By Andrew Levison
An extremely important new Gallup poll on Iraq (analyzed in a recent post by Ruy Teixeira) dramatically illustrates both the key problem and also the tremendous opportunity that now confronts the Democratic Party.
The problem Dems face on Iraq is that the public is divided into three roughly equal groups – one solidly anti-war, one solidly pro-war and a pivotal middle group with more nuanced and less easily pigeonholed views of the conflict. According to the Gallup poll, 36% of Americans believe that the war was a mistake and that we should set a timetable for withdrawal while 30% believe that we were right to send troops in the first place and that we must now keep them there as long as necessary.
These two groups – neither close to a majority – include many of the committed base supporters of the two political parties. The critical swing group of 28%, however, is comprised of people who believe either (1) that the initial decision to send troops was correct, but we should now set a timetable for withdrawal or (2) that the initial decision to send troops was a mistake but we are now nonetheless obligated to keep troops in the country until some kind of stability is achieved.
This poses an extremely difficult opinion climate for the Dems. They face a hard uphill struggle to formulate a clear, coherent message that can appeal to these distinctly ambiguous sentiments among the swing voters while at the same time not alienating those who are firmly opposed to the war. Attempts to rhetorically bridge the gap by combining different elements of these distinct positions – or by switching between them — inevitably ends up appearing vague, confused and vacillating. What the Democrats need is one clear core message that firmly expresses most Democrats’ basic disagreement with the Bush Administration’s approach to Iraq but which is presented in a form and language that seems reasonable and convincing to the ambivalent middle group.
For an answer, the polls suggest that the Democrats should take page from the Republican’s political playbook from 2004 and challenge Bush on the basic and fundamental issue of leadership. In the last election, Republicans did not debate John Kerry’s specific criticisms of the Administration’s policy in Iraq; instead they challenged his ability as a leader, caricaturing his behavior with pejorative adjectives like “flip-flopping” and “waffling”.
Democrats should take a parallel approach with Bush – not out of spite, but for two more substantive reasons. First, because the key current problems America faces in Iraq stem directly from Bush’s profound failures of leadership and second, because the public opinion polls clearly indicate that in recent weeks there has been nothing less then a massive collapse in public confidence in George W. Bush as a wartime national leader.
Recent surveys have consistently and repeatedly shown that solid majorities – ranging from 51% to 58% and 59% now feel that the war was “not worth it” or that we “should have stayed out” and similarly firm majorities of 55%-59% express direct disappointment and disapproval of how Bush himself has handled the conflict. In the last month majorities have agreed that America has become “bogged down” in Iraq, that the war was “a mistake”, that it “has not increased U.S. security” and that Bush and his administration have “no clear plan” for ending it.
These results have been reconfirmed by a number of distinct surveys and survey questions. They indicate a genuinely stunning loss of confidence in George W. Bush as a leader. Even Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon’s support during the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War declined relatively gradually in comparison with the sudden meltdown that has occurred in Bush’s popular backing.

Read more…

As support for the Iraq war continues to ebb–and, no, I don’t think reaction to the London bombing will much of an impact on that support, except perhaps in the very short run–let’s not forget how little support Bush has for what he’s doing on the economic front.
A recent report by Gallup, “Bush’s Economic Report Card Shows Little Progress“, notes the following:

Americans remain concerned about the economy, as more say they expect it to get worse than get better, and Bush’s economic approval rating stands at 41%, with 55% disapproving.
Gallup asks the public on a monthly basis if Bush’s economic policies are “helping the economy, not having much effect, or hurting the economy.” The trend line over the last five months shows consistently lackluster ratings. Slightly more than a third of Americans (36%) say Bush’s economic policies are hurting the economy. This percentage has remained fairly steady, with a high point of 40% in April. A similar percentage of Americans (37%) say the president’s policies are not having much of an effect. About one in every four Americans (24%), on the other hand, say the president’s policymaking has helped the economy, and this percentage has hovered within a five-point range since February.

So only about a quarter of the public (and just 16 percent of self-identified moderates) believe Bush’s economic policies are actually helping the country. That should make the economy another difficult issue for the Republican party in 2006. As Democracy Corps’ report on their recent poll puts it:

Iraq will certainly be an issue, but do not underestimate the power of the economy. Structurally, this economy is not producing enough jobs to seriously tighten the labor market or enough income and benefits for people to feel they are making gains. When asked whether this is economy is doing well (creating jobs, rising incomes and home ownership and moving in the right direction) or not doing well (jobs scarce, incomes stagnant and benefits cut), a large majority (60 percent) are very clear that this economy is not performing for people.

