If there is one crucial thought presented most frequently here at TDS, it is the importance of sorting out strategic and tactical issues from matters of values, goals and principles, particularly in intraparty conflicts. Sometimes strategic/tactical differences are blown out of proportion into “civil war” topics, and sometimes looking at different strategic approaches helps discern the underlying common ground between factions.
That is the case with the antichoice movement, as I discussed yesterday at Washington Monthly in a post based on the fine work of MSNBC’s Irin Carmon:

[S]upporters of more a more direct strategy and more confrontational tactics often reveal the extremism of party-wide ideological positions that more cautious people would prefer to disguise. So you can learn a lot from paying attention to the loud-and-proud types even if you don’t think they will prevail within their own party.
I say all this as a prelude to Irin Carmon’s piece at MSNBC about a new and abrasive wing of the antichoice movement that doesn’t believe in hiding its light under a bushel of pieties about late-term abortions or “women’s health:”

For the mainstream movement to ban abortion, graphic photos and aggressive language have generally gone out of style. The winning slogans, the ones Republican politicians prefer, are warmer, fuzzier: Thumbsucking ultrasound photos, or “women’s health” used as a pretext to shut down safe abortion clinics, including three in Texas this month alone. The losing slogans involve Akin-like “legitimate rape” and comparing Planned Parenthood to the Klan.
Abolish Human Abortion (AHA) begs to differ. Founded out of Norman, Oklahoma, and with chapters nationwide, AHA activists wear t-shirts emblazoned with “End Child Sacrifice” and proudly display photos of bloodied, fully developed fetuses. They protest outside churches – yes, churches – accusing them of not doing enough to end abortion, and talk scornfully of “pro-lifers” who make peace with rape exceptions to abortion bans.
AHA activists disdain the phrase “pro-life” altogether. They prefer “abolitionists,” with all slavery comparisons explicitly intended, and they want to push the larger movement to abide by their uncompromising positions. That means moving away from the incremental strategy – 20 week bans, admitting privileges laws for clinics – and sticking to banning all abortion without exceptions, equating hormonal birth control (even the daily pill kind) with abortion, and advocating that women who have abortions be tried as murderers. That sort of unblinking absolutism in the face of the messiness of real life decision-making may be what has drawn nearly 34,000 people to like their Facebook page.

But here’s the thing: their basic positions are generally shared by antichoice activists of all varieties. What the AHA zealots are demanding is that antichoicers exhibit some honesty about them:

They don’t care who they offend. They aren’t interested in a political or legal strategy; they reserve their deepest scorn for the incrementalists who have crafted a step-by-step plan to overturn Roe v. Wade. As far as AHA is concerned, those guys are sellouts. But in the end, there isn’t so much that the mainstream movement and Abolish Human Abortion disagree on besides tactics.

That’s very important to know.

There’s a big and fascinating new study of the Millennial Generation out today from Pew, drawing from its recent polling, that poses some interesting questions for Democrats. Here’s how I characterized the strategic issues at Washington Monthly today:

The biggest dichotomy involves the political allegiances of Millennials: fully half self-identify as independents, but the cohort is significantly more likely than older generations to vote Democratic, identify itself as “liberal” (more Millennials self-identify as “liberal” than “conservative,” the first cohort to do so in a very long time), favor government activism, and agree with Democratic issue positions on both cultural and economic topics (there’s a slight divergence on abortion policy, where Millenials are marginally less likely than GenXers to support generally legalized abortion). Yet less than a third of Millenials agree there is a “great deal of difference” between the party they agree with and the party that tends to characterize Millennial views as secular-socialist.
There’s a particularly interesting finding on health care policy:

Millennials are as skeptical as older generations of the 2010 health care law. In December 2013–the most recent Pew Research Center survey on the Affordable Care Act–there were no significant differences across generations in views of the law. About four-in-ten in each cohort approved of the law.
Yet by 54% to 42%, Millennials think it is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care coverage. There is less support among older age cohorts for the government insuring health coverage for all.

