For an interesting slant on what’s at stake for Democrats in the Wisconsin demonstrations, read Nate Silver’s “The Effects of Union Membership on Democratic Voting” at his Five Thirty Eight blog at The New York Times. Silver mines exit poll data and considers the propensity of union voters and households to vote for Democratic presidential and congressional candidates, noting:

In 2008, for instance, 59 percent of people in union households voted for Barack Obama, as compared to 51 percent of people in non-union households — a difference of 8 percentage points, according to the national exit poll. An extremely simple analysis might conclude, then, that the presence of the labor union vote boosted Mr. Obama’s share of the vote by slightly under 2 points overall: the 8 percentage point “bonus” that he received among union voters, multiplied by the 21 percent of the sample that was in labor union households, which is 1.68 percent.
The potential problem with this is that labor union voters are not distributed randomly throughout the population. Instead, virtually every other demographic variable — age, income, geography, occupation, gender, race, and so forth — is correlated in some with the likelihood of being in a union.
It could be, for instance, that because labor unions are concentrated in blue states, especially those in the Northeast and the industrial Midwest, the apparent influence of union membership on voting is really just a matter of geography. Alternatively, it could be that union members tend to vote Democratic despite having certain other characteristics that are ordinarily harmful to Democrats: for instance, union members tend to skew a bit older than the rest of the population and older voters normally tend to vote Republican. If so, the quick-and-dirty estimate from the exit poll might understate the effect of union membership on voting behavior.

Silver runs a logistic regression analysis on a large data sample from the National Annenberg Election Survey to help isolate the various factors. He presents a couple of bar charts which provide graphic depiction of the influence of 23 demographic variables on voters for president and congressional representatives, respectively. Silver calculates that members of unions and “union households” provided a 1.7 percent net advantage to Obama in ’08. However, if the National Exit Poll accurately reflected the union percentage of the turnout, Silver explains, the union member and household edge goes up to 2.4 percent. The figures were similar for congressional elections.
Further, in Silver’s analysis:

…Any votes that did not go to Mr. Obama instead went to Senator John McCain. Therefore, the impact on the margin between the two candidates was twice as large: not 2.4 points, but 4.8 points.
This is fairly meaningful. Of the last 10 elections in which the Democratic candidate won the popular vote (counting 2000, when Al Gore lost in the Electoral College), he did so by 4.8 points or fewer on 4 occasions (2000, 1976, 1960, 1948). So, while the impact of union voting is not gigantic in the abstract, it has the potential to sway quite a few presidential elections, since presidential elections are usually fairly close.

Silver then offers this interesting conclusion about the possible reverberations of Governor Walker’s and the GOP’s escalation of the political war against unions:

More tangibly, Republican efforts to decrease the influence of unions — while potentially worthwhile to their electoral prospects in the long-term — could contribute to a backlash in the near-term, making union members even more likely to vote Democratic and even more likely to turn out. If, for instance, the share of union households voting for Democrats was not 60 percent but closer to 70 percent, Republicans would have difficulty winning presidential elections for a couple of cycles until the number of union voters diminished further.

They could also energize union participation in campaign volunteer efforts. In the worst case scenario, Governor Walker may win his battle to eradicate most public employee unions. Even then, however, he may insure that it costs his party the presidency, and perhaps some other offices, in 2012.

