One one level, Thad Cochran’s success in attracting enough African-American “crossover” votes to subdue Chris McDaniel in Mississippi’s GOP SEN runoff was a strange and unexpected triumph for Republican “outreach” to minority voters. But the conservative backlash to this tactic, in MS and beyond, could do that cause a lot more damage in the long run, as I noted at Washington Monthly today:

A lot of us spent a good part of yesterday wondering what the basis might be of some Chris McDaniel challenge to the results in Mississippi on Tuesday night. Would Team McDaniel stick to investigating clear and provable violations of state law (e.g., Democratic primary voters being allowed to participate in the GOP runoff), or essentially try to criminalize “crossover” voting?
The answer is “both,” it appears, per comments McDaniel made last night on Mark Levin’s radio show:

We haven’t conceded and we’re not going to concede right now. We’re going to investigate.
Naturally sometimes it’s difficult to contest an election, obviously, but we do know that 35,000 Democrats crossed over. And we know many of those Democrats did vote in the Democratic primary just three weeks ago which makes it illegal.
We likewise know that we have a statute, a law in our state that says you cannot participate in a primary unless you intend to support that candidate. And we know good and well that these 35,000 democrats have no intention to do that. They’ll be voting for Travis Childers in November. We know that. They know that. And so that makes their actions illegal.
So we’re going to be fighting this.

Aside from the fact that this “intent to support” statute McDaniel cites is blatantly unenforceable and unconstitutional, I hope he understands that any inquiry into “crossover” voting in a state like Mississippi is going to be strictly about race. How do we know these are “crossover” voters, since there’s no party registration? Because they are African-Americans! Can’t have African-Americans voting in our White Primary, can we?

The “Republican Establishment” folk who are congratulating each other for engineering Cochran’s upset win should probably wake up and spend some time muzzling (or better yet, though they wouldn’t dare contradicting) McDaniel. Having Republicans debating whether or not they should be willing to accept minority votes is a long-term disaster. Reminding the world they’re now the segregated White Man’s Party of Mississippi isn’t the best idea, either.

Abby Smith reports at The Hill that “Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg said Wednesday that unmarried women are the “absolute centerpiece” of the 2014 midterm elections for his party…Greenberg joined Women’s Voices Women’s Vote founder Page Gardner on a press call with reporters to release the results of a new national survey, which found that, with the right messaging, Democrats could pick up votes from the rising American electorate and shift the vote in their favor from a -1 to a +3 margin….According to the Democracy Corps/Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund survey, the rising American electorate responds best to an empathetic “in your shoes” messaging framework. And when unmarried women are exposed to this messaging, they shift from +17 to +31 Democratic margin and increase their turnout by 10 percent. In a congressional race that is neck-in-neck, Greenberg said that messaging could make all the difference for Democrats…His survey found that unmarried women voters respond positively to an economic agenda that caters to their interests, focusing on policies that help working mothers, secure equal pay, raise the minimum wage and make college more affordable.”
From Daniel Kreps’s post on the return of Rock the Vote at Rolling Stone: “Rock the Vote will once again be a merging point of music, pop culture, politics and technology as they strive to reach their goal for the midterm elections: Registering 1.5 million people — including 400,000 young people and 200,000 Latinos — to vote. RTV will also seek to kickstart an advocacy campaign to fight back against punitive laws that have made access to polling more difficult for certain citizens, focusing their efforts on states where voting rights are threatened like Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Georgia, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin.” Here’s RTV’s new website, with a gateway link to voter registration forms for the entire nation.
Deficit spending to boost employment is an economic policy of proven effectiveness. But it remains politically problematic. Ruy Teixeira observes in Danny Vinik’s TNR article “Hillary Clinton’s Biggest Vulnerability: Her Economic Agenda“: “The public is not Keynesians or anything close to it. They don’t understand the relationship between spending, debt and growth. And, therefore, it’s the hardest sell.”
At Reuters Opinion Janal S.Nelson writes, “Congress must act swiftly to move the Voting Rights Amendment Act forward with a hearing in the House and, ultimately, a vote for its passage…The amendment is designed to restore crucial elements of the landmark act and strengthen its safeguards against racial and language discrimination in voting. It updates the formula for identifying jurisdictions that must receive federal oversight by relying on voting violations within the past 15 years as a trigger. It demands crucial advance notice and disclosure of any changes in election law nationwide, increases deployment of federal observers and expands Washington’s ability to suspend potentially discriminatory state laws pending litigation.”
Chris McDaniel may be the new poster boy for sour grapes. But he isn’t the only Republican still marinating in bile over his upset loss to Sen. Thad Cochran, as Emily Arrowood and Olivia Kittel report in their Media Matters roundup of recent comments by wingnut talking heads.
Michael Tomasky makes the case that Dems who were rooting for McDaniel as an easier Republican to defeat in the general election should be glad Cochran won.
Crystal Ball’s Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley add credence to the argument that Black voters “saved Cochran’s bacon.”: “Cochran’s victory margin of about 6,400 votes may well have been provided by African Americans, who were recruited by Cochran’s campaign and who realized the incumbent senator was a better choice for their interests than McDaniel. There was a relatively strong positive correlation of r = .64 between the black population percentage of Mississippi counties and turnout change.”
This New York Times editorial makes an excellent point: Thad Cochran should show his gratitude to African American voters by supporting legislation to restore the Voting Rights Act.
Yes Sarah, a third party is a swell idea. Call it ‘The Bitter Tea Party.’