Aside from the fact that Millennials are for obvious reasons less inclined to worry about health coverage than older cohorts, this finding suggests that Millennials may be disproportionately represented in the ranks of those who object to Obamacare from the left.
In any event, the study can be read in two very different ways by progressive political folk. Nothing about their views indicates much of an openness to Republican political appeals, at least so long as the GOP is in its current hyper-reactionary and old-white-folks-dependent phase. That would argue for a Democratic strategy of largely taking them for granted and focusing appeals on older generations more likely to “swing.” But insofar as low voting levels (particularly in midterms) among Millennials are a serious problem for the Donkey Party, and in view of their relatively strong feeling that the two parties aren’t greatly different, a more left-bent message might boost turnout and bond Millenials more durably to the party that actually seems to share its values. One much-discussed dilemma in Democratic strategy actually may be an illusion: while Millennials have huge doubts about Social Security’s solvency, and as an abstract manner favor greater emphasis on program benefiting young folks as compared to old folks, a pretty large majority (61%) oppose cutting Social Security benefits as a solution to the program’s solvency issues.
All in all, the study is worth a close look, particularly by those who like to make breezy assertions about “the kids” without much empirical grounding.

If nothing else, bookmark the study for future reference.

One of the more annoying habits of the MSM (and some progressive media) is the tendency to greet virtually every political development within the Republican Party as signaling the demise of the Tea Party and the renewed ascendence of the Great Big Adults of the Republican Establishment. It echoes earlier efforts to prematurely bury the Christian Right, which, of course, overlaps extensively with the Tea Folk.
We heard the trumpets of doom for the Tea Party blow yet again the morning after this week’s Texas Primaries, where a couple of bad right-wing congressional campaigns against fairly right-wing incumbents got a lot of attention. This is from my post-mortem at TPMCafe:

[T]he story we are hearing from most national observers (such as this headline from the New York Times today: “Texas GOP Beats Back Challengers From Right”) was about the dog that did not bark: tea party challengers to Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Pete Sessions failed miserably, a result that will undoubtedly be used to reinforce an ongoing national meme that the Tea Party is dead or dying and the GOP establishment is riding high.
But if you look beyond the congressional races, that’s not necessarily the right conclusion to derive from the Texas GOP primary results.
In the Lieutenant Governor’s race, incumbent David Dewhurst — the same guy Ted Cruz upset in the 2012 U.S. Senate primary — ran a poor second last night, and will face fiery right-wing state senator Dan Patrick in a May runoff Dewhurst seems doomed to lose. In the primary to replace Attorney General Greg Abbott, the GOP gubernatorial candidate, the first place finisher was state senator Ken Paxton, whose main campaign credential was his coziness with Cruz. In the Ag Commissioner’s primary, the top finisher was former state legislator Sid Miller, whose campaign co-chairman and treasurer is (even after the neanderthal rocker’s “Obama is a subhuman mongrel” comment) none other than Ted Nugent. On a night when for the first time in memory, all but one Texas statewide office was open, the tea folk did quite well, and could do just as well in what should be an extremely low turnout runoff in May.
But beyond the tea party-versus-establishment dynamics, this primary reflected the full absorption of “constitutional conservative” rhetoric by candidates previously associated with country-club Republicanism. John Cornyn has spent much of the last year snuggling up to his junior colleague Cruz seeking cover. Greg Abbott (“typically described as a more conservative version of [Rick] Perry,” says one Texas observer) is running a campaign that has been teetering on the edge of a vengeful culture-war assault on Democratic rival Wendy Davis. And most interesting at all, the scion of that great weathervane of Republican ideological change, the Bush family, is tacking hard right as well: George P. Bush, the half-Hispanic son of Jeb, is running for the statewide position of Land Commissioner after an extended effort to court the tea folk and identify himself with Cruz (notably endorsing the “defund Obamacare” stunt that led to last year’s government shutdown).
The situation in Texas reflects a more general dynamic in the GOP, dating back at least to the concessions Mitt Romney made to “constitutional conservative” orthodoxy (from signing onto the radical “Cut, Cap, Balance” budget pledge, to taking a hard line on immigration, to promising a full repeal of the Affordable Care Act) in order to secure the Republican presidential nomination over weak and divided “true conservative” opposition. The more the tea party movement (itself mainly a continuation of the “movement conservative” faction that has been struggling for preeminence since its breakthrough in the Goldwater campaign of 1964) influences mainstream GOP policy positions and rhetoric, the less it may succeed in intraparty contests with an “establishment” that has largely coopted it, and whose differences are mainly over strategy and tactics rather than core ideology.

Since the Texas primary was the first major primary of this cycle, it offers a good opportunity to discard this habit of wishing away the ideological “fever” in the GOP before it does real damage to our understanding of conservative politics.

