Ed Kilgore over at NewDonkey has an excellent four part series on “Lessons Learned” from the previous 12 months of politics. I commend the entire series to you, but I particularly wanted to highlight four points of agreement among Democrats that Kilgore proposed in his first entry to this series:

(a) mobilization of partisans and ideologues is not enough; we need a persuasion strategy as well;
(b) we’re the out-party now, and no longer have any excuse for behaving as the Party of Government;
(c) you just cannot win a presidential election without a clear, overarching message, defined as a theme or two that explain what you propose to do to organize public resources to address the needs and interests of the American people at home and abroad; and
(d) that message must, for the foreseeable future, address the perceived weakness and incoherence of Democrats on national security issues; the perceived elitism and relativism of Democrats in terms of their understanding of the direction of American society and culture; and the perceived obsession of Democrats with a program-heavy, values-lite approach to economic and other domestic issues.

Can we all agree on this? We may disagree on exactly how to address these four points, but we should all agree that these are the points to be addressed. Kilgore provides his basic approach to these points in the other three parts of his four part series; it’s up to all of us to provide our own recommendations in the months ahead.

One reason Bush won in November is that the public wasn’t quite sick enough yet of the Iraq war. If they had been sick enough of the mess in Iraq it wouldn’t have mattered that Kerry’s plan for Iraq wasn’t particularly clear or convincing. Enough voters would have gone for Kerry simply because they wanted a change–any change–from Bush’s course in Iraq.
Moving forward, however, it remains a distinct possibility that voters will get fed up enough with Iraq that the political damage will not be not containable. Consider these data from the latest Washington Post/ABC News, as summarized by ABC News polling director, Gary Langer (note that these data were collected before the bombing of a US military mess hall in Mosul):

Fifty-six percent, a new high, now say the war in Iraq was not worth fighting, and fewer than half think the United States is making significant progress restoring civil order there. Most call Iraq unready for the election scheduled for late next month, doubt the integrity of the election process and lack confidence it’ll produce a stable government.
There are political implications: Fifty-seven percent disapprove of President Bush’s work on the situation, a point shy of his worst rating on Iraq, set during the Abu Ghraib scandal last spring. His approval for handling terrorism overall — his best issue — has dropped to 53 percent, near its low of 50 percent in June.
….Most broadly, this ABC News/Washington Post poll shows no second honeymoon for Bush after his re-election last month. The nation is as divided as ever, with Americans split, 48 percent to 49 percent, on his overall job performance — about where it’s been for most of 2004. Bush has 55 percent job approval in the “red” states he won — compared with 40 percent, 15 points lower, in the “blue” states won by Democrat John Kerry.
Comparisons to past year-end polls underscore the difficulties confronting Bush in his second term. His job approval rating is 11 points lower than a year ago, and 18 points lower than two years ago. His rating on terrorism is 17 points lower than at this time last year. There’s been a 17-point drop in the number of Americans who say the Iraq war was worth fighting, and a 10-point rise in the number who call U.S. casualties “unacceptable.”

That’s the situation now. And it seems only likely to get worse. Bush isn’t out of the woods yet on Iraq–not by a long shot.

On Sunday, I mentioned that support for private accounts tends to plunge precipitously when costs and trade-offs of these accounts are mentioned. The new Washington Post/ABC News poll provides more compelling evidence that this is the case and that, therefore, the level of “hard” support for Social Security privatization is quite low.
In the WP/ABC poll, there is a slight majority (53 percent) in favor of “a plan in which people who chose to could invest some of their Social Security contributions in the stock market”. But when a followup is asked (“What if setting up a stock-market option for Social Security means the government has to borrow as much as two trillion dollars to set it up, with that money to be paid back over time through cost savings from the current system?”), that 53 percent is cut in half, so only 24 percent of the public winds up favoring private accounts if that kind of borrowing is necessary to set them up. That’s bad news for Bush, since it appears that the administration plans to advocate just that sort of borrowing to set up these accounts.
Yet more bad news for the administration is the public’s expressed interest in participating in such accounts if they were set up. Only 37 percent say they would personally put some of their Social Security money in such an account, given that they would “get higher Social Security benefits if the stock market went up, but lower Social Security benefits if the stock market went down.” Significantly, people who don’t expect to receive their full benefits from Social Security are no more likely to say they would participate in these accounts than are those who expect to receive full benefits. That undercuts one of the key selling points of the administration’s plan.
So the public doesn’t support private accounts, given the costs of setting up such accounts, and expresses little enthusiasm for participating in these accounts, even if they were available. If Bush is hoping for a groundswell of public opinion to push his privatization proposal over the top, he’d better think again.