The following article is cross-posted from a DCorps e-blast:
These 12 battleground U.S. Senate races take place in a country deeply discontented with the state of the country, all national leaders, and political parties. With 10 of 12 seats held by Democrats but won by Romney by 8 points in 2012, this will be a competitive year to be sure. Nevertheless, Democratic incumbents and challengers are out-performing Obama in these states, while Democratic intensity matches that of Republicans, and the U.S. Senate vote numbers suggest the parties could well split these seats, putting the Senate at close to 50 for either party.
This survey is the first survey conducted in the U.S. Senate battleground by Democracy Corps and Resurgent Republic for National Public Radio.
The Republican Senate candidates have a 3-point advantage, 46 to 43 percent in the Senate generic ballot – still within the margin of error, but perhaps an edge. But Romney carried these states by 8 points, so the Democratic candidates are running better than Obama despite massive advertising campaigns to link them to Obama and to attack them for ‘Obamacare.’ That is not a bad result and the question of control is far from settled.
But U.S. Senate races usually break toward one of the parties: the President’s standing here makes a Republican break more likely, while the standing of the Republican Party and Republicans in Congress could produce a break the other way.
Democratic and Republican partisans are equally intent on voting in the battleground. The national pattern of reduced voter enthusiasm and turnout prospects, particularly among Democratic base voters, may be offset in the Senate battleground where stakes are high and campaigning is intense.
President Obama is weak in these states, particularly on the economy: 38 percent approve of his performance, falling to 33 percent among Independents. Approval of Obama’s performance on the economy is slightly lower and Republicans have a 10 point advantage over Democrats on handling the economy.
But the Republican Party is also very weak and is a serious liability even in these Red states. In these Romney states, voters have more favorable views of Senate Democrats and its leadership than they do of Senate Republicans and Republican leadership in the House. While just a third (32 percent) approve of the way Democrats are handling their job in the Senate, just a quarter (25 percent) approve of the way Republicans are handling their job in charge of the House – the leaders defining Congress and public perception of Washington gridlock.
Intense doubts about House Republicans and GOP governors could play a role. Many of the Republican candidates have come out of the House of Representatives or played a big role in Republican-controlled states where voters have turned on the governors. Indeed, President Obama’s approval is higher than Jindal’s in Louisiana.
Fate of the middle class is stronger ground than the economy. Republicans have an advantage on the economy–but critically not on the middle class. The parties are at parity in this battleground on who would do best for the middle class.
What Obamacare liability? The Republicans have just a 3-point edge on health care in this Republican battleground, and just 46 percent oppose the law because it is big government. Every minute Republicans spend on repealing the Affordable Care Act is a minute they are not addressing the economy.
Listen to the story on NPR