There has been a fascinating change of circumstances occurring this last week, revolving around cookie-cutter state legislation sponsored by Republicans aimed at implementing the widely-deployed conservative rhetoric about “religious liberty.” Beginning in 2012, Republicans nationally and across the country adopted the mantra of “religious liberty” to take advantage of conservative Catholic and evangelical hostility to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage mandate. It did not produce the hoped-for defection of Catholics to the Romney-Ryan ticket (the Catholic vote, as had been the case recently, closely reflected the overall national vote), but did provide a rubric for talking about Republican opposition to legalized abortion and marriage equality that avoided messy and unpopular specifics and gave a positive cast to essentially reactionary positions.
What’s happening now, though, is that efforts to provide “religious liberty” exemptions to normal law-abiding expectations is moving the debate in the opposite direction, drawing attention to the extremism of conservative culture-issue positions. Here’s how I summed up this development at TPMCafe:

This began happening first on the contraception coverage front, where the religious objection to the Obamacare mandate had to be justified (in the Hobby Lobby litigation most notably) by the claim that highly effective contraceptive devices (the IUD) and treatments (Plan B and hormonal “patches”) used by millions of women were in fact “abortifacients.”
This is not a terribly common view outside the Right-to-Life movement and the conservative Catholic and evangelical Protestant clergy; it certainly is not in accord with mainstream medical opinion. But the very discussion of angels-dancing-on-a-pin disputes over fertilization versus uterine implantation as the beginning of pregnancy shifted the debate over reproductive policy away from the strongest ground for anti-choicers — rare but controversial late-term abortions and the conditions under which they should be allowed — to the very weakest: “abortions” so early that most Americans don’t consider them abortions at all. So a gambit designed to broaden support for faith-based objections to reproductive rights policies is pulling the discussion in a direction that threatens to isolate anti-choicers and their Republican allies in a small ghetto of extremist opinion.
Similarly, the effort to “protect” religious believers from the consequences of a sudden shift in policies on same-sex marriage began as a reasonable-sounding request for two-way tolerance that might unite the near-majority of Americans who are not presently “comfortable” towards marriage equality with those whose views had recently “evolved.”
But the more the demands for religious “exemptions” from compliance with new marriage laws have become concrete, the less reasonable they have seemed. Nobody’s talking about requiring that religious communities perform same-sex marriages (or for that matter, ordain gay ministers, the most heated issue within many U.S. Christian communities). So the martyr’s cross of the “persecuted” must be found among the small ranks of marriage professionals who refuse to bake wedding cakes with two plastic men on top, or offer to offer planning services to two women.
Perhaps some non-sectarian Americans instinctively identify with “bakers of conscience” or wedding planners who consider themselves in danger of hellfire for booking hotel ballrooms for Sodomites. But like the fight for the freedom to treat IUDs as death machines, the fight to provide the conservative Christian elements of the wedding industry with plenary indulgences from obedience to the law tends to elicit less sympathy than ridicule from the non-aligned.
And that matters a great deal politically. On many fronts in the culture wars, the momentum has usually been possessed by those who can best identify themselves with the ambivalent attitudes of a mushy middle “swing vote”–favorable to contraceptives and early-term abortions but not late-term abortions; increasingly accepting of LGBT folk but indulgent of their parents’ and grandparents’ “ick factor.”
After years of shedding crocodile tears for the victims of late-term abortions, anti-choicers are now finding themselves defending businesses who in open court argue that the dividing line between acceptable contraception and murderous abortion occurs moments after sexual intercourse — when women instantly transition from autonomous individuals to “hosts” for a state-protected zygote. And after years of arguing against marriage equality on behalf of the positive “rights” of men and women in “traditional marriage,” those who actually think gay people in love are abominations unto the Lord are being exposed for who they really are.

So a “religious liberty” statute that breezed through the Kansas House was halted in the Senate by Republicans who feared it went too far. And just tonight, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed even broader legislation that actually passed both houses of her state’s legislature, with both GOP U.S. Senators and even some bill sponsors urging her to do so.
Right now, the once powerful “religious liberty” strategy for dealing with cultural issues is in shambles, with Republicans divided. It goes to show that deception and indirection can only work for so long.