The Bush administration appears determined to build on its “mandate” and push Social Security privatization early in Bush’s second term. This seems an ill-advised plan for several reasons.
First, there is little compelling evidence that Social Security is in any kind of crisis and none at all that carving out private accounts will improve Social Security’s fiscal position. In fact, it will almost certainly worsen that position.
Second, there is no evidence that the public is thirsting for this particular “reform”. The new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that only 35 percent believe Bush has a mandate to allow “workers to invest some of their Social Security taxes in the stock market”, compared to 51 percent who believe he does not. And when asked whether they thought it was “a good idea or a bad idea to change the Social Security system to allow workers to invest their Social Security contributions in the stock market”, half said it was a bad idea and only 38 percent said it was a good one.
The poll also asked two other questions gauging sentiment about private accounts that mentioned some of the potential trade-offs involved in these accounts. The first question returned a 45-39 percent plurality in favor, while the second question returned a 46-41 percent plurality against, perhaps because the second question mentions the huge expenses involved in adding these accounts to the system. But in neither case do you get very strong support for private accounts, which is entirely typical of questions that explicitly mention the tradeoffs of privatization.
Of course, artfully-crafted questions that make private accounts sound like a free lunch (though, interestingly, not the good idea/bad idea question cited above) can find higher levels of support for private accounts. But inevitably this support contracts dramatically if any kind of reasonable followup is asked that mentions any of the costs associated with these accounts.
But if the public is not crying out for Social Security privatization, does that mean Democrats can confine themselves to simply opposing privatization and leaving it at that? I don’t think so. If Social Security isn’t broken, the overall US retirement and pension system is and the public knows this. Therefore, Democrats must offer something beyond defending the status quo, even if the part of the status quo they are most vigorously defending is worth a strong defense.
What is it that Democrats should be offering? That’s a subject for useful debate. Democrats in search of a “compelling economic message” would do well to promote such a debate, rather than wasting time debating whether the party should be “populist” or not. Of course it should be, but populism is not enough: what exactly do Democrats propose to do to actually make the lives of Americans better? No amount of corporation-bashing (or hugging) can substitute for a compelling economic message that answers that question.

Presumably that is the attitude in the Bush White House. Despite losing independents and moderates in 2004, they didn’t lose them by enough to spell defeat for the president.
Well, they better hope that formula continues to work, because the administration is getting off on the wrong foot with the political center in this post-election period. Consider these results from recent polls.
1. In the latest Ipsos-AP poll, 43 percent think the nation’s going in the right direction, compared to 52 percent who feel it’s off on the wrong track. Not so good. But among independents a stunning 68 percent feel the country is off on the wrong track.
2. On Iraq, in the same poll, 48 percent approve and 50 percent disapprove of Bush’s handling of Iraq. But among independents, 66 percent disapprove. And in the latest Quinnipiac University poll, Bush’s approval rating on Iraq is very poor 41/55 but an even worse 37/58 among independents.
In the Ipsos-AP poll, 47 percent believe it is likely that a stable, democratic government will be established in Iraq, compared to 51 percent who don’t. But only 36 percent of independents believe a stable government in Iraq is likely.
Finally, the Q-poll finds the worst numbers ever on whether going to war with Iraq was the right thing for the US to do or the wrong thing. Just 42 percent now say we did the right thing, while 52 percent say it was the wrong thing. And independents have an even harsher judgement: they say war with Iraq was the wrong thing to do by 55-37.
3. On the economy, the Q-poll finds the public disapproving of Bush’s handling of the economy by 53-42. Bad, but independents are substantially worse, disapproving of Bush’s performance in this area by 58-37.
A poor start indeed for Bush with the political center. Will he do better with these voters in the future? Do he and his political advisors even care? We shall see as (shudder) Bush’s second term starts to unfold.

Michael McDonald of George Mason University provides the final turnout numbers and presidential results:

Bush 62,008,619 (50.74%)
Kerry 59,012,107 (48.29%)
Total (all candidates) 122,212,577
(Turnout Rate among eligible: 59.9%)
Margin of Victory: 2,996,512 (2.45%)

So Bush’s final percentage point margin is closer to two points than three and his final vote margin is under 3 million. Hardly awe-inspiring–in fact, unprecedentedly weak as incumbent re-election victories go. And we’re supposed to believe this is a mandate?
Note: McDonald’s turnout rate is based on his estimate of the voting-eligible population and is somewhat different from the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate’s voting-age citizen based turnout rate and quite different from the traditional voting-age population (VAP) based turnout rate.

