Al From’s and Bruce Reed’s recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “Get the Red Out” has occasioned much comment, most of it hostile, in the Democratic-oriented blogosphere. Atrios is quite annoyed and feels the DLC basically looks down on 80 percent of Democrats. Josh Marshall is less annoyed, but nonetheless thinks the DLC’s attitude is deplorable and shows contempt for most the Democratic party (though see also his followup post where he tempers his criticism a bit and separates himself from the heavy-duty DLC-bashers). Markos Zuniga over at Daily Kos has perhaps the most stinging rebuke, terming the DLC simply “irrelevant”. He states:

The DLC is a dying organization. But the quicker it dies, the better we’ll be as a party. The path to success lies in finding common ground between the party’s myriad constituencies, not in toeing the Gospel According to From and Reed.

I guess I am not persuaded that the DLC is truly irrelevant (though they certainly do and say some irrelevant things) and dying as an organization. I don’t even believe that would be a good thing if it were true. The DLC is full of smart people who have many good and useful ideas about the road forward for Democrats. You can see some of them in their WSJ article, but Will Marshall’s article, “Heartland Strategy” is a much better source of useful analysis, as is Ed Kilgore’s terrific blog, NewDonkey.
But there’s no denying it: their tone and their attitude are a genuine problem and, in my view, they should be more sensitive to that problem–especially if they don’t want their influence to fade over time. In today’s party, they simply can’t dominate debate the way the once did. If they try to, by casting every debate in an us-against-them way, they do risk becoming, as Zuniga believes they already are, irrelevant. And I think that would be a shame for an organization that has so much to contribute to the party.

What is the struggle for chair of the DNC chair really about? Are we seeing a re-run of the DLC-liberal spats that have pre-occupied the party for so many years? I hope not. That would be stupid, counterproductive and pretty far removed from an emerging and much more important dispute about the party’s future. Nick Confessore over at Tapped gets it exactly right:

[T]he most consequential split in the Democratic Party going forward is not liberals versus centrists. The key split is not really ideological at all, when you get down into it. Here’s how I see the fight shaping up. On the one side are the rump Democratic establishment of consultants, pollsters, and senior members of Congress, people who span the ideological continuum but who share in common an inability to adapt to the Republican ascendancy and recognize it for what it is. Many of them would like Democrats to win more often, but they are not ready to give up the Beltway fiefdoms and influence they still possess in order to achieve it. On the other side are party reformers of left and right, who tend towards ideological ecumenism but are determined to change the way the Democratic Party is organized and funded. Pretty much anyone who is deeply invested in restarting the DLC/liberal food fights is by definition part of this rump establishment, since the distinction of vision between Democratic centrists and liberals pale next to the differences between the Democratic average and the Bush-era conservatives.

The indefatigable Mark Blumenthal over at Mystery Pollster has yet more on the revisions of the the NEP exit poll Hispanic figures. Read his whole post, but here’s the essence:
1. The initial TX Hispanic figure of 59 percent support for Bush, according to the NEP, was the result of a “tabulation” error that improperly weighted telephone interviews with early/absentee voters that were conducted to accompany the election day polling place interviews. (OK–but how’d that happen? And why did it take so long for them to figure it out? And what about the TX white vote for Bush now–doesn’t that have to be higher as a result?)
2. The 40 percent figure for Bush’s national Hispanic support issued by NBC, based on aggregating all the state polls, was not a “correction” of the NEP national poll data, but simply a different, (though better, according to NBC) estimate, of Bush’s national Hispanic support. The NEP national exit poll figure of 44 percent for Bush’s Hispanic support still stands uncorrected by Edison/Mitofsky, the actual exit pollsters. (OK–but if we needed a better estimate than the national poll estimate because the sampling was screwed up–NBC’s story–why is Edison/Mitofsky sticking by their national estimate? If NBC is right, doesn’t it need to be corrected? If not, why not?–isn’t it a problem that the national poll estimate and the state poll-based national estimate don’t matchup (they did almost perfectly in 2000)?
Clear? I thought so. I eagerly await, as I’m sure you do, more “clarifications” from the good folks at the NEP, Edison/Mitofsky, NBC and whoever else is getting into the act.