This item by TDS Contributor Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from Huffington Post.
Yesterday, ABC News leaked a confidential report from investment bank Goldman Sachs warning that the spending cuts proposed by the Republicans to take effect this year would slow the economy by 2 percent of Gross Domestic Product. It also found that even compromise cuts of $25 billion would cut growth by 1 percent.
This report would not be surprising if it came from the progressive Economic Policy Institute (EPI) — or even someone at the Brookings Institution. Instead it comes from Wall Street — which is, after all — the principal base of the GOP.
Of course, their conclusions are not surprising. Virtually everyone with an ounce of economic literacy understands that cutting federal spending right now — just as the economy is clawing its way out of the worst recession in 60 years — will cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Right now, the government projects about a 2.7 percent rate of growth in the economy this year. So according to Goldman Sachs, if the Republicans have their way, most of that growth would be wiped out and we would be perilously close to a double-dip recession.
It’s time to stop treating proposals for immediate cuts in spending as “reasonable” policy alternatives. These proposals are dangerous to the economy and the welfare of everyday Americans.
You have to ask yourself, why would the Republicans propose a policy that even Wall Street thinks would be suicidal for the economy? Here are two options:
Reason 1: To Damage the Economy for Political Purposes
Mitch McConnell — the Republican Senate Leader — made it very clear at the end of last year that their major goal for this session of Congress is to defeat Barack Obama in 2012 and take over both Houses of Congress. And there is no question that the most important key to President Obama’s reelection is an improving economy.
The Republicans have absolutely no political interest in the creation of jobs in the American economy. The more unemployed Americans there are next November, the better for them. The more incomes have stagnated, the better for them.
As much as they blather on about how they will create jobs in the private sector by cutting government spending, even most Republicans understand that as you recover from a recession, that is simply not true.
As much as they wish it were not so, recessions are never caused by too much government spending, they are caused by an deficit of demand in the economy for goods and services that could be produced if the economy were operating at full capacity. The virtuous cycle that is behind economic growth requires that demand be jumpstarted by government — that enough people be put back to work with incomes to buy new products, that the private sector is enticed to invest and hire.
Right now private corporations are sitting on almost two trillion dollars in cash. The fact that they are not hiring or investing heavily in new plant and equipment has nothing to do with a need for more tax breaks or a shortage of capital. It has everything to do (as they will tell you) with the fact that they aren’t confident there will be enough demand in the economy — enough people with money to buy their products and services.
The time to cut deficits is not as you are recovering from a recession, but in periods of long-term economic growth — in the same way that President Clinton did during the 1990’s. Some people act like the deficit is an intractable problem of many generations. It was just over 10 years ago that we had no deficit. The way to deal with the deficit in the future is essentially the way it was eliminated in the 1990’s — tax increases on the wealthiest taxpayers and robust economic growth.
If you cut $61 billion of spending out of the economy over the next six months, you make the “demand deficit” larger, not smaller. In the process you destroy jobs. It’s that simple. Or as Republican Leader John Boehner might say, “So be it.”
Most thoughtful Republicans actually understand that. But one reason they continue to support these cuts is that by hurting the economy, it will benefit them politically.
Reason 2: Because the Inmates Have Taken Over the Asylum
A second reason that the Republicans are supporting these damaging policies is that the crazy relatives they used to try to keep out of sight have burst into the living room.
For many years, the interests of Wall Street and the biggest corporations have completely dominated the economic policymaking of the Republican Party. While this wing of the party pays appropriate tribute to “restraining spending” and “smaller government,” their ideology is not really about principle. They adhere to only one core ideological premise: They favor whatever is in their own economic interest.
Wall Street and big corporations are generally advocates of “smaller government” because they want to cut their taxes and reduce government regulations that prevent them from injuring consumers, fouling the air or engaging in the kind of reckless speculation that sunk the economy in 2008 and cost 8 million Americans their jobs.
But the Wall Street crowd is perfectly capable of abandoning any talk of “small government” when it comes to huge government contracts. And you don’t hear much about the deficit when it comes time to ask for tax breaks for the rich or oil company subsidies. Remember it was former Vice President Dick Cheney who famously said: “deficits don’t matter” — a view that he used to justify the fact that he and President Bush rolled up more deficits in their eight years than all of the previous presidents in American history combined.
However, there is another wing of the Republican Party that has traditionally talked a lot, but didn’t have a lot of power. They are the libertarian ideologues who actually believe that the economy would be better off with a tiny government. This gang mainly has appeal to the “non-Wall Street” base of the Republican Party — the Republican “foot soldiers.”
The “foot-soldier” wing has traditionally been concerned more with social issues and has been heavily populated with right-wing religious activists. But the Wall Street-induced economic disaster — and overall decline of the American middle class — has made this group a prime target for libertarian economic narratives that include a conviction that government spending is the root of all economic evil.
Libertarian economic nostrums infused the Tea Party Movement, and that helped propel many new Republicans into Congress last fall. Suddenly this wing of the party is no longer relegated to the role of campaign season political fodder. They actually have some power in the Republican Caucus.