The following article By Dennis Kelleher, Better Markets and Anna Greenberg is cross-posted from the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research web pages:
Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research.
Pundits have blamed Eric Cantor’s shocking upset in the Virginia 7th District Republican primary on many things, from immigration, to the broader alienation of “establishment” Republicans from their activist, Tea Party base, to Cantor’s poor performance minding his own district. But challenger David Brat put the coddling of big banks and Wall Street at the center of his campaign. For example, in a radio interview last month, Brat said:
“The crooks up on Wall Street and some of the big banks — I’m pro-business, I’m just talking about the crooks — they didn’t go to jail, they are on Eric’s Rolodex.”
In his campaign, Brat emphasized corruption, bailouts and Wall Street as much as immigration and other issues.
Republican primary voters in the Richmond suburbs are in good company with voters across the country fed up with Wall Street and frustrated with Washington’s complicity in protecting Wall Street’s too-big-to-fail bankers and their high risk gambling and egregious law breaking. Recent research, including a new national survey of 1,000 likely voters, makes it clear that voters not only distrust Wall Street and big banks, but want strong, serious reform. Voters believe financial markets are “rigged for insiders,” and “hurt everyday Americans.”
A strong, bipartisan majority of likely 2014 voters support stricter federal regulations on the way banks and other financial institutions conduct their business. Voters want accountability and do not want Wall Street pretending to police themselves: they want real cops back on the Wall Street beat enforcing the law.
Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, on behalf of Better Markets, conducted a national survey of 1,000 likely 2014 voters exploring reactions to financial actors, support for financial reform and voters’ understanding of how Wall Street impacts the economy and American people. This survey was informed by two national, online focus groups and a linguistic analysis on the discourse of financial reform.
Key Findings:
Voters still regard Wall Street and big banks as “bad actors.” A 64 percent majority believes “the stock market is rigged for insiders and people who know how to manipulate the system.” Another 55 percent majority believes “Wall Street and big banks hurt everyday Americans by pouring money into ‘get-rich-quick’ schemes rather than real businesses and investments.” Therefore, not surprisingly, most financial institutions generate huge negatives among voters.
Figure 1: Favorability of Financial Actors

A 60 percent majority favors “stricter regulation on the way banks and other financial institutions conduct their business,” and just 28 percent oppose. Strong supporters outnumber strong opponents by a 35 to 15 percent margin. These findings are consistent with other public data on this issue. Moreover, a battery of pro-reform messages moves support for reform from 60 percent favor to 72 percent and strong support jumps from 35 percent to 46 percent.
Figure 2: Support for Stricter Regulations on Financial Institutions

Support for stricter regulations inspires bipartisan support. Tea Party Republicans in the 7th District are not alone in wanting Washington to protect them from Wall Street. Stricter regulations generate large and wide partisan support, including among Democrats (74 percent favor, 17 percent oppose) and Independents (56 percent favor, 32 percent oppose), as well as a comfortable plurality of all Republicans (46 percent favor, 39 percent oppose). Most notably, voters who own stocks are slightly more likely to support stricter regulation than voters overall (63 percent favor, 27 percent oppose).
Voters see and condemn existing government efforts to regulate financial markets as a failure. An 89 percent majority of voters rate the federal government’s work here as “only fair” or “poor.” In the focus group, voters described the government as complicit in Wall Street abuse. As one participant noted, “the government is actually in bed with the banks.”
There is urgency to this issue. Voters believe another crash is likely and that regulation can help prevent another disaster. An 83 percent majority of voters believe another crash is likely within the next 10 years, and 43 percent very likely. Another 55 percent, however, agree “Stronger rules on Wall Street and big financial institutions by the federal government will help prevent another financial collapse.”
Conclusion:
Cantor lost in no small measure because he forgot that voters want their own interests represented. Voters do not want politicians putting the interests of K Street lobbyists and Wall Street ahead of their interests. This view is shared by voters throughout the country. This research suggests that ignoring voters’ anger with Wall Street–and its protectors in Washington–comes at incumbents’ own peril.

