For an insightful analysis of current congressional campaigns in key swing states, read “Mood Indigo: A Democratic Revival” by John B. Judis in the New Republic Online. Judis, NR senior editor, author and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has recently returned from swing states Colorado and Ohio, where he interviewed voters and candidates. His report has a lot for Dems to be encouraged about, including:

…this year, Democrats could unseat as many as five House Republicans in Ohio and win a Senate seat and the governor’s mansion. In Colorado, Democrats are very likely to win the governorship and both state legislatures, and to take as many as three House seats from the Republicans. And, in both states, it’s not just a sudden and fleeting reaction to Bush, but the resumption of a movement among upscale suburban voters and working-class Reagan Democrats. America may not turn blue this year, but it looks as if it is definitely becoming purple.

Judis says there are two general types of districts that are morphing Democratic:

The first is suburbs of older manufacturing regions in the East, Midwest, and West that have shifted to producing high-tech information services. These areas are heavily populated by professionals–from scientists and software programmers to teachers and nurses–who began voting Democratic in the late ’80s and early ’90s in response to the GOP’s embrace of the religious right and adoption of a deregulatory, anti-New Deal business agenda. Democratic support in these areas was particularly high among women voters and voters with a postgraduate education.
…The second kind of district where Democrats have a chance of unseating Republicans is white, working-class, and located in or near a mid-sized city like South Bend or Louisville. Voters in these districts tend to be less affluent, less educated, and more socially conservative.

Judis has a lot more interesting detail and analysis about this trend and the political dynamics of the campaigns — particularly the role of women voters. His article is highly reccommended for everyone interested in Democratic political strategy.

Shankar Vedantam’s “In Politics, Aim for the Heart, Not the Head” in today’s WaPo explores a provocative idea for political strategists. Although his proposition is tethered to a 71 year-old experiment in which voters responded twice as positively to a raw, emotional appeal over a rational one, the idea deserves some consideration. Vedantam puts it this way:

Given the enormous proliferation of policy questions today, surfing the emotional wave nowadays may be even more important than it was in 1935. George E. Marcus, president of the International Society of Political Psychology, said modern research confirms that unless political ads evoke emotional responses, they don’t have much effect. Voters, he explained, need to be emotionally primed in some way before they will pay attention.
The research is of importance to politicians for obvious reasons — and partly explains the enduring attraction of negative advertising — but it is also important to voters, because it suggests that the reason candidates seem appealing often has little to do with their ideas. Political campaigns are won and lost at a more emotional and subtle level.

An interesting idea which warrants more long-range exploration. In terms of short-range strategy, Vedantam offers the following:

What works much better, because it influences people at an emotional and subtle level, is to get people to focus on a different issue — the one where the candidate is the strongest.
“The agenda-setting effect is what we are talking about,” said Nicholas A. Valentino, a political psychologist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “The ability of a candidate not to tell people how to feel about an issue, but which issue they should focus on — that is the struggle of most modern campaign managers.”
“Campaigns have been much more successful at shifting people’s attentions to different issues rather than shifting people’s positions,” he added.

Is Vedantam on to something here? Or is this another way of saying people often vote their gut feelings? Either way, the idea merits further study.

by Scott Winship
So, my intent with this post was to emphasize that I really was playing devil’s advocate in my last post on the middle class. I received an email from the Pew Research Center with the following plug:

Americans See Less Progress on Their Ladder of Life
In the past four years, some of the edge has come off good old American optimism. As economists and politicians debate whether there is less mobility in the United States now than in the past, a new Pew Social Trends survey finds that many among the public are seeing less progress in their own lives.