Read more…

Few TDS readers will be shocked by Political Animal Steve Benen’s Washington Monthly post, “How the Media Covers health Care Rulings, Cont’d,” which shows that unfavorable court rulings on the legality of the Affordable Care Act are getting a lot more ink than favorable decisions. What is a little surprising, however, is that the rule of thumb holds true even for top liberal rags that supported the legislation in their editorials, including the Washington Post and the New York Times (nifty chart here).
Benen does a content analysis of the word counts, page placement and mentions in the news reports, showing a clear pattern of decisions upholding the ACA getting the short end of the stick for the Post, Times, Politico and the Associated Press. “…the discrepancy is overwhelming. In every instance, conservative rulings get more coverage, longer articles, and better placement,” says Benen.
Benen acknowledges that it may not be entirely because of political bias in each case, because conflict generally gets more coverage than agreement. He expresses some puzzlement about WaPo’s lack of any coverage for the most recent (Kessler) decision, especially since the courthouse is right around the corner from The Post’s offices.
All of the understandable reasons for the discrepancy acknowledged, however, Benen is right to fault the media outlets for failing to provide anything resembling balanced reporting on how legislation as important as the ACA is faring in the courts. While Politico may not be technically “MSM,” the huge word count discrepancy does raise a serious question about its coverage objectivity. The Times, Post and AP are critically-important, because so many editors of smaller papers read their coverage. If you had to give a letter grade to these four outlets for their coverage of the ACA rulings thus far, a “D” would be generous.
MSNBC, at least, ran a video clip of Sen. Richard Durbin, which could be instructive for reporters in putting the various rulings in a more balanced perspective. Here’s what Durbin said:

This law has been challenged in 16 different federal courts. Twelve judges have dismissed the challenges. Four have considered it. Two ruled that it was constitutional, two unconstitutional. So it isn’t exactly a wave of sentiment against the law.

And that was before the Kessler ruling. You can watch the video here, at the bottom of the page.

At first glance, this response to Senate Democratic offers to kill several billion dollars in earmarks seems bland and formulaic:

“It sounds like Senate Democrats are making progress towards our goal of cutting government spending to help the private sector create jobs,” said Michael Steel, spokesman for House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). “Hopefully, that means they will support the [bill] with spending cuts that we will pass next week, rather than shutting down the government.”

But stare at that first sentence for a minute, and ask yourself when, if ever, Republicans have made any sort of case that “cutting government spending” will “help the private sector create jobs.”
The government spending cuts at the state and local level that have been underway for two years now certainly haven’t done anything to “help the private sector create jobs.” Indeed, a new Commerce Department report suggests that state and local spending cuts had a lot to do with lowering GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2010 from a projected 3.2 percent to 2.8 percent.
But what’s remarkable is that the “spending cuts equal jobs” claims of Republicans rarely involve any sort of coherent argument for this counter-intuitive assertion. Yes, there is a point at which public debt could get to levels that boost interest rates and thus dry up capital for private-sector investment. But that’s not happening at all right now. Maybe some government regulations add to business costs (often for very good reasons, if you value the environment, safe food, or safe working conditions, or fear another financial meltdown), but Republicans have made no effort at all to correlate its budget cut proposals with specific examples of alleged excessive regulation. Occasionally you hear conservatives suggest that the entire social safety net, and particularly unemployment compensation, has somehow made it impossible for employers to find anyone to fill job openings. But no serious person believes, particularly at a time of 9% employment, that the private sector is suffering from a labor shortage.
Democrats need to challenge the “spending cuts equal jobs” nonsense whenever it appears. If the Republican agenda is actually to cut spending on programs it doesn’t like for various ideological reasons (e.g., family planning), or to reduce government as an end in itself, then its advocates should be forced to say so, instead of pretending they are pursuing some sort of strategy for economic recovery, jobs or long-term growth. As New York Times economic columnist David Leonhardt explained the other day, that cuts against everything we know about recessions.