Yesterday, at the end of the first part of this post on exurbia and politics, I wondered how Mark Gersh/NCEC could come up with so many exurban counties (30) in a single state (Ohio). I don’t know the full answer to this since Gersh’s piece in Blueprint magazine includes no information on how he or NCEC define exurban counties. However, I did manage to get ahold of an earlier version of NCEC’s criteria for typologizing counties and it indicates that pretty much any suburban county that does not contain a large city can be designated as exurban, if it is relatively downscale in terms of occupation, income and education or if it falls below a certain density criterion. (The current criteria apparently differ somewhat, but not by that much, from these earlier criteria.) This approach leads to a number of unusual results including:
1. Some entire MSAs (metropolitan statistical areas) are designated exurban, like the Canton MSA in Ohio and the Pensacola and Sarasota MSAs in Florida.
2. In other MSAs, only the county containing the MSA’s main city is designated “urban-surburban” while every other county is designated exurban or even rural. For example, in the Columbus, OH MSA, only Franklin county is termed urban-suburban, while five other counties are designated exurban and two are considered rural. Similarly, all Ohio counties in the Cincinnati MSA are designated exurban except Hamilton county.
3. Medium-sized metro areas wind up being classified almost entirely as exurban or rural. In Florida, for example, there are 16 counties in medium-sized metro areas. Of these, just three are classified as either urban-suburban (1) or suburban (2), while 13 are classified as either exurban (11) or rural (2).
4. Almost no counties are simply designated “suburban”. In Ohio, there are only three (compared to 30 exurban counties); in Florida, just five (compared to 21 exurban counties).
Gersh’s article even refers to Hillsborough county, which contains Tampa, as exurban! (Note, however, that it is not displayed as such on his map of Florida, so perhaps his enthusiasm for exurbia was simply getting the best of him.)
This approach to defining exurbia is, in my view, simply too broad to be of much use. Collapsing all but the most urbanized parts of big metro areas, almost the entirety of medium-sized metro areas and outer suburbs everywhere into exurbia does considerable violence to the concept and clarifies little.
A geographer friend of mine comments as follows on the Gersh/NCEC approach:

The NCEC criteria don’t have much to do with any accepted notion of exurban, since they ignore the geographic requirement of being on the fringe of metro areas. Many of the counties listed as exurban are independent small metro or micropolitan areas….It’s “small urban” not “exurban”.

In short, analyses like these create a big exurban problem for the Democrats by defining way more voters into that category than is really appropriate. By doing so, these analyses can say or imply “Democrats are losing because of those really fast-growing exurbs, so they are on the short end of the demographic stick!!” instead of the less exciting, but more accurate: “Democrats experienced some slippage in suburban and small urban counties of all types and that contributed to their loss in 2004”. The task for the Democrats is the familiar one of getting enough garden-variety suburban and small urban votes back to win; they need not worry about being overwhelmed by a demographic tsunami of Republican exurban votes.

The first WSJ/NBC News Poll conducted since the election offers scant support for President Bush’s assertion that he has “earned a mandate.” The poll, conducted by Hart/McInturff December 9-13, found that 41 percent of respondents think the country is “headed in the right direction,” while 46 percent agree that it is “off on a wrong track.” Bush failed to get a favorable majority for his job approval rating (49-44), while 51 percent disapproved of his handling of both the economy and foreign policy. He did get 51 percent approval for his handling of the war against terrorism, but the poll was conducted before most of the revelations of the Kerik debacle were reported.
As the President launches his campaign to privatize Social Security, the poll reports that only 35 percent of the respondents believe his election entails a ‘mandate’ for investing SS taxes in the private sector, while 51 percent say it does not. While 41 percent said they were “more confident” that the War in Iraq will come to a successful conclusion, 48 percent said they were “less confident” in that prospect. It appears that the only ‘mandate’ the President received in his 2 point margin of victory, if he wants to get anything done, is to move toward the political center.