I thought that I’d highlight this study [pdf] and thereby provide counter-evidence against my devil’s advocacy. Well, you’re just going to have to believe me that I’m agnostic on the question of middle-class insecurity because it turns out that my read of this study is that things ain’t that bad.
The report begins by noting that the number of Americans saying that they’d be better off in 5 years declined from 61 percent in 2002 to 49 percent today — less than half the population. Sounds kind of ominous on first glance. But only 12 percent think that the in 5 years they will be worse off. It turns out that 74 percent think they will be at least as well off as they currently are (14% don’t know). And while the report doesn’t give the information necessary to say for sure, I’m willing to bet that the 2006 figure isn’t statistically different from the figures Pew found for the years 1964 to 1979. Much of this period was actually economically a pretty lousy era, but the second half of the 1960s were robust years.
Similarly, while the number of people saying that they are better off today than 5 years ago has declined, it stands at 48 percent, versus 21 percent saying they are worse off. That’s no worse than from 1976 to 1996, which again includes good years and bad years.
Next is the finding that the average rating for how respondents will be doing in 5 years is down from 1999. True enough, but it is still 15% higher than the average for how they say they are currently doing, and nearly 30 percent higher than the average for how they say they did 5 years ago. And the 5-years-from-now figure is no worse than any year between 1964 and 1997.
Young people are even more optimistic about the future, with those 18-49 much significantly more optimistic than older adults. That could be due to the fact that people earn more as they age. However, blacks and Latinos are more optimistic than whites. Optimism declines as family income increases, but 48 percent of those with less than $30,000 in income are optimistic, compared with 14 percent who think they’ll do worse in 5 years.
Americans are more optimistic than their counterparts in nearly every European country.
Finally, the report indicates that Americans’ predicted rating of how they’ll be doing in 5 years is always higher than how Americans 5 years later rate the present. Aha!! The poor naifs are simply mistaken in their optimism! Maybe a bit, but Americans in 2006 ranked the present higher than respondents in any year from 1964 to 1996 did, so compared with the past, they feel they’re actually doing better than people in those years.
The patterns shown in the report tend to confirm that people who are more disadvantaged tend to be more likely to think they were better off in the past and that they’ll be better off in the future, but that’s what we’d expect if most of these folks are currently at their low point economically. They probably were better off in the past and will be better off in the future.
Oh, one more finding: Republicans and conservatives are more optimistic than Democrats and liberals….

by Alan Abramowitz
Republican Party leaders are claiming a lot of credit for their GOTV effort in Rhode Island on Tuesday and boasting that they’re going to apply the same techniques in every competitive House and Senate contest this fall. Leaving aside the question of whether it would be possible to duplicate this sort of all-out effort in 40+ House districts and 8-10 states, how impressive was the turnout in the Rhode Island Republican primary? Impressive for a Rhode Island Republican primary, but really not all that impressive. It’s not just that more votes were cast for Democratic nominee Sheldon Whitehouse than for both Republicans combined even though Whitehouse faced only nominal opposition. GOP turnout in the hotly contested Rhode Island Senate primary was actually less impressive than Democratic turnout in the hotly contested Maryland Senate primary. When we calculate the votes cast in each primary as a percentage of the votes cast for the party’s 2004 presidential nominee we find that the Republican turnout in Rhode Island (64,000 votes) was 37.9 percent of the vote for George Bush in Rhode Island in 2004 (169,000 votes) while the Democratic turnout in Maryland (513,000 votes) was 38.5 percent of the vote for John Kerry in Maryland in 2004 (1,334,000 votes). So perhaps Democratic party leaders should be bragging about their great GOTV effort in Maryland and about how they’re going to duplicate it in every competitive House and Senate contest this fall.

Democrats wondering how to tweak campaign strategies in the wake of Tuesday’s primaries are directed to Chris Cillizza’s and Jim VandeHei’s WaPo article “In R.I., a Model for Voter Turnout: Employing Senate Primary Strategy May Give GOP an Edge.” Read the entire article, but give this excerpt some extra thought:

The turnout campaign that Republican operatives used to help pull Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee to victory in the Rhode Island primary was a potent demonstration of how money and manpower can transform a race even in an unfavorable political environment — and a preview of the strategy that national party officials say they plan to replicate in the most competitive House and Senate races over the next 55 days.
In the past two national elections, in 2002 and 2004, Republicans outperformed Democrats in bringing their backers to the polls, but many Democrats and independent analysts have suggested that the competition may be different this year, in part because of slumping morale among GOP activists. But Chafee’s performance — combined with reports of late-starting organization and internal bickering on the Democratic side — suggest that the Republican advantage on turnout may remain intact even as many other trends are favoring the opposition.
The Republican National Committee, convinced that Chafee is the party’s only chance of keeping a seat in a Democratic-leaning state, spent $400,000 to ship 86 out-of-state volunteers and several paid staff members to Rhode Island. They targeted not just Republicans but also independent voters during the final days of the campaign, following a blueprint developed months ago by the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Chafee campaign.
…”Their turnout operation is exquisite,” a senior Democratic strategist said. “We are not going to match them.”

Gulp. And then there’s this:

Recent history underscores the importance of superior voter-mobilization plans. In 2004, Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) thought that if he received 190,000 votes it would be impossible for former congressman John Thune (R) to beat him. Daschle won 193,340 votes; Thune got 197,848. In Ohio — the central battleground in the race between Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) — Democrats met all of their projected vote totals but came up more than 100,000 short.