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Pundits are always very quick to come up with the key reason that something surprising (something that none of them predicted) happened politically. Because these explanations are usually off the top of their heads prognostications, backed up by no actual statistics or maybe one random fact someone pulled out of an exit poll, they quite frequently have little or no truth to them.
The Eric Cantor upset has been a field day for the random, off-the-top-of-their-head pundit theories. We heard that the shocking defeat was caused by rural voters turning on Cantor, but that was quickly debunked. We heard that the problem was redistricting, but the district really is very similar to the last district he had, and he’s already had one cycle in the new district for the few new voters there are to get used to him. We heard that the surprise might be due to anti-Semitism, but the rural numbers linked to above and the fact that Cantor has been elected for many years in essentially the same district, plus that little point that there is absolutely no evidence for this idea, tend to undercut that thesis. Then there is the idea that Democrats strategically going to the polls to kick Cantor out, but again those little things called statistics undercut this theory.
Finally, of course, there is the theory that pundits and right wingers immediately jumped on: It was all about the immigration issue, since the tea party guy running against Cantor is even more virulently anti-immigrant in his rhetoric than Cantor had been. Again, not a shred of actual proof on this theory, but that didn’t keep the nativists and pundits from jumping all over that one. Fortunately, there are smart people like David Jarman who know how to actually look at voting statistics to figure out whether there is anything to all to many of these theories. His summary answer: None of them hold water.
The fact is that Eric Cantor was an arrogant man. He was far more interested in running for speaker than in looking after folks back home. The taking care of your constituents thing is politics 101, and he flunked that test dramatically. But there is something closely related to the taking care of your constituents thing that is going on here, and all you have strong to do is to look at the rhetoric of his opponent to figure it out. Check out this important article from Lee Fang,and look at Brat’s (Cantor’s opponent) language on the campaign trail. Quotes from Brat from Fang’s article:
“All of the investment banks, up in New York and D.C., they should have gone to jail.”
“Eric Cantor and the Republican leadership do not know what a free market is at all, and the clearest evidence of that is the financial crisis … When I say free markets, I mean no favoritism to K Street lobbyists.”
“Eric is running on Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable principles,” Brat told a town hall audience, later clarifying that he meant the US Chamber of Commerce, the largest lobbying trade group in the country. He also called out the American Chemistry Council for funding ads in his race with Cantor, telling a radio host that his opponent had asked his “crony capitalist friends to run more ads.” Brat repeats his mantra: “I’m not against business. I’m against big business in bed with big government.”
Now obviously, Dave Brat is no progressive populist. He is a virulently anti-immigrant, far-right conservative on a great many issues, and that helped him with the anti-establishment tea party crowd that voted in force in Virginia’s Republican primary. But Brat ran his campaign much more on these populist economic outsider themes than on anything else, and given that Cantor came across to his district as the ultimate insider, as caring more about K Street and special interest fundraising than about the folks back home, Brat’s message was the perfect formula to pull off the shocking upset.
Voters all over this country — left, right, and middle — are sick and tired of the way Washington works. They don’t like wealthy, powerful, special interest lobbyists swinging sweetheart insider deals. With all the big money paying for sleazy attack ads by innocuously named groups who don’t disclose their donors, Democrats would be well-served by taking K St and the Koch brothers on. The best way to do this is to be specific — tell voters, for example, who the Koch brothers are and why they are spending so much money running these sleazy ads. This terrific ad by Begich’s campaign in Alaska helped Begich enormously in his tough race for re-election. Democrats can win answering the why question: Why are these wealthy special interests spending so much money on ads attacking them? If voters understand what is going on and who is paying for these ads, they can win the message wars in spite of all the money being spent against them.
Eric Cantor’s upset shows that big money doesn’t always win, and that K St-bashing populism wins elections. Let’s hope that Democrats across the country take that to heart and fight back against the big money flooding their races.

This post from Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, is the seventh contribution to the joint American Prospect/Democratic Strategist forum, Progressive Perspectives on the Future of the New Deal/Great Society Entitlement Programs. It is cross-posted from the Prospect.
Having rolled the rock of entitlement reform up Mt. Sisyphus more than a few times over the last decade or so, I know it’s important to begin with the obligatories. I prefer to define the challenge as “modernizing social insurance” but in truth such semantic fine-tuning doesn’t make the politics of reform easier. Any suggestion that Medicare and Social Security need fixing touches the rawest of liberal nerves. It’s seen as sacrilege – literally, as Vice President Biden might say — by votaries of the programmatic status quo. This quasi-religious fervor has never made much sense to me, given the utterly pragmatic and experimental spirit in which FDR conceived Social Security. Nonetheless, let me say for the record that I’m reasonably fond of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and, far from compassing their destruction, would like to see them reformed for the benefit of my children and theirs.
So what’s the problem? Leaving aside some lesser flaws and anachronisms – including the fact that the basic Social Security benefit isn’t generous enough — the big entitlement programs present us with two large dilemmas. As currently structured, they squeeze out public investment and they create generational inequity. This post focuses on the former, economic problem, because it tends to get less attention than the distributional problem. Since the government’s resources are always going to be finite, it’s important that it strike a sensible balance between spending that supports present consumption and public investment that makes Americans more productive and competitive down the road. Today the balance is badly out of whack.
Regardless of where they stand on entitlement reform, most progressives agree that jobs and economic growth should take precedence over austerity. What I think many are missing is the link between constraining the growth of social insurance costs and a stronger economy. America is stuck in a slow growth trap. Since 2000, the economy has averaged less than 1.8% GDP growth a year, its worst performance since before World War II era. The slowdown in job and GDP growth, as well as middle class wage stagnation, began before the recession-cum-financial crisis of 2007-2008.
The basic problem, in other words, is structural. Due mainly to lagging business investment and innovation, eroding competitiveness, and skill shortages, our economy has lost its productive mojo. Americans have grown accustomed to consuming more than they produce, and borrowing to make up the difference. Federal spending priorities have reinforced this consumption bias. Since the 1960s, Washington has been channeling an ever-rising proportion of the revenues it raises into consumption, especially of health and retirement benefits, while the portion of the budget devoted to economic and social investment has shrunk.
Feeding this dynamic is the inexorable growth of automatic, formula-driven spending on older Americans. Such “mandatory” spending now accounts for 60% of the nation’s budget. Meanwhile, discretionary spending (excluding defense), has fallen to just 17 percent. (In 1962, the ratio was roughly reversed: Discretionary spending (including defense) 67% percent of federal spending, mandatory spending 26%.) With most of federal spending on autopilot, the domain of democratic deliberation, where our elected representatives debate the nation’s needs, decide which priorities are worth funding and figure out how to pay for them, keeps shrinking. Lawmakers oversee a dwindling portion of the nation’s income and outgo, most of which already has been pre-committed to the big entitlement programs by politicians who are long dead.
I can think of many things to call this “crowding out” phenomenon, but progressive is not one of them. After all, domestic spending supports priorities liberals once fought and bled for. These include common goods like transport, water, and other vital infrastructure that supports economic growth; our national commitment to science and technology, perhaps our prime source of comparative advantage in global competition; and, the public education and training institutions that make “equal opportunity” more than a hollow slogan. Also being starved are progressive programs to help people lift themselves out of poverty, curb hunger, and expand early learning opportunities for families that can’t afford costly day care, not to mention environmental protection, public health and law enforcement.
Medicare and Social Security, which alone account for more than 37% of federal spending, are on track to absorb (along with interest on the debt) almost every dollar of revenue Washington collects over the next several decades. Meanwhile, the Urban Institute estimates that federal spending on children will decline about 20 percent over the next decade. This growing disparity seems perverse at a time when poverty rates are higher for children than seniors (18 versus 14.8 percent in 2012, as measured by the Supplemental Poverty Measure). From the standpoint of investing in children and families, uncontrolled mandatory spending on seniors is like a fiscal version of the Doomsday Machine from Dr. Strangelove.
The fiscal skirmishing in Washington has aggravated this systematic whittling down of public investment. Since 2011, the Obama administration and Congressional Republicans have agreed to nearly $4 trillion in debt reduction over the next decade. Of the $2.7 trillion in savings thus far (excluding the effects of the odious “sequester” in future years), $1.55 trillion has come from spending cuts, $700 billion in new revenues from the fiscal cliff deal, and about $450 billion in interest savings. In other words, for every dollar in new revenue, lawmakers have cut spending by $2, and almost all of that has come out of the hide of domestic spending.
This is the inevitable consequence of twin ideological obduracies – the GOP’s anti-tax fanaticism and Democrats’ denial of the need to align social insurance with the inescapable reality of an aging society. And it suits conservatives just fine. Before the Murray -Ryan budget deal softened the sequester’s bite (for two years anyway) The Wall Street Journal‘s Stephen Moore chortled over the sequester’s “success:”

The sequester is squeezing the very programs liberals care most about – including the National Endowment for the Arts, green-energy subsidies, the Environmental Protection Agency and National Public Radio. Outside Washington, the sequester is forcing a fiscal retrenchment for such liberal special-interest groups as Planned Parenthood and the National Council of La Raza, which have growth dependent on government largess.

One reason enough Republicans voted to partially suspend the sequester is that it will also eviscerate defense spending. There was a time when the GOP identified itself as the part of national strength and “resolve” expressed through more military spending. Today Tea Party types and libertarians apparently feel more threatened by the federal government than by America’s enemies.
Of course, progressives could avoid a zero-sum conflict between entitlements and domestic programs by borrowing more money or hiking taxes. Unfortunately, either expedient collides with economic and political reality. More borrowing would propel the national debt to 100 percent of GDP and beyond, driving up interest and shrinking the “fiscal reserve” we’ll need to combat future downturns. Given the halting recovery, big tax hikes now are economically dumb as well as politically infeasible. Many liberals have convinced themselves that the entitlements can be made solvent as the boomers surge into retirement simply by raising the payroll tax. This is probably the least progressive “solution” imaginable. By making labor more expensive, it would discourage employers from hiring workers, especially young and low-skilled ones. And it would transfer more wealth from young workers to retirees.
What progressives ought to do instead is strike a more equitable balance between mandatory and domestic spending (if not eliminate the distinction altogether by bringing entitlements on budget). Yet when President Obama dared to endorse “chained CPI,” a more accurate inflation measure that would reduce cost-of-living adjustments for Medicare and Social Security recipients, he was instantly flamed by lefty activists. Declared Stephanie Taylor of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee:

You can’t call yourself a Democrat and support Social Security benefit cuts. The president is proposing to steal thousands of dollars from grandparents and veterans by cutting cost-of-living adjustments, and any congressional Democrat who votes for such a plan should be ready for a primary challenge.

Will Democrats allow themselves to be intimidated by such reactionary liberalism, as Republicans now cower before Grover Norquist and the Club for Growth? If progressivism means anything, surely it’s a commitment to adapting old policies and programs to new economic and social realities. As custodians of America’s venerable social insurance programs, progressives are responsible for ensuring they work for future generations as well as for past ones. Today that means making the Big Three solvent amid an unprecedented demographic bulge; rebalancing the intergenerational compact to avoid putting unjust financial burdens on the young; and shifting public resources from consumption – especially by well-off retirees – to investments aimed at accelerating growth and social mobility.

Sarah Kliff’s Wonkblog post “Don’t believe the hype: Health insurers think Obamacare is going to be fine” provides a welcome antidote from industry experts to the GOP hysteria.
HuffPo’s Jason Linkins illuminates Christie’s ‘Shadow Primary’ problem with this quote from Matthew Yglesias: “…in order to win, any candidate needs to first gain the allegiance (or at least nonhostility) of a wide range of elites outside his immediate political circle. House members from South Carolina. State senators from Iowa. Anti-abortion activists in New Hampshire. Talk radio hosts. Fox News executives. Donors. Lobbyists. State-level Chamber of Commerce chiefs. These people are paying attention right now, and they’re thinking about who they want to back and who they want to bandwagon against. And there’s just no way this bridge thing is making any of those people more likely to support Christie than they were six months ago. Republican elites are mostly looking to find a candidate who is both conservative, effective, and electable and this makes him look less electable and less effective without making him look more conservative…” Linkins adds, “When you consider that Christie is likely to draw competitors like Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan and Scott Walker, as opposed to Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain, there’s no reason for party elites to be desperate or settle early.”
WaPo’s Paul Kane discusses prospects for a Blue Dog resurrection.
But at The Hill, Mario Trujillo’s “Blue Dogs recruit four vulnerable Dems” notes that “All the new members won their last elections with less than 55 percent of the vote. The National Republican Congressional Committee has singled out both Barber and Rahall, who represent red-leaning districts that went to Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election.” However, “Democrats have also looked to protect the swing districts held by the new Blue Dog members. All but Rahall have been named to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Frontline Program, which protects vulnerable incumbents.”
In an NYRB cover story, Gary Wills concludes that Joe Scarborough’s plan to save the GOP from itself has a few major blind spots: “Scarborough’s silly picture of American politics leaves out most of the things that matter–including (but not restricted to) race, religion, and money. And the greatest of these is money.”
Politico’s Tal Kopan, Politico and Gallup headline writers have what strikes me as a textbook example of biased poll interpretation for government-bashing. Here’s her lede: “Americans continue to identify government itself as the biggest problem facing the nation in a new poll, although the numbers have come down since the end of the government shutdown…Asked to name the most important problem facing the country today, 21 percent of those surveyed in a Gallup poll out Wednesday cited government and politicians.” But the exact wording of the choice that received a 21 percent response to Gallup’s question was “Dissatisfaction with government/Congress/politicians/poor leadership/corruption/abuse/power.” Some of the blame, however, should be shared with the ejits who crafted the response choice, which is so broad as to make the poll worthless.
Politico’s Manu Raju and Carrie Budoff Brown have a more nuanced analysis of “Obama’s Plan to Save the Senate.”
E.J. Dionne, Jr.’s profile of Rep. George Miller, “The Lost Art of Tough Liberalism” merits a thoughtful read by m.c.’s and their staffers and offers an interesting suggestion: “Congress could use more liberals who can brawl and negotiate at the same time. Perhaps Miller will now open a school for progressive legislators. He could name it after Ted Kennedy.”
Can the Koch brothers buy a U.S. Senate seat for the Republicans in N.C.? Kris Kromm discusses the disturbing possibilities in his Facing South post “Hagan, Southern lawmakers targeted in Obamacare attack ads.”

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of ‘Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,’ is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Yesterday’s revelation of the Governor’s Office was directly involved shutting down George Washington Bridge access lanes to Fort Lee, N.J., is not just another run-of-the-mill political problem for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
It could be fatal to Christie’s presidential ambitions. There are four reasons to believe that the ham-handed attempt to punish Ft Lee’s mayor by causing traffic gridlock in his city may make his presidential ambitions to sink faster than a rock in the Hudson River.
Reason #1: The episode turns his trademark no-nonsense forcefulness from a refreshing positive into self-serving bullying — a disgusting negative.
In politics, every positive trait has its evil twin. Voters want leaders who are on their side, but they don’t want demagogues that pander to their interests.
It’s a good thing in politics to be passionately committed to strongly-held beliefs. It’s not a good thing to be an uncompromising ideologue.
Voters want their leaders to be self confident and forceful. They don’t want leaders to be arrogant bullies.
That’s why in politics if you’re trying to convince persuadable voters that they shouldn’t support your opponent, it’s often best to take on their strongest positive traits and morph them into their negative first cousins. You attack their strength by turning their into their negative incarnations.
One of the reasons why this approach often works is that people are already predisposed to believe that the politician in question is prone to the qualities and behaviors in question that could have either a positive or a negative side.
Once Christie sold the public on the notion that he is a no-nonsense, straight-talking guy who doesn’t suffer fools lightly, tells it like it is and gets things done — it’s not hard to believe he is also the kind of a guy who will act like a bully to get what he wants.
And of course this episode conjures up all of the worst stereotypes about New Jersey politics that Christie already needed to overcome in places like Iowa and Wisconsin. “Bridgegate” and its colorful cast of characters could be a sequel to the current box office hit, American Hustle.
People in the Midwest and South like straight talk, but they also like “nice” and civil. Christie’s brash “straight-talk” was going to wear thin pretty quickly outside the Northeast even before the “bridgegate.” Now the negative side of his personal style will be the first thing they see.
Reason #2: “Bridgegate” will be the first impression that many ordinary voters get of Chris Christie.
Outside of New Jersey and the New York media market, most of the swing voters who will decide a general election — and many Republican primary voters — have only a vague knowledge of Christie. Normal people, after all, think about politics five minutes a week. The first priority of a political figure is to break through the clutter — to get on the radar scope — to get noticed.
But like your mother told you, you only have one chance to make a good first impression. This is a bad first impression.
Voters cast their ballots based on what they know. For example, if all you know is that you share the candidate’s ethnic name, you are often more likely to support him — since he’s “like you.” But if they learn more, the importance of the name begins to shrink.
“Bridgegate” is a big, interesting, symbolically powerful story that will break through with voters who know very little about Christie. For many voters, it will be their first real impression and he will come to be defined by it. Political communication is all about symbols. This will become a symbol for Christie — a story that describes him for voters who don’t know anything else about him.
“Oh yeah, he’s they guy who caused a three-day traffic jam to punish a mayor that wouldn’t support him, right? What a piece of work.”
Reason #3: So much for the guy who could, as the New York Times said, “transcend partisan rancor and petty politics in the service of the public good.”
You don’t get much more partisan or much more petty than inconveniencing and threatening the public safety of thousands of ordinary citizens in order to punish a Democratic mayor who failed to endorse your re-election for governor. When one unidentified aide said he felt sorry for the children on school buses who were late to school because of the intentional traffic jam, Christi’s friend and Port Authority official David Wildstein replied that they were the kids of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Buono’s supporters. Yuck.
Reason #4: The momentum and inevitability of Christie’s march to the GOP nomination has evaporated.
One of the big things Christie had going for him was the bandwagon. He seemed inevitable, so Republican donors, county chairmen and activists were signing on. No longer.
Of course part of that inevitability was built upon the premise that he could attract lots of persuadable voters and disaffected Democrats with his straight talking, non-partisan image. That is gone too. His attempts to revive that narrative will always be stalked by the specter of the bridge incident that proves it to be a work of fiction.
When he lost re-election many years ago, former Texas Agricultural Commissioner and now progressive radio talk show host and writer Jim Hightower said: “One day you’re a peacock and the next day you’re a feather duster.”
Christie may not be a feather duster quite yet, but the odds have increased that his oversized presence in American politics will appear in history books as little more than a small footnote.

It’s early yet. But WaPo’s Chris Cilliizza asks “If Hillary Rodham Clinton passes in 2016, which Democrats run?” He calls out the second tier, Biden, Cuomo, O’Malley, Warren and some others, but overlooks van Hollen, McCaskill, Durbin and some other short-listers.
Cillizza also flags Stuart Rotherberg’s Roll Call post, “The Most Important Election of 2014,” which references Mitch McConnell’s struggle to survive the GOP senate primary in KY. Democratic candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes has to be wondering if the McCaskill strategy of providing support for )’Connell’s primary opponent could prove worthwhile.
At the Center for American Progress web pages, Eric Alterman’s “Think Again: 10 Years of False Equivalence and Still Going Strong” observes “Over and over, no matter what the issue–no matter how outlandish, illogical, or simply untrue the conservative argument has been–journalists create a sense of false equivalence between positions that rest on data and logic and those that don’t. To quote Cenk Uygur, “If CNN did sports reporting, every game would be a tie.”
Steven Elbow reports at The Capital Times that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker appears vulnerable in 2014, according tot he latest poll by Wisconsin Public Radio and St. Norbert College. “Asked whether Walker deserved reelection were the gubernatorial election held today, 49 percent of respondents said no, while 46 percent said yes. Six percent were unsure.”
At Sabato’s Crystal Ball Larry J. Sabato and Geoffrey Skelley are calling it “A Democratic Tide in Virginia.” and the down-ballot fallout could be considerable.
Matt Pommer reports at GazetteXtra: “In a new book, Federal Judge Richard Posner said he made a mistake when he voted to uphold an Indiana law requiring a photo ID or other accepted means of identification in order to cast a ballot. Posner, who was appointed by President Reagan in 1981 and sits on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, is a widely respected jurist. His statements were stunning: Judges seldom admit they made a mistake.”
The bilious resignation of this charmer ought to make it a little harder for the more thoughtful conservatives in North Carolina to vote Republican, or admit they did.
At Salon.com, Jonathan Bernstein explains the “GOP’s Obamacare conspiracy: Sabotage from the inside.” And, boy, if Dems need a poster-boy for the GOP’s smug, mean-spirited vision of government, I nominate Rep. Joe Barton, depicted here in Evan Vucci’s caught-in-the-headlights AP photo.
In his post at The Nation, “Lou Reed’s Politics,” John Nichols, author of “The ‘S’ Word,” has a poignant epitaph for America’s great Punk rocker. Meanwhile, Dems can take heart from Reed’s lyric “You need a busload of faith to get by” in the video below, backed up by James Cotton and Buddy Guy.