On Friday, February 14, in an inverse Valentine Day gift for labor, after an intensive anti-union campaign not by the employer but by local, state and national Republicans, workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, narrowly rejected a unionization bid by the United Auto Workers. Here was my initial reaction at WaMo:

I wish I could say I’ve never seen the likes of the campaign of intimidation that led to the vote against UAW representation at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee on Friday. But I did, as a child growing up in a Georgia textile company town in the early 1960s, where public schools began the year on Labor Day, the word “union” was not said out loud, and people still graphically remembered National Guardsmen being called out to break a strike at Callaway Mills back in 1935–the same year Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act.
I’m a little rusty on my labor law, but I’m reasonably sure that any employer who issued the sorts of threats made by Republican politicians in Tennessee (including Sen. Bob Corker, Gov. Bill Haslam, and a variety of state legislators, backed by national conservative figures like Grove Norquist) against a unionization effort would have been in blatant violation of the NLRA. But that’s what makes the incident such a travesty: it wasn’t the employer fighting the union (VW by all accounts was neutral-to-positive towards unionization, which would have facilitated establishment of the kind of “work council” the company had set up at other international plants to help maintain good employer-employee relations). As Brent Snavely of the Detroit Free Press reported (probably incredulously):

The crusade by anti-union forces in Tennessee, including the state’s governor and senior senator, is as much a fight with Volkswagen management as with the UAW.
Not only are Republican legislators accusing Volkswagen of backing the UAW, some of their leaders on Monday threatened to withhold tax incentives for future expansion of the three-year-old assembly plant in Chattanooga if workers vote this week to join the UAW.

So addicted are Tennessee Republicans to the “race to the bottom” approach to economic development that they are willing to risk the good will of an existing employer in their zeal to make sure their own people are kept in as submissive a position as possible. President Obama’s reported comment during a Democratic retreat last week that the pols involved in this union-busting effort are “more concerned about German shareholders than American workers” is one way to put it; I’d say they’ve internalized the ancient despicable tendency of the southern aristocracy to favor the abasement of working people as an end in itself.
This incident is also a pretty good symptom of the radicalization of the Republican Party. It’s one thing to oppose collective bargaining rights for public employees, or to defend “right-to-work” laws that interfere with the contracting rights of employers and employees and create “freeriders” who benefit from union collective bargaining without paying dues. But now the very existence of private-sector unions, a familiar part of the American landscape for most of the last century, is under attack from Republican politicians.

As we prepare to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., on Monday, it’s time for progressives to prepare ourselves for a fresh effort by conservatives to purloin his legacy and rewrite the history of the civil rights movement. Just yesterday, Sen. Rand Paul, a serial offender, tried to compare defenders of the filibuster–the filibuster!–and other restraints on popular democracy to advocates for the civil rights of racial minorities. I addressed this effort at WaMo today:

Last April [Paul] gave a speech at Howard University that pursued the ridiculous theory that the New Deal was essentially a complement to Jim Crow in its “enslavement” of African-Americans to the terrible indignity of material living assistance. And now we have this, via WaPo’s Aaron Blake:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), in an interview Thursday, likened President Obama’s governing philosophy to the kind of “majority rule” that led to Jim Crow laws and Japanese internment camps.
Speaking on Fox News, Paul reacted to Obama’s repeated assertions that Republicans should win elections if they want to control the agenda in Washington. Obama has also suggested in recent days that he might pursue more executive actions — changes made without Congress.
“The danger to majority rule — to him sort of thinking, well, the majority voted for me, now I’m the majority, I can do whatever I want, and that there are no rules that restrain me — that’s what gave us Jim Crow,” Paul said. “That’s what gave us the internment of the Japanese — that the majority said you don’t have individual rights, and individual rights don’t come from your creator, and they’re not guaranteed by the Constitution. It’s just whatever the majority wants.”
Paul added: “There’s a real danger to that viewpoint, but it’s consistent with the progressive viewpoint. … Progressives believe in majority rule, not constitutional rule.”

Don’t be confused with the conflation of the Japanese interment outrage–a temporary product of wartime hysteria which no one at the time regarded as “progressive”–with Jim Crow. The original Constitution which Paul and his followers worship certainly didn’t concern itself with the rights of racial minorities. It took the most egregious exercise of “majority rule” in U.S. history–the Civil War–to abolish slavery. Only a majority given extraordinary power by the self-exclusion of southerners was in a position to pass the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, the most important efforts taken until 1964 to vindicate the rights of racial minorities. It was a failure of will by the majority that led to the abandonment of Reconstruction and the establishment of the Jim Crow regime. And it was the power of the minority in the Senate (and by the 1930s or so, the minority in the Democratic Party) to thwart majority rule via the filibuster that kept Jim Crow in place for so very long.
And BTW, it’s conservatives, far more than progressives, who perpetually chafe at judicial enforcement of individual rights, unless it happens to coincide with their own policy goals. But in any event, Paul and others like him really need to stop trying to invoke the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement to attack “majority rule” on behalf of a “constitutional conservatism” aimed at creating a oligarchical or even theocratic dictatorship of absolute private property rights and puny government. The “minorities” they want to protect are snowy white and very privileged.