VandeHei and Cillizza provide a lot of very interesting detail about the GOP’s strategy and tactics in R.I.. Read it all. Twice.
Also check out Ron Brownstein’s more encouraging L.A. Times wrap-up of the primaries, probably the best yet published on the topic. Not to pile on with the hand-wringing, but Brownstein adds:

In a memo obtained by The Times, RNC officials said they used their “microtargeting” technology, which tries to deduce voter sympathies in part by tracking their consumer preferences, to direct a massive get-out-the-vote effort for Chafee. The RNC said its turnout program made 198,921 contacts with voters in the campaign’s final 11 days, helping to propel a record turnout nearly 40% larger than the previous high in a Republican primary.
That large influx to the polls “means there was a bunch of independents who flooded into that primary and they are the ones who saved Chafee,” said Darrell West, a political scientist at Brown University in Rhode Island. “It suggests that this general election is going to be very competitive.”

And if the GOP turnout machine wasn’t enough to worry about, Dems need to take a hard look at the failures of election day machinery, particularly the Maryland mess. For more on this, check out Richard Wolf’s disturbing USAToday piece “Election Watchers Predict Glitches” and hope — nay, pray — that Dems are on the case.

Democratic strategists should read Chris Kromm’s Facing South post “Are Women Key to Democratic Chances in the South?” discussing the gender gap as a wedge for Dems to regain some clout in the region. As Kromm notes in evaluating a recent Associated Press story on the topic “War Turns Southern Women Away from GOP”:

…the AP piece makes the classic mistake of equating “Southern women” with “white women.” Last year, Texas became the country’s fourth “majority minority” state, and over 40% of the populations of Georgia and Mississippi aren’t white. Women of color, who will soon be half the population of these states, have never been strong supporters of Bush or the Republican Party.
That being said, the AP rightly observes that a defection of white Southern women from the GOP could be a key factor — maybe the leading factor — in determining the outcome of the mid-term elections, and that foreign policy is a leading cause of their disappointment

As Shannon McCaffrey writes in the The Associated Press article:

“In 2004, you saw an utter collapse of the gender gap in the South,” said Karen Kaufmann, a professor of government at the University of Maryland who has studied women’s voting patterns. White Southern women liked Bush because “he spoke their religion and he spoke their values.”
…Republicans on the ballot this November have reason to worry. A recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that three out of five Southern women surveyed said they planned to vote for a Democrat in the midterm elections. With control of the Senate and House in the balance, such a seismic shift could have dire consequences for the GOP.

Kromm points out that the gender gap has been “most volatile” in the south, and he quotes from Dr. Karen Kaufman’s study in the Journal of the American Political Science Association:

Although the gender gap between White Southern men and women was a full 11 percentage points in 2000, it fell to only 5 points in 2004. Even more striking, the presidential vote gap in the South hit its lowest point in 40 years. Compared to White Southern men, Southern women chose Bill Clinton over Bob Dole by a 17-point margin in 1996 and preferred AlGore to George W. Bush by 9 percentage points in 2000. In 2004, however, Southern women favored Bush by a 2-point margin over Southern men. The collapse of the Southern gender gap was not mirrored else where. Outside of the South, the male-female divide in the vote actually increased slightly from a 9-point difference in 2000 to a 10-point difference in 2004.

The “write off the south” strategy favored by some Democratic strategists may soon be outdated, if it isn’t already. Clearly, demographic trends in southern states favor the Democrats and they have much to gain by a stronger commitment to turning out people of color — especially women — in southern elections.

Republican campaigns are expected to set a new standard for negative attack ads in the weeks ahead, according to Jim VandeHei and Chris Cillizza’s Sunday WaPo article “In a Pivotal Year, GOP Plans to Get Personal: Millions to Go to Digging Up Dirt on Democrats.” According to the authors,

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which this year dispatched a half-dozen operatives to comb through tax, court and other records looking for damaging information on Democratic candidates, plans to spend more than 90 percent of its $50 million-plus advertising budget on what officials described as negative ads.
The hope is that a vigorous effort to “define” opponents, in the parlance of GOP operatives, can help Republicans shift the midterm debate away from Iraq and limit losses this fall.