This item by TDS Contributor and Progressive Policy Institute senior fellow and managing editor Lee Drutman is cross-posted from Progressive Fix.
Over at Third Way, Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck have published a new analysis about the role of moderates in American politics, “The Still-Vital Center: Moderates, Democrats, and the Renewal of American Politics.” It’s a keen paper, and I generally suspect they are right in their basic thesis: American government would work a whole lot better if there were more moderates running the place and that self-identified moderates have a more coherent worldview than many critics think.
Galston and Kamarck have pulled together some solid survey data on moderates, enough to conclude that, “moderates have mixed opinions about the overall stances of the two parties.” They’re more like Democrats on social issues, a little more like Republicans on foreign policy, and about split on economic policy.
But in general, moderates are more likely to support Democrats. Since 1980, the U.S. electorate has hovered around 20 percent liberal, 33 percent conservative, and 47 percent moderate. This means that Democrats need moderates more, since liberals make up only one-fifth of voters. Conservatives outnumber liberals by a substantial amount, so Republicans need fewer moderates to establish a winning coalition. This is the kind of simple math that liberals keep forgetting. Obama, like every Democrat before him, couldn’t have won without strong support among moderates.
But there’s also a puzzle here, and one that continues to frustrate centrists: If moderates consistently represent almost half of the electorate, why are there so few moderate representatives, and why is our politics so polarized?
Galston and Kamarck put a lot of emphasis on primary elections as a culprit, since they are generally low-turnout affairs, in which extremist candidates who are able to mobilize a small but loyal following can win. (Witness Christine O’Donnell winning Delaware’s Republican primary with 30,561 votes in a state of 900,000 people).
They advocate for open primaries so that voters from both parties can participate, which might, as they write, “open up the possibility that moderate and compromise might be rewarded rather than punished.” By all means! But already half of the states do this, and I’ve yet to see any systemic evidence that states with closed primaries turnout candidates any more extremist. Moreover, Alan Abramowitz has made the case that primary voters are actually not that different from general election across a number of ideological indicators.
But the ability of ideologues to triumph in primaries points to a larger problem: that moderate voters tend to be the least engaged and least educated part of the electorate. This extends as well to general campaign work, contributions, and even just talking to other people about politics.
In Abramowitz’s recent book The Disappearing Center (reviewed here by me), he shows that 56 percent of strong liberal or conservatives reported being politically engaged in 2004, as compared to 36 percent of those who “lean” liberal or conservative, and just 20 percent of those who say they are moderate, or of no ideology. And according to National Election Studies data, 43 percent of self-identified conservatives had a college degree, 32 percent of self-identified liberals had a college degree, but only 18 percent of moderates had a college degree. This is something centrists are going to have to grapple with.
In Abramowitz’s story, the plight of the moderates is mostly a story about less-educated, less-engaged citizens who don’t know or care enough about politics to pick a side. Were they to get wealthy and educated, like the partisans, they would presumably then know enough to pick one of the two distinct teams in American politics. But lacking the means or the will to pick a side, they call themselves moderate, feel disengaged and disenchanted by politics, and try to get on with the business of making a living.