Ah, but how to translate this economic dissatisfaction into the political coin of the realm, actual votes on election day? That’s the difficult part and, in the last couple of elections, Democrats have had little success doing just that.
An easy answer is: new ideas on the economy. But, as Jonathan Chait usefully reminds us in his New Republic piece, “The Case Against New Ideas: Policies Aren’t What Matters in Politics“, Democrats don’t lack for ideas, many of them fairly new, and, in fact, Democrats’ ideas tend to more resemble real ideas (as opposed to slogans) and to be more carefully worked-out than those of their Republican opponents. Moreover, there is little evidence that voters actually pay much attention to detailed ideas, however new, about public policy.
So is there no ideas problem in the Democratic party? Depends on what you mean by “ideas”, as Mark Schmitt points out in an excellent post on his Decembrist blog. It may be true that voters pay little attention to the details of policy ideas, but they do pay attention to what parties generally stand for and where, in general, they propose to take the country. And they do pay attention to the results of parties’ policies once they are in office.
The Democrats could use new ideas, therefore, but:
1. Those ideas should sum up clearly and simply what the party stands for and where it proposes to take the country.
2. Those ideas should be few in number and easily reduced to a key principle or two that can be transmitted to voters–otherwise voters are unlikely to pay much attention.
3. Those ideas should actually work in practice, so that voters will see the benefits of having the party in office and reward it with additional electoral success.
If Democrats can produce ideas on the economy that meet these criteria, I think they have an excellent chance of capitalizing, both short-term and long-term, on voter dissatisfaction with Republican management of the economy.
Otherwise, not.

As was widely predicted, President Bush failed to provide leadership for significant action against global warming at the G-8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland. This despite a new new PIPA/Knowledge Networks Poll conducted 6/22-26 revealing that his policies on global warming lag way behind the wishes of the American people.
The poll found that 73 percent of Americans wanted the U.S. to participate the Bush-opposed Kyoto Agreement and 56 percent now agree that the U.S. should take steps “to reduce greenhouse gasses, even if it involves significant costs.” The poll also found that 83 percent of respondents favored legislation requiring large companies to reduce greenhouse gasses. 50 percent of respondents wanted the U.S. government to do “as much as other countries” to reduce greenhouse gasses, and another 44 percent wanted the U.S. to do “more than other countries.”
The poll indicated that overwhelming majorities supported GOP-blocked reforms such as tax incentives for companies to provide clean energy, requiring car companies to make hybrid autos half of production by 2010 and setting higher fuel efficiency standards, even if it makes cars more expensive. The poll revealed that awareness of the global warming problem increased modestly (9 percent over 2004), but 43 percent mistakenly believe that President Bush supports the Kyoto agreement.

Democracy Corps new report, “The Democrats’ Moment to Engage,” brings more dismal news for the GOP — and reason for Democrats to be cautiously optimistic. The Report, which includes results of a survey conducted 6/20-26, indicates that 56 percent of Americans think the country is “on the wrong track,” the same percentage agreeing that the war in Iraq is “not worth it” and 55 percent of respondents want the country to go in “a different direction” than Bush’s leadership is taking it. These percentages have been holding steady for Democracy Corps’ last three surveys, and report authors Stan Greenberg and James Carville conclude “This is a country almost settled on the need for change.”
The report also found that Democrats lead by 5 percent in a “hypothetical congressional contest” during the last three surveys. But the authors warn against overconfidence, because the GOP free fall is accompanied by “no rise in positive sentiment about the Democrats” and Democrats’ positive ratings still lag 5 percent behind the Republicans.
Carville and Greenberg urge Dems to make “sharp choices to diferentiate” themselves from the Republicans. Democrats must become “the party of change” and “empower the middle class over the big corporate interests in Washington.”
This and a host of other recent surveys (see below) strongly indicate that Americans want a clear change of direction. Job one for Dems is to show they can lead the way.

The London bombings underscore the urgency of improving homeland security in the U.S., a critical issue for Democrats to master in upcomming campaigns. But it’s also important for Dems to get up to speed on what is really going on inside Iraq. Facing South, website of the Institute for Southern Studies, has a trio of articles that shed fresh light on U.S. policy in Iraq and ought to be of interest to Democratic strategists. Chris Kromm’s “What Do the People of Iraq Want” reports on a U.S. government poll of Iraqis which found that:

45 percent of Iraqis support the insurgent attacks against coalition troops and a majority of Iraqis oppose having the U.S.-led multinational force in the country, and feel less safe with foreign troop patrols in their neighborhood.

In another article, “A Way Out of Iraq,” Kromm reports on a proposal for a “negotiated withdrawall” from Iraq, a “win-win” policy option that merits thoughtful consideration by Democratic candidates and strategists. And, as long as you are there, you might as well check out Kromm’s eye-opening piece “The Looting of Iraq,” a devastating indictment of contractor corruption in Iraq, which summarizes a longer Guardian article Kromm calls “one of the most galling stories in the annals of U.S. foreign policy.”