Some ads are already running, and Cilliza and VandeHei cite examples, including an attack on a Democratic House candidate’s medical practice for suing 80 patients for non-payment of bills and Ohio Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown’s votes on border protection and illegal immigration.
How dirty will it get? Expect the worst, suggests MyDD’s Matt Stoller, who comments on the track record of RNC oppo research director Terry Nelson:

In 2002, he was deputy Chief of Staff at the RNC, where he became wrapped up in Tom Delay’s TRMPAC money laundering scandal as a key point of contact between the RNC and Delay’s Texas PAC. He also testified in the trial of convicted GOP operative James Tobin for illegal phone jamming in New Hampshire, because he was Tobin’s supervisor when Tobin illegally spammed Democratic phone banks on election day.

None of this comes as much of a surprise. But Democratic campaign strategists should prepare their candidates for the most intense negative ad campaigns ever and to respond aggressively. Reading the aforementioned articles is a good start.

New Democracy Corps Survey on Nat. Security
by Scott Winship
Democracy Corps — part of boss Stan Greenberg’s vast polling empire — released a strategy memo yesterday based on a new national security survey they conducted last month. You’ll be hearing more about this survey this fall, but for now you can check out the memo and some top-line survey findings.
The Republicans are basically in no better shape now than they were on Memorial Day. In the aggregate, Democrats hold a narrow lead when respondents are asked which of the named candidates they will vote for in Congressional elections. Over 6 in 10 likely voters think the country is headed in the wrong direction, basically unchanged from recent months (the steady increase since 9/11 having plateaued). Fifty-five percent of likely voters disapprove of Bush’s performance. The number who approve — 41 percent — is smaller than the number who strongly disapprove (45 percent). In the fifty most-competitive districts, the number who strongly disapprove rose from 36 percent to 47 percent. In these districts, Democrats’ aggregate lead is growing and has reached a majority of likely voters.
The GOP has tried to use gay marriage and immigration as issues to fire up their base and flip swing voters, but “illegal immigration” comes in 7th on a list of most important issues, and “moral values” comes in 9th. Iraq and terrorism are basically tied for most important. Want to guess which of these the Administration will try to exploit this fall?
Many Democratic critiques of the Bush Administration’s Iraq policies resonate with the public, including charges of mismanagement of the war, the assertion that it has no plan moving forward, and the accusation that Iraq has taken away from the effectiveness of the war on terrorism.
But there are a few reasons for worry. Half of the Democracy Corps sample was asked whether they felt warm or cool toward “the Republican Congress” and half about “the Congress”. While just 26 percent were warm toward “the Congress”, 38 percent were warm toward “the Republican Congress”. This is the opposite of what we’d expect to see if voters were mainly fed up with the GOP. And corruption ranked dead last among ten issues when respondents were asked which were most important to their vote.
Furthermore, the number of voters indicating that terrorism was one of their top two concerns jumped 9 percentage points since the spring. And even though their advantage has declined, Republicans are still trusted more on this fundamental issue, 48 to 33 percent. The DCorps memo emphasizes that Democrats narrow these gaps after respondents are given security questions that contrast the Democratic and Republican messages, especially among Independents and in swing districts. But even then Republicans lead Democrats on terrorism and national security (nationally and among Independents) or are tied with them (in swing districts). Democrats are given the edge in terms of who would do a better job in Iraq only by a two-point margin (not statistically different from a tie).
The memo recommends an emphasis on changing the course in Iraq, implementing the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, working toward energy independence, rebuilding international ties, and demanding accountability for Republicans failure to prioritize keeping America safe.
I think that if the election were held today, I’d feel pretty good about our chances. But I do worry that the Administration can create political traps — such as the one in the making regarding the move of al Qaida leaders to Guantanamo and the Administration’s demand for military tribunals. I also worry that the real-world competition between Democratic and Republican messages is poorly captured by the poll-testing of head-to-head position statements. The Democrats’ position on Iraq matches the public, but the public doesn’t give either party the edge on future plans there, and it trusts the GOP more on terrorism. Haven’t I seen this movie before? I don’t remember that it has a happy ending. Hope the sequel is better….

Gadflyer Paul Waldman has an op-ed in the Boston Globe “Elections aren’t about issues,” arguing the primacy of identity as the key to future Democratic victories. As Waldman explains in the nut graph:

If there’s one thing Republicans have understood and Democrats haven’t, it is that politics is not about issues. Politics is about identity. The candidates and parties that win are not those aligning their positions most precisely with a majority of the electorate. The winners are those who form a positive image in the public mind of who they are (and a negative image of who their opponents are). Issues are a vehicle to create that identity, one that combines with symbolism and narrative to shape what the public thinks about when they think about Democrats and Republicans.