It’s very important, morally and politically, to fight back against the kind of egregious revisionism and phony parallels offered by those who are the ideological (and in some cases, literal) descendants of the people who fought against King and the Civil Rights Movement. It’s the least we can do to honor the sacrifices made by so many to create the kind of society the “constitutional conservatives” are determined to bury.

With the MSM (and for that matter, political junkies everywhere) loving electoral horse races as they do, there’s enormous artificial pressure for creating a competitive 2016 Democratic presidential contest. That possibility is largely up to Hillary Clinton, who could create one instantly by deciding not to run. Otherwise, there will be talk about Elizabeth Warren and Martin O’Malley and maybe a few others taking the plunge, until each takes his or her name out of contention.
But for now, what we’ve got is former Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a one-time netroots darling who is making all the noises you’d associate with a serious potential candidate, including trips to Iowa. And he doesn’t seem intimidated by HRC.
In an interview with MSNBC’s Benjy Sarlin, though, Schweitzer has unveiled a peculiar strategy: strong opposition to Barack Obama, almost across the board. Here’s part of what I had to say about that major mistake at WaMo today:

Unless this was some sort of screwed-up revival of Teddy Kennedy’s famously disastrous Roger Mudd interview in 1980, Schweitzer’s sure taking an unorthodox route to a Democratic presidential candidacy. Yes, his complaints about Obama’s record are shared by quite a few progressive folk. But generally trashing Obama–or for that matter, trashing HRC–is not the way to build a base for a presidential campaign. According to the latest Gallup numbers, Obama’s job approval rating among self-identified liberal Democrats stands at 84%. That is rather high. Among African-Americans, who play a huge role in many Democratic presidential primaries, it’s at 86% (it’s only 58% among Hispanics, but that includes a decent number of Republicans).
As I’ve observed on more than one occasion, left-bent Democratic presidential nominating candidacies have failed again and again because of poor support from minority voters. There’s virtually nothing about Brian Schweitzer that gives him a natural connection to these voters (unless you count his reported proficiency in Arabic as appealing to Muslims). Making common cause with Republicans in Obama-bashing isn’t going to help.

I also noted that some of Schweitzer’s former fans in the netroots–most notably Markos Moulitsas–are annoyed that he took a pass on running for a critical Senate seat in Montana before seeing the next president of the United States in the mirror. All in all, if he does want to occupy the Oval Office, he’s not off to a great start.
BTW: lest you think this is all just premature crazy-talk given the calendar, keep in mind that we’re just two years away from the likely date of the 2016 Iowa Caucuses. Past candidates have in some cases taken up virtual residence there by this juncture.

With all the vast literature on partisan polarization out there, it’s important to draw attention to those who understand the phenomenon in depth (not a large group), and recognize that something more powerful and ominous is going on. I wrote about one example at WaMo today:

At WaPo’s Monkey Cage subsite today, there’s an important piece by University of Texas political scientist Sean Theriault that gets to a distinction in political attitudes that some of us have been trying to articulate ever since the radicalization of one of our two major parties occurred:

I have been studying party polarization in Congress for more than a decade. The more I study it, the more I question that it is the root cause of what it is that Americans hate about Congress. Pundits and political scientists alike point to party polarization as the culprit for all sorts of congressional ills. I, too, have contributed to this chorus bemoaning party polarization. But increasingly, I’ve come to think that our problem today isn’t just polarization in Congress; it’s the related but more serious problem of political warfare….
Perhaps my home state of Texas unnecessarily reinforces the distinction I want to make between these two dimensions. Little separates my two senators’ voting records – of the 279 votes that senators took in 2013, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn disagreed less than 9 percent of the time (the largest category of their disagreement, incidentally, was on confirmation votes). In terms of ideology, they are both very conservative. Cruz, to no one’s surprise, is the most conservative. Cornyn is the 13th most conservative, which is actually further down the list than he was in 2012, when he ranked second. Cornyn’s voting record is more conservative than conservative stalwarts Tom Coburn and Richard Shelby. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz disagreed on twice as many votes as John Cornyn and Ted Cruz.
The difference between my senators is that when John Cornyn shows up for a meeting with fellow senators, he brings a pad of paper and pencil and tries to figure out how to solve problems. Ted Cruz, on the other hand, brings a battle plan.