The Pew Hispanic Center has just released a very useful, data-rich report, “Hispanics and the 2004 Election: Population, Electorate and Voters“. Among other things, the report concludes, as I have, that the 58-40 Kerry-Bush split among Hispanics in the combined state exit polls is much more plausible than the 53-44 split in the national exit poll. To support this view, they note that the demographics of the Hispanic voter sample in the combined state polls matches up well with the demographics of the 2004 Census Voter Supplement Hispanic sample. The demographics of the national exit poll Hispanic sample, on the other hand, match up rather poorly with the Census data. (For an explanation of what the Census Voter Supplement data is and why we should take its demographic information quite seriously, see my recent comments on the release of the 2004 Voter Supplement data.)
The report also notes that all of the shift toward Bush among Hispanics from 2000 to 2004 occurred among Protestants. Hispanic Catholics didn’t waver in their Democratic loyalties.
The focus of the report, however, is not on partisan Hispanic voting patterns, but rather the Hispanic vote as a whole and how rapidly it is growing. Their answer, in brief, is: not as rapidly as you think, especially in comparison to the overall growth of the Hispanic population. Here are their key findings:

Between the 2000 and 2004 elections, the Hispanic population grew by 5.7 million, accounting for half of the increase in the U.S. population of 11.5 million.
Of those 5.7 million Hispanics added to the U.S. population between the last two presidential elections, 1.7 million persons or 30 percent were less than 18 years old and are thus not eligible to vote. Another 1.9 million or 33 percent of the people added to the Hispanic population between the two elections were adults not eligible to vote because they were not citizens.
As a result of these factors, only 39 percent of the Latino population was eligible to vote compared to 76 percent of whites and 65 percent of the black population.
Both the number of Latinos registered to vote (9.3 million) and the number of Latinos who cast ballots (7.6 million) in November 2004 marked increases of political participation over the 2000 election that were larger than for any other ethnic or racial group in percentage terms.
However, both registration and turnout rates for Latinos were lower than for whites or blacks. As a result, only 47 percent of eligible Hispanics went to the polls compared to 67 percent of whites and 60 percent of blacks. Differences in registration rates explain most of the gaps.
The combination of demographic factors and participation rates meant that only 18 percent of the Latino population voted in 2004 compared to 51 percent of whites and 39 percent of blacks.
In November 2004, Hispanics were 14.3 percent of the total population but only 6.0 percent of the votes cast. In the previous election, Hispanics were 12.8 percent of the population and 5.5 percent of the votes cast.

These interesting data serve to remind us of an important fact. While the Hispanic population is indeed growing fast, the Hispanic vote still lags far, far behind the white vote in terms of political importance and that is not going to change anytime soon. Therefore, even if the Hispanic vote turns back towards the Democrats in the 2006 and 2008 elections, as I believe is likely, the Democrats will not make much progress without moving the white vote, particularly the white working class vote, away from the Republicans.
Indeed, it would greatly serve GOP interests for Democrats to focus their worries and energies on the Hispanic vote, while conceding GOP dominance over the white vote. That’s still where most of the ducks are and where most of the Democratic hunting should be, if they hope to break the GOP hold on Congress and the Presidency.

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner (GQR), in conjunction with internet survey firm Polimetrix, is conducting a “Youth Monitor” series of surveys of 18-25 year olds. The first survey in the series has just been released and it suggests that youth, as they showed in the 2004 election, are very much not with the Bush program.
According to the poll, youth give Bush a strongly net negative approval rating–42 percent approval,with 58 percent disapproval, for a -16 net. Even more tellingly, youth hold the following views: by 63-37, they feel the war in Iraq has not been worth the cost in US lives and dollars; by 65-33, they believe the Democrats, not the Republicans, do a better job representing the interests of young people; by 64-36, they think Bush and the Republicans “are going too far by invading peoples’ personal lives and family decisions”, rather than “are doing a good job in trying to uphold moral values and protecting families”; by 58-42, they believe we need to work harder at tolearting people who are different, particularly gays, rather than work harder at upholding traditional values and strong families; and, last but not least, by 57-43, they think that Bush has not made us safer from terrorist attack.
By these data, the Democrats should replicate their recent strong performance among young voters in 2006 and perhaps beyond.

In the current issue of The New Republic, Jonathan Chait blows away the cliche that the Republicans’ success in politics derives from their superior “new ideas.” Chait’s article, “The Case against New Ideas” makes a compelling argument that (a.) the Dems have lots of ‘new’ (and good) ideas, certainly compared to the GOP and (b.) getting elected isn’t so much about ideas anyway. As Chait explains:

To begin with, the plain fact is that liberals have plenty of new ideas. Troll websites of the Center for American Progress, the Brookings Institution, or the Century Foundation, and you will find them teeming with six- and twelve-point plans for any problem you can imagine: securing loose nuclear weapons, reforming public education, promoting international trade, bolstering the military, and so on. They get churned out by the shelfful providing more material than any presidential administration could hope to enact…Liberals are brimming with ideas about reforming health care and taming the deficit. Conservatives have little to say about either of these problems.