Waldman, author of Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success, makes a compelling case in clear, blunt language and his insights about strengthening Democratic campaigns deserve more attention.

by Scott Winship
Let me take you down, ’cause I’m going to….review a paper by one Paul T. McCartney. (Hey Jude, I never claimed to be the Daily Humorist.)
For real though. Let’s talk about a paper presented at last weekend’s annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. Not just any ol’ paper, but Sir Paul’s “Partisan Worldviews and Foreign Policy in Post-Cold War Era.” The paper tackles the question of whether there really is such a thing as an ideological divide between Democrats and Republicans on foreign policy. That is, can it be said in the post-Cold War period that Democrats and Republicans consistently prioritize different values that lead them to embrace different foreign policies? Is there something about the Administration’s foreign policy that is “conservative”, or does it simply reflect the particular views of the Administration itself? Is Democratic electoral weakness on foreign policy due to framing or past decisions by Democratic leaders, or is it a consequence of the Party’s basic ideology in foreign affairs? Different answers to these questions imply different political strategies.
McCartney’s review of the more general “culture war” literature and literatures oriented toward national security positions leads him to identify two worldviews that govern foreign policy preferences. The Inclusive Pluralist worldview is analogous to George Lakoff’s Nuturant Parent worldview; both emphasize cooperation and empathy and reject blind authoritarianism and moral absolutism. Lakoff’s Strict Father worldview mirrors McCartney’s Nationalist-Darwinist worldview. In both cases, the emphasis is on strength, competition, self-interest, submission to authority, and respect for tradition.
McCartney took all of the Key Votes related to foreign policy — as chosen by Congressional Quarterly editors — between 1989 and 2004 and coded them to indicate which position was Inclusive Pluralist and which was Nationalist-Darwinist. He then examined how the votes mapped onto legislators’ parties. Each year, between 60 and 92 percent of Democrats voted the IP position, while just 8 to 64 percent of Republicans did. The gap between Democratic and Republican legislators ranged from 9 to 64 percentage points, with the average across years being 37 points.
There was one exception to these results — in 2001 Republicans were actually more likely than Democrats to vote the IP position. That’s because in the wake of 9/11, most Democrats voted for N-D policies (i.e., related to the Patriot Act) while Republicans were more likely to vote the IP position on Fast-Track Trade Authority (i.e., pro-free trade). McCartney classifies the pro-free trade position as IP because it indicates support for a cooperative arrangement that benefits poor countries. In this case, the domestic Nurturant Parent/Strict Father worldviews conflict with and win out over the foreign policy IP/N-D worldviews. The same is true for one immigration vote in 1998.
I would go a step further than McCartney and argue that there are three fundamental value dimensions underlying the domestic and foreign policy worldviews (and therefore all policy preferences): altruism vs. self-interest (How much do I care about others versus myself?), idealism vs. realism (How practical is it for me to pursue these priorities?), and classical liberalism vs. traditionalism (Is it legitimate for me to pursue these priorities?). Inclusive Pluralism and economic liberalism at home combine altruism and idealism, while cultural liberalism rests on classical liberalism. The foreign policy preferences of establishment Republicans as well as economic conservatism can be seen as reflecting self-interest and realism. Nationalist conservatives like Pat Buchanan add a dose of traditionalism. Cultural conservatives value traditionalism above all. Domestic neoconservatives of the ’60s and ’70s can be viewed as altruistic realists who wanted to believe in social programs but could not. They eventually also embraced traditionalism. Finally, the foreign policy neoconservatives of recent decades blend self-interest and idealism.
Analyses like McCartney’s help explain why Democrats have electoral problems related to their cultural liberalism and their national security views. Fairly or not, the Party is perceived to put too much of a priority on the rights and interests of other nations rather than advocating a strong self-interested foreign policy. And their stance on key “values issues” challenges the traditionalism of many voters. Because of the basic values underlying each party’s worldview and the policies the parties have supported over time, voters have become sorted into two camps, one of which embodies both traditionalism and self-interest and one of which values classical liberalism and altruism.
One final thought — like cultural polarization, foreign-policy polarization is a recent phenomenon. The ’60s marked the arrival of the culturally-loaded controversies that would reshape the parties in subsequent decades as well as the breakdown of Cold War liberalism as a unifying foreign policy doctrine. Vietnam activated the altruistism, idealism, and anti-authoritarianism of young liberals and changed American politics. It is interesting to ponder what might have been if early war protestors had been more traditional or if anti-authoritarian youth had entered politics without the backdrop of the war. Perhaps we’d be looking at a gap in only one policy area rather than two.