The initial take on the allegedly central role of “values voters” in the 2004 election had a shaky empirical foundation: the slight plurality of voters in the NEP exit poll who selected “moral values” as their most important voting issue and who voted heavily (80 percent) for Bush. This line of analysis has come under increasing fire in the recent weeks, as many observers have noted that moral values did not really belong in a list of voting issues like the economy and the war in Iraq and that the NEP exit poll question has not been asked with a values choice before and hence provides no information on any change in this election in the level of values voting.
The latter point is where Christopher Muste picks up the story in his excellent article, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Polling Data Show Moral Values Aren’t a New Factor” in Sunday’s Washington Post. Muste notes, to begin with:

[T]here’s another exit poll that has asked voters about moral values in the past four elections. The Los Angeles Times conducts its own national exit poll. Since 1992, it has asked voters which two issues they considered most important in deciding how they would vote. This year, 40 percent of voters the newspaper surveyed cited “moral/ethical values” as one of their two most important issues. Guess what? That’s about the same proportion as in the previous two elections: 35 percent named moral values in 2000 and 40 percent did so in 1996, up from 24 percent in 1992. So this year didn’t see an unprecedented surge in values voters rushing to the polls.

I’ve seen these particular findings from the LA Times polls cited in other articles, but Muste goes on to cite some addtional and very interesting findings from these polls that I have not seen before:

And while Bush strategist Karl Rove must be gratified that the 2000 dip in the turnout of values voters was reversed in 2004, he can’t be entirely thrilled by how they cast their votes. The L.A. Times survey showed that moral values voters gave 70 percent of their votes to Bush this year. But that’s a drop from 2000, when he won 74 percent. Put another way, 54 percent of Bush voters this year cited moral values — a decline from the Republican high-water mark in 1996, when 67 percent of Bob Dole’s voters named moral values. For Democratic nominees, by contrast, the trend has been up, not down, steadily rising from a scant 9 percent of Bill Clinton supporters naming moral values in the “it’s the economy” election of 1992 to 24 percent of John Kerry’s voters this year.

Muste goes on to cite other data from the NEP poll and data from a post-election survey by the Pew Research Center that suggest the dominant role of values voters in the 2004 election has been exaggerated and that values voting, in general, should not be narrowly defined by reference to issues like gay marriage and abortion. He concludes:

A large and fairly stable group of moral values voters, whose numbers have been largely consistent over the past three elections, who vote Republican in roughly the same or smaller proportions year after year, who provided no clear winning boost to Bush, and whose idea of what constitutes moral values is hardly uniform. This is a poor fit for the reigning image of a crucial swing vote — animated single-mindedly by cultural wedge issues — that turned out in unprecedented numbers to push Bush over the top in 2004. It’s time to reel the moral values myth back down to earth.

Amen. I might add, though, that even if values voters weren’t important in the way election mythology has indicated, it doesn’t mean values, broadly defined, weren’t important to voters. Questions of presidential character and of America’s role in the world, especially vis a vis the war on terror, are very much bound up with values and affected voters’ decisions. But that broad conception of values and voting should’t be collapsed to the image of swing voters “animated single-mindedly by cultural wedge issues”, as Muste correctly points out.

By Alan Abramowitz
Here’s a rating of 10 polling organizations that conducted polls in multiple battleground states during the 2004 campaign. The rating is based on the final polls released by each organization in 10 battleground states: Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Nevada, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. In order to take into account both the number of states polled and the accuracy of the results, the score of each polling organization is based on the number of states predicted correctly minus the number predicted incorrectly. Predictions of ties do not count. Closeness of predictions to the actual margins also does not count and some polls made correct predictions that were pretty far off the mark.
Here’s the list, ranked from best to worst:
1. Rasmussen–10 states polled, 9 correct, 1 tie, +9
2. Mason-Dixon–10 states polled, 9 correct, 1 incorrect, +8
3. SurveyUSA–6 states polled, 5 correct, 1 incorrect, +4
3. Zogby–9 states polled, 6 correct, 2 incorrect, 1 tied, +4
5. Research 2000–5 states polled, 4 correct, 1 incorrect, +3
5. Strategic Vision–7 states polled, 4 correct, 1 incorrect, 2 tied, +3
7. FoxNews/Opinion Dynamics–4 states polled, 2 correct, 2 incorrect, 0
7. Los Angeles Times–2 states polled, 1 correct, 1 incorrect, 1 tied, 0
9. ARG–7 states polled, 3 correct, 4 incorrect, -1
10. Gallup–6 states polled, 2 correct, 4 incorrect, -2