Chait offers impressive examples of creative policy reforms offered by Democrats that never got much traction in the media. He argues that “the vast majority of the time, the press will simply ignore ideas put forth by the minority party.” Chait points out that the Republican party is not exactly a treasure trove of new ideas (Quick, name the GOP’s fresh ideas for addressing global warming or the health care crisis).
Chait shreds the notion that Bush’s Social Security privatization scheme is a new idea and he notes that the Iraq war was not based on the ‘new’ idea of democracy-promotion, but the bogus threat of WMD’s. And where, Chait asks are the GOP’s new ideas about dealing with very real security concerns, like North Korea or Iran?
Chait’s point is not just that the Dems have more and better ideas than the GOP; It is also that ideas rarely determine political outcomes. As Chait notes:

Alas, this sort of thinking assumes a wildly optimistic level of discernment by voters. Polls consistently show that large swaths of the voting public know very little about the positions taken by candidates. In 2000, the National Annenberg Election Survey found that just 57 percent of voters knew Al Gore was more liberal than Bush, 51 percent knew he was more supportive of gun control, and a mere 46 percent understood that he was more supportive of abortion rights. “The voting behavior literature, which is massive, shows that people are not particularly idea-driven,” explains Berkeley political scientist Nelson Polsby. “They don’t know what the fashions are, with respect to what ideas go with other ideas.”
…A recent study in Science magazine was even more disturbing to those who believe in the power of ideas. Scientists showed the subjects pairs of photographs, which turned out to be matched candidates in Senate and House races. The subjects had to judge within one second which candidate looked more competent, on the basis of appearance alone. Their choice matched the candidate who won an astounding 71.6 percent of the time in Senate races. If you consider that a decent share of Senate races pit unknown, underfunded challengers against popular incumbents in highly partisan states, that is a remarkably high percentage. Faith in the discernment of the public is not based on proof, it’s premised on, well, faith

Chait emphasizes that the myth of ‘new ideas’ as the decisive determinant of electoral victories has been bandied about as much by liberals, as by conservatives, and he quotes numerous sources to make his point. Well-articulated, fresh ideas can be an asset. But Democrats who want to win would do better to keep focused on projecting good character and credibility, supporting solid policies that address real concerns of working people and getting their message out to new voters, as well as their base.

By Alan Abramowitz
The problem with the Rose argument is that it is based on the assumption that it is primarily if not exclusively the disadvantaged who benefit from Democratic economic policies. But this assumption is patently false. In the first place, the Democratic Party has long championed government programs that benefit the middle class such as Social Security and Medicare. But even more fundamentally, the vast majority of Americans, probably all except the very, very wealthy, benefit from Democratic economic policies. This can be seen by comparing the performance of the economy under Democratic and Republican presidents over the past 60+ years. By almost every conceivable economic measure–real GDP growth, unemployment, real disposable income, and even the performance of the stock market–the economy does better, in fact substantially better, under Democratic leadership than under Republican leadership (for some evidence along these lines, see Michael Kinsley’s excellent column on this subject). And this remains true even if you correct for the delayed effect of economic policies by subtracting the performance of the economy during the first year of a new administration.
The facts demonstrate that the vast majority of Americans are better off when Democrats are in power than when Republicans are in power. The major problem that Democrats fact today is driving this point home as forcefully as possible–something that both Al Gore and John Kerry unfortunately failed to do.

As the toll for the war in Iraq worsens, it appears that the military’s ability to attract new recruits is being badly damaged. In April, for example, the Army’s recruiting fell short 42 percent. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has ruled out reinstating the draft for the time being. But other politicians have expressed support for the draft, including a few Democrats, such as N.Y. Rep. Charlie Rangel.
Bad idea, at least for any candidates facing a close election, according to an AP-Ipsos poll, conducted 6/20-22.
The poll found that 7 out of 10 respondents opposed reinstatement of the draft, with nearly half saying they “strongly” oppose bringing the draft back. About a quarter of the respondents supported reinstating the draft. A majority of respondents said they would discourage a son from joining the military, and two-thirds of those polled would discourage a daughter from joining.
“People simply don’t want their kids to be sent off to Iraq to be shot at in a situation in which the value of the war is becoming more and more questionable,” explained Dr. John Mueller, a political-science professor at Ohio State University and author of War, Presidents and Public Opinion, quoted in DiversityInc.com.
The poll found that a majority of all major demographic groups opposed reinstating the draft, although men were less likely to oppose it than women. Republicans supported the draft reinstatement proposal more than Democrats and respondents over age 50 supported it more than younger adults.