This may seem like a strange question on election day, but how many times have you been annoyed when some friend or acquaintance says, often with self-righteous intonation, “I vote for the person, not the party”?
My answer would be, “a lot,” so commonplace the phrase has become in political discussions. My hunch is that there is a pretty good chance you have also heard the expression in the last couple of months.
It can be a conversation-ender, depending on your tolerance for political dialogue with those who don’t give politics much thought, unprincipled dimwits or otherwise intelligent but apolitical people. But the expression is emblematic of a larger problem, the failure of the Democratic Party to inspire broad-based loyalty of similar magnitude as progressive parties in other nations.
Steve Benen has an interesting observation about “The Limited Value of the ‘Vote for the Person’ Maxim” at The Washington Monthly. As Benen notes,

…I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard people say, with some degree of pride, “I vote for the person, not the party.” I get the sense those who repeat it consider it evidence of high-minded independence.
…The “I vote for the person” crowd is making an odd argument. These folks seem to be suggesting they’re not especially concerned with policy differences, policy visions, or agendas, but rather, are principally concerned with personalities. Maybe the candidate seems more personable; maybe they ran better commercials. Either way, as a substantive matter, the “vote for the person, not the party” approach seems pretty weak. Indeed, it’s what leads people to express a series of policy priorities, and then vote for a candidate who opposes all of those priorities — a dynamic that’s as exasperating as it is counter-productive.

Benen quotes Michael Kinsley to underscore the point:

…There is nothing wrong with voting for the party and not the person…. A candidate’s party affiliation doesn’t tell you everything you would like to know, but it tells you something. In fact, it tells you a lot — enough so that it even makes sense to vote your party preference even when you know nothing else about a candidate. Or even vote for a candidate that you actively dislike.

There are several reasons for the failure of the Democratic Party to inspire the kind of loyalty that motivates voters to support their candidates, even when a candidate’s charisma is lacking. Multiparty parliamentary systems seem to do this better. They have more ‘street’ or neighborhood presence, which builds solidarity. America’s culture elevates individual achievement over accomplishments based on ideological solidarity. And there’s no denying that the Democratic Party could do a lot better job of defining and projecting what it stands for.
I raise this issue today because the “I vote the person” maxim will have a particularly sour echo on a day like today. I find it hard to believe that majorities of voters really believe that Sharron Angle, Rand Paul or Nathan Deal are truly persons of superior character, competence or likability, compared with their Democratic opponents. In a way support for those candidates is based on party, but not party loyalty — numerous polls indicate voters don’t like the GOP very much. Rather, indications are that many are angry with Democrats for what they perceive as inadequate commitment to economic recovery.
Dems did not sell the very real economic achievements of their party during the last two years very well. I don’t recall seeing any ads in which Dems claim credit for saving the auto industry, talk about the impressive number of jobs created by the stimulus, explain that TARP is proving to be a cost-effective investment, or brag about the life-saving benefits of HCR. Instead they relied on interviews and speeches to get the message out, with limited results. As Joe Klein observed on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe,’

…This is one of the weirdest campaigns I’ve ever seen. The Democrats pass all this legislation — stuff they wanted to pass for 60 years — and then they run away from it. They don’t even bother to explain the stuff that they passed…

Painfully true. Lots of ads are necessary to tell a party’s story properly and unedited by outsiders, because TV editors clip interviews and speech excerpts, often drastically, to suit their programs.
But there is still hope that Dems can build a stronger spirit of party loyalty. The seeds are there, as James Vega has noted,

…During the 50’s and 60’s, in dozens and dozens of congressional districts blue- collar Democrats loyally voted for Democratic candidates who were much more liberal than they were on social issues. They did it out of a combination of party loyalty and trust that the Democratic candidate would be more pro-labor on economic issues.

Dems need a stronger commitment to assertively promote the party and its agenda, not just our candidates in their individual races. The image of the Democratic party has dwindled down into a collection of candidates who stand for different reforms in varying degrees with little solidarity between them. Party building is not just about recruiting good candidates; It’s also about creating a collective identity that inspires voters and invites them to be a part of it.

While there’s no doubt that Republicans are going to make net gains in congressional and gubernatorial contests today (as the “out” party almost always does in the first midterm after a new presidential administration takes office), there is some pretty serious mystery about how big those gains wll be, particularly in the House. That’s mainly because of an unusual degree of disagreement among the major polling outlets about the shape of the midterm electorate and the size of the GOP advantage.
Mark Blumenthal of pollster.com has a nifty write-up this morning of the problem, which includes a chart of final likely-voter generic congressional ballot polls showing a remarkable range of findings, from Marist/McClatchey’s dead even to the “low-turnout”-based Gallup prediction of an astonishing 15 point Republican margin.
Complicating the issue (which would normally dictate just averaging the polls and not worrying about it) is the fact that Gallup has historically been very accurate in its final generic ballot poll. Yet today their findings look like an outlier, off there nearer to the Rasmussen numbers (a 12-point GOP margin) than to such equally well-established and sober outfits like Pew (a 6-point margin) and ABC/WaPo (4 points). TDS contributor and advisory board member Alan Abramowitz of Emory University has been saying for a good while that something’s screwy with Gallup’s methodology this year. One theory is that Gallup is placing too much stock in subjective “enthusiasm” indicators that may over-estimate the marginal tendency of Republicans to vote. With other apparent outlier polls like Rasmussen’s, there is a suspicion that the firm has failed to sufficiently adjust for its inability to reach cell-phone