This just in from Michael McDonald of George Mason University:

New York just reported its certified election results. With only two states (Maine and Pennsylvania, I use their AP reported results) left to certify we have the following popular vote results:
Bush: 61,816,317 (50.62%)
Kerry: 58,824,880 (48.17%)
Total: 122,124,783 (turnout rate: 59.9% of voting-eligible population)
Bush’s popular vote margin is now 2,991,437 or 2.45 percentage points. In all likelihood, it will go lower when Pennsylvania certifies their results.
New York’s turnout is now 2.2 percentage points higher than 2000, meaning that turnout was up in every state.

Interesting. That means, among other things, that you could already round his victory down to 2 points, if you were dealing with whole numbers. And even if you’re dealing with two significant digits, very soon his margin will likely round down to 2.4 (instead of up to 2.5) which will further promote the sense it was a 2 point victory.
So: the mighty Bush win is now down to 2 points. Spread the word.

Peter Beinart, editor of the The New Republic, proposes in their latest magazine that Democrats stop all this unity nonsense and get down to what’s really important: purging the party of all those wrong-headed “softs” who don’t have the backbone to stand up (really stand up) to the new totalitarian threat of Islamic fundamentalism. Their failure to “report for duty” (Beinart specifically mentions only MoveOn and Michael Moore but I think his criteria for softness would also implicate most of the liberal blogosphere, most Dean campaign activists, a good chunk of the leadership of the 527s and countless others within the party) cost the Democrats the White House in 2004 and will do so forever until Democrats decisively remove them from power and influence in the party. Yes, it’s purge time in the glorious spirit of the late ’40s actions against Communists and those soft on them within the Democratic party.
Boy, what a great idea: a massive, no-holds-barred faction fight about who’s really tough on terrorism. That may make the blood course in Beinart’s veins, but I guess I’m not entirely convinced it’s necessary.
For one thing, his prescription seems more suited to, say, the Democratic party of the late ’40s than it does to the actually-existing Democratic party of 2004. Noam Scheiber, who is actually quite hawkish himself, makes this point in considerable and, in my view, devestating detail in a comment on Beinart’s piece on the TNR website.
Also on the TNR website, John Judis takes Beinart to task for a political prescription that won’t work and a complete misunderstanding of MoveOn and Democratic-oriented internet activism in general. I couldn’t agree more. Here’s a couple of key paragraphs from Judis’ article but I urge you to read whole piece:

Initiating factional warfare with, or even purging, everyone to the left of Joe Lieberman will not create a viable Democratic Party. Okay, that may be an exaggeration of what Peter prescribes, but there are clear echoes in his essay of Ben Wattenberg’s Coalition for a Democratic Majority, which tried to do something similar after the 1972 Democratic defeat by creating a party centered around Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. The voters didn’t buy it, and they won’t buy Peter’s party either.
Peter also misunderstands MoveOn.org and the various other Internet-based groups that have sprung up in the last five years. They are not an old-fashioned militant left but part of a college-educated post-industrial center-left politics that was developing under Bill Clinton in the 1990s. One of their big issues was the deficit, hardly a left-wing concern. They became identified with “the left” because they were early and prescient opponents of the Iraq war–a position that can no longer simply be identified with the left and that is not a reason to criticize them. Sure, they shouldn’t have participated in marches with the Workers World Party, but these new movements are organized by people who don’t have long political pedigrees. If anything, they are the best hope for a new moral vision that will animate the Democrats.