Read more…

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In some presidential cycles, an incumbent’s reelection strategy doesn’t matter all that much. When the economy is very strong (1984), the incumbent wins big; when it’s very weak (1932), he loses even bigger. And when a party chooses a nominee seen as outside the mainstream (1964, 1972), it suffers a crushing defeat. It’s possible that one or more of these circumstances could prevail next year. The economy could over- or under-perform current projections; the Republicans could choose a nominee who’s too conservative or lacks credibility as a potential president. But it’s more likely that both the economy and the presidential nomination contest will yield results in the zone where strategic choices could prove decisive. In that context, two recent events are alarming, because they offer clues to what may well become President Obama’s reelection strategy.
The first was a Ron Brownstein interview with David Axelrod, who said that he saw Michael Bennet’s 2010 senatorial victory in Colorado as “particularly instructive.” As Brownstein noted, Bennet prevailed by mobilizing “enough minorities, young people, and socially liberal, well-educated white women to overcome a sharp turn toward the GOP among most of the other white voters in his state.” The second event was DNC chair Tim Kaine’s selection of educated, new economy Charlotte, North Carolina, as the site for the 2012 Democratic convention. In the process, he rejected three Midwestern finalists: St. Louis, Minneapolis, and, most notably, Cleveland.
Taken together, these clues suggest that the Obama’s 2012 campaign will focus more on the Democratic periphery–territory newly won in 2008–than on the heartland, where elections have been won and lost for the past half-century. This could turn out to be a mistake of epic proportions. Why? Because the United States looks a lot more like Ohio than like Colorado.
Here’s a snapshot from the exit polls in the 2008 election, versus the 2010 Ohio and Colorado Senate elections, broken down by education level:
4% of the 2008 national electorate had less than a high school education; that’s true of 1% of the 2010 Colorado electorate, and 3% of Ohio’s.
20% of the 2008 electorate had a high-school diploma but nothing else; the number dropped to 12% in Colorado and rose to 25% in Ohio.
31% of the 2008 electorate had “some college;” the numbers were 20% for Colorado and 32% for Ohio
28% of the 2008 electorate were college graduates; 39% of 2010 Colorado voters achieved that level, and only 24% of Ohio’s.
And the number for post-graduates is 17% for national 2008 voters, 28% for Colorado’s 2010 voters, and 15% for Ohio’s 2010 voters.
In other words, the 2010 Colorado electorate was a total outlier (67 percent with a B.A. or more), while Ohio was a near-microcosm of the national presidential electorate. Every Midwestern state for which exit polls are available looked pretty much like Ohio.
Now let’s look at the new Gallup state-by-state survey released on February 21. It shows that between 2008 and 2010, Democratic identifiers and leaners have declined as a share of the electorate in every state. The median loss was 6.1 percent. And every Midwestern state was at or above the median, raning from 6.1 percent in Minnesota to 9.2 percent in Wisconsin.
No wonder that Democrats lost 2010 Senate races in Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, Indiana, light blue Pennsylvania, and even dark blue Illinois, or that they lost gubernatorial races in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Small consolation that Democratic gubernatorial candidates managed to scratch out victories in Illinois (by 20,000 votes out of 3.5 million cast) and Minnesota (by 9,000 out of 2 million).
The Midwest is home to large numbers of white working-class voters, who accounted for nearly 40 percent of all voters nationwide in 2008. Obama has never done very well with this group, losing them by 2 to 1 against Hillary Clinton in the primaries and by 58 percent to 40 percent against McCain in the general election. And they turned against Democratic candidates in the vast majority of 2010 House and Senate races.
As a recent Washington Post/Kaiser/Harvard survey reveals, white working-class voters are even more disaffected today. They are gloomy about the present and think it will be a long time before the economy recovers. They fear that the job market of the future will have little use for workers with their level of education and skills. Only 14 percent say that the president’s economic policies are working, and a large majority think that his administration isn’t doing enough to look after their economic interests. Remarkably, when asked which party better understands the people’s economic priorities, they give the Republicans a 14-point edge. Moreover, white working-class voters have long tended toward conservatism on social issues, nationalism in foreign policy, and hawkishness on defense.