That’s probably why Cornyn has attracted a right-wing primary challenge from Rep. Steve Stockman.
The rise of “politics as warfare” on the Right, accompanied with militarist rhetoric, is one that my Democratic Strategist colleagues James Vega and J.P. Green and I discussed in a Strategy Memo in 2012. We discerned this tendency in the willingness of conservatives to paralyze government instead of redirecting its policies, and in the recent efforts to strike at democracy itself via large-scale voter disenfranchisement initiatives. And while we noted the genesis of extremist politics in radical ideology, we also warned that “Establishment” Republicans aiming at electoral victories at all costs were funding and leading the scorched-earth permanent campaign.

That clearly has not changed since 2012.

As we soberly look ahead at 2014, it’s important to remember state elections in addition to competitive congressional races. Alas, the landscape for Democrats is not as good as one might imagine given the radicalism and misgovernment exhibited by the state-level Republicans who benefited from the landslide of 2010. I summed up the lay of the land in a column for TPMCafe today, from which I’ve drawn this excerpt:

In theory, Republicans should be exposed to some serious losses thanks to their 2010 landslide. They will defend 22 of the 36 governorships up this November. Nine are in states carried twice by Barack Obama. Republicans also control 27 legislatures (91 percent of state lower-chamber seats are up this year, along with 55 percent of state senate seats) and partially control five more; five states carried twice by Obama have Republican-controlled legislatures, and three more have split legislatures.
Aside from possible “over-exposure” in places that lean blue, Republican state-level success in 2010 means they could suffer from identification with a wildly unpopular status quo. While approval rating polling of governors has been erratic of late, several notable Republicans (e.g. LePage of Maine, Scott of Florida, Kasich of Ohio, Corbett of PA) have been struggling for many months.
But when you consult the professionals on how gubernatorial races look, there doesn’t appear to be any Democratic counter-landslide in the offing for 2014. The Cook Political Report does not presently show Democrats leading in any race involving a Republican-controlled governorship. Cook does have four Republican incumbents in toss-up races (LePage, Scott, Corbett and Snyder of MI), but that’s balanced in part by two Democratic governorships (Pat Quinn’s Illinois, and Arkansas, where Mike Beebe is retiring) in toss-up status. Overall, Cook shows nine gubernatorial races as competitive (toss-ups plus leaners), and five are Republican, four Democratic. Another rating site, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, presently shows Pennsylvania and Maine favored to flip from Republican to Democratic, but also shows three current Democratic states (Connecticut as well as Arkansas and Illinois) as toss-ups.

Why the lack of opportunities? There are three basic reasons:

The first is the recent alignment of the two parties with elements of the electorate that do (older, whiter voters) and don’t (young people and minorities) tend to vote disproportionately in midterm elections. The “fall-off” in voting for midterms and its variable level in different parts of the electorate is an ancient phenomenon; what’s new is how it affects the major parties, particularly given Democratic dependence on young and minority voters. While a lot of political observers have noted this new situation (and a few, like yours truly, have suggested it will make the elimination of partisan gridlock very difficult), few if any have concluded the “two electorates” with their different leanings are likely to provide Republicans with a significant advantage in gubernatorial elections since four-fifths of them occur in non-presidential years. This advantage may really come in handy for GOPers in 2014.
A parallel factor of equal importance is the sharp decline in ticket-splitting that has occurred since the late 1980s (roughly the time when the ideological sorting-out of the two parties reached its culmination, greatly reducing the number of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats who were natural ticket-splitters). In a period of strong national partisan polarization, the likelihood of one trend in congressional elections and a contrary trend in state elections is significantly lower. And that’s why for all the persistent talk of “anti-incumbency elections” or “waves,” it’s actually rare to see elections “turn out the bums” in both parties at different levels of government.
Finally, at the state legislative level, it’s important to remember that the same gerrymandering efforts that solidified Republican control of the U.S. House benefitted the GOP Class of 2010 among state legislators as well.

The good news for Democrats is that Republicans seem to be overconfident about 2014, and just as importantly, determined to continue pushing their luck with radical policies that could help Democrats make major steps in overcoming the midterm turnout “fall-off” problem. I vividly recall one midterm (in 1998) when offensive Republican behavior towards minorities and national revulsion against the effort to impeach Bill Clinton produced a major turnout surge among African-Americans that lifted Democrats to upset gubernatorial victories in three Deep South states (Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina). That sort of scenario is by no means impossible this year in the wide swath of Republican-governed states, but it will take a supreme Democratic effort to make it happen.

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.