According to the first national post-election survey of student participation in the 2004 election, the era of student apathy is over and the Democratic Party is the big winner. The poll, conducted by Schneiders/Della Volpe/Schulman from November 9-19, found that 77 percent of college students nation-wide said they voted on November 2nd, and they voted for John Kerry by a margin of 55-41 percent.
The poll also found that 62 percent of the respondents said they encouraged or helped someone else to vote, nearly double the figure for 2000. Interestingly, two-thirds of the respondents were registered in their home town. However, the third who were registered in their college’s towns turned out to vote at a slightly higher rate. John Kerry received a healthy majority of all student major groups, except those who majored in education, 51 percent of whom voted for Bush.

Democratic Leadership Council bigwigs Al From and Bruce Reed have an article in today’s Wall St. Journal, “Get the Red Out,” that rolls out a couple of fresh ideas for a Democratic resurgence. Along with their more predictable proposals and pot shots at Michael Moore and Joe Trippi, From and Reed propose a “Heartland Project,” which would include “family policies that give parents more time to raise their kids right,” a provocative idea that merits further exploration. They also advocate a new message strategy that gives more emphasis to the Democrats’ outsider status, as they “take up the reform mantle” and become “the party of change, protecting our principles, not our programs.” All Democrats may not be able to unite behind the DLC’s positions on Iraq policy, same-sex marriage and other issues, but Reed and From are thinking creatively about the Party’s future, and their ideas merit thoughtful consideration.

I particularly liked this exchange, “What Now?: A discussion on the way forward for the Democrats” among a very good panel of political observers (E.J. Dionne, Ed Kilgore, James Pinkerton, Walter Shapiro, Michael Tomasky, Paul Glastris and Amy Sullivan) in the new Washington Monthly. Almost everything said is intelligent and perceptive–not always the case with these postmortems–and I found the comments on the national security issue and on the use of narrative in campaigns especially worthwhile. Highly recommended.

I commented on Sunday about the exaggerated importance assigned to the rural/exurban vote in Ohio. Much the same thing could be said about Florida: when you look closely at the county by county vote in Florida, rural/exurban areas were much less important to Bush’s victory there than generally supposed.
Specifically, my analysis finds that Bush received a net gain of 308,000 votes from metro Florida outside the exurbs this year and just an 82,000 net vote gain from exurban and rural counties. Indeed, about half his net vote gain can be accounted for by looking only at counties in medium-sized metropolitan areas like Jacksonville, Pensacola and Sarasota.
The more I look at the data, both nationally and in states like Florida, Ohio and ohers, the more I’m convinced these medium-sized metro areas are critically important to Democrats’ electoral chances. I realize it’s more fashionable for Democrats to weep and wail and gnash their teeth about rural/exurban areas. But these medium-sized metros deserve more study and strategic thought than they have received so far–much more.

Journalism 101 professors should require their students to read an excellent article in the Sunday Washington Post, “The Anatomy of Myth: How did one exit poll answer become the story of how Bush won?”. The author, Dick Meyer, editorial director of CBSNews.com, shreds the argument that concern about declining ‘moral values’ was the pivotal determinant of the 2004 presidential election. Meyer notes that responses to “a single dodgy exit poll question” ranking ‘moral values’ as the most important priority for 22% of exit poll respondents over economy/jobs (20%), terrorism (19%) and Iraq (15%) became the basis for a media bandwagon based on lazy reporting and thin suppositions about the meaning of the term.
Meyer likens the term to a “Rorschach test” holding a multitude of meanings for different people, “not a discrete, clear political issue to be set next to taxes or terrorism.” Reporters seized on the exit poll responses to the catch-all question as proof that voters were reacting to same-sex marriage, late-term abortion and other cultural concerns of the religious right. Yet to many voters, moral issues include the war in Iraq, personal integrity of the candidates, patriotism or helping the poor. Had the term “moral values” been broken down into such categories in the poll, or had terrorism and Iraq been combined, the ranking would likely have been quite different. As Meyer concludes “the moral values doctrine has morphed from a simple poll finding to a grand explanatory theory to gospel truth. This contaminated strain of punditry needs to be eradicated before it spreads further.”