Read more…

In their monomaniacal obsession with budget cuts, Republicans and conservatives feel compelled to pretend that there is little public support for any increased federal spending. Recent polling, however, indicates that there is overwhelming public support for one particular category of big-ticket spending — modernizing America’s deteriorating infrastructure, according to Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages. Teixeira explains:

Eighty percent declared themselves in agreement with President Barack Obama’s State of the Union call for a major effort to rebuild and modernize America’s infrastructure in a new Hart Research/Public Opinion Strategies survey for the Rockefeller Foundation.

Nor will conservatives be very happy with the high levels of public support for progressive measures to facilitate infrastructure modernization indicated in the poll:

What’s more, the public backs a number of government actions to provide additional funding for infrastructure projects. These include a National Infrastructure Bank (60 percent support), issuing national transportation bonds (59 percent), and eliminating oil company subsidies (58 percent).

So much for the GOP myth that increases in government spending are opposed by the public across the board. Members of congress should not be intimidated by conservative fear-mongering about federal spending for needed modernization. As Teixeira puts it, “Infrastructure investment is important — and the public’s got your back.”

New York Times economic columnist David Leonhardt wrote a piece yesterday that every Democratic activist and elected official should read and then try to put into as plain a form of English as possible. Its title is plain enough: “Why Budget Cuts Don’t Bring Prosperity.” And its content wouldn’t have seemed that striking until very recently, when one of America’s two major political parties suddenly embraced the belief that government spending had somehow caused a private-sector housing and financial crisis and then a demand-side recession, and that radical cuts in government spending would put the economy on the right track via “business confidence” or some such magical term.
The simplest term for this delusion is probably Hooverism, since many Americans are aware, however dimly, that the Great Depression was significantly worsened by the policies of a president who was ideologically opposed to any major stimulation of the economy by the public sector. Now it’s true that many of today’s conservative activists deplore Hoover’s handling of the Depression, but only because they believe he was too active in trying to use government to revive consumer demand and prevent the collapse of public and private investment–or according to one recent conservative account, he was too “pro-labor” in his wage policies!
Here’s Leonhardt’s take, which is what virtually every politician in either party would have odded at until quite recently:

[N]o matter how morally satisfying austerity may be, it’s the wrong answer. Hoover’s austere instincts worsened the Depression. Roosevelt’s postelection reversal helped, but he also prolonged the Depression by raising taxes and cutting spending in 1937. Only the giant stimulus program known as World War II finally ended the Depression. When the private sector is hesitant to spend, the government has to — or no one will.

Leonhardt makes the crucial point that interest-rate signals simply aren’t supporting the common conservative argument that the public sector is gobbling up resources for pointless programs and redistribution that the private sectors needs to produce jobs:

In the early 1990s…government borrowing was pushing up interest rates. When the deficit began to fall, interest rates did too. Projects that had not previously been profitable for companies suddenly began to make sense. The resulting economic boom brought in more tax revenue and further reduced the deficit.
But this virtuous cycle can’t happen today. Interest rates are already very low. They’re low because the financial crisis and recession caused a huge drop in the private sector’s demand for loans. Even with all the government spending to fight the recession, overall demand for loans has remained historically low, the data shows.

The impact of budget cuts on the current economy seems to be lost on
Republicans who are constantly predicting gloom and doom over entitlement spending projections that extend for the next several decades. And again, the credit markets are showing no signs at this point of panicking over long-term deficits and debt, much less short-term deficits and debt. Indeed, the U.S. economy is actually doing better than those of countries who have adopted austerity policies. As Leonhardt observes:

For the sake of the economy, the best compromise in coming weeks would be one that trades short-term spending for medium- and long-term cuts. Beef up the cost-control measures in the health care overhaul and add new ones, like malpractice reform. Cut more wasteful military programs, like the F-35 jet engine. Force more social programs to prove they work — and cut their funding in future years if they don’t.
By all means, though, don’t follow the path of the Germans and the British just because it feels morally satisfying.

So here we are, with Republicans threatening to shut down the federal government and create a debt-limit crisis unless Democrats agree to deep short-term spending cuts, exactly what the economy does not need. This is a manufactured crisis that Democrats need to expose early and often, and if impugning Herbert Hoover’s memory helps get the job done, so be it.

Politico‘s Jonathan Martin makes a pretty interesting point today about one potential implication of Sen. John Thune’s decision not to run for president in 2012: This could be the first presidential election since 1904 without a sitting member of Congress in the mix.
He goes on to discuss various reasons for this development, including Tea Party antipathy towards Washington, and the advent of a younger conservative leadership cadre that’s not quite ready for the presidential campaign trail.
But he doesn’t mention another explanation that makes at least as much sense and applies to candidates who have never served in Congress: it’s a lot easier to run for president (unless you are the incumbent) these days if you don’t hold a full-time elected office.
After all, the presidential field in 2012 will likely include two candidates who have never held an office other than in Washington, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. And it could include a number of candidates who have ended or are nearing the end of service as governors (former governors Mike Huckabee, Tim Pawlenty and Sarah Palin; Haley Barbour, who leaves office in Mississippi at the end of this year; and possibly Mitch Daniels, who leaves office at the end of 2012). What all these folk have in common is the time to get to know the fine citizens of early caucus and primary states. National conservative stars like Chris Christie, who is only in the second year of a first term as governor, or Marco Rubio, in his first year as a senator, have day job responsibilities that can’t really be shirked at this point in their careers. And at least one potential candidate, Mike Huckabee, may pass up a second presidential run because he has no way of supporting himself if he leaves his highly-paid gig at Fox News.
Having said all this, it’s possible that Rep. Michele Bachmann will wind up spoiling Martin’s scenario by running for president (in that case she would be bucking a historical trend even older than that of sitting congressmen running, in seeking to become the first House member since 1880 to get elected). And it’s worth remembering that five sitting U.S. senators (four of them Democrats) made the race in 2008.
Still, one suspects the wave of the future in preparing for presidential runs is probably represented best by someone like Newt Gingrich, who parleyed national fame gained in Washington to put together an impressive network of organizations and publishing outlets that paid the bills and gave the would-be president all sorts of excuses to go on television and press the flesh in places like Dubuque, Manchester and Charleston. And then, of course, there’s Sarah Palin, who may have set a precedent by leaving her elected “day job” without even completing a term, blaming the resignation on her enemies, and then “going rogue” as a national celebrity with no responsibilities more serious than those of, say, a Kardashian.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker apparently thinks he is poised for a big victory. But the latest Gallup opinion data indicates that he may instead be opening a big can of self-sabotage. Gallup is not infrequently accused of conservative bias in survey methods, which makes this lede from Dennis Cauchon’s USA Today article, “Poll: Americans favor union bargaining rights” all the more interesting:

MADISON, Wis. — Americans strongly oppose laws taking away the collective bargaining power of public employee unions, according to a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll. The poll found 61% would oppose a law in their state similar to such a proposal in Wisconsin, compared with 33% who would favor such a law.

The 28 point advantage favoring public employee unions in this controversy is impressive, but Independents were even more opposed to limiting public employee bargaining rights, with 62 percent opposed vs. 31 percent favoring limits. Wisconsin voters can’t be all that different from this nationwide survey sample in their views on the topic.
Not content to advocate an unpopular policy, Gov. Walker seized the opportunity to showcase his ignorance of labor history and a certain flair for Orwellian ‘logic,’ quoted by Cauchon:

“Most people … mistakenly think worker rights come from collective bargaining,” Walker told USA TODAY Tuesday. He said his plan would not remove union workers’ protections from wrongful termination or inappropriate discipline or hiring. “When you alter collective bargaining, it doesn’t alter workers’ rights,” he said.

Just wait till he starts meddling with Wisconsin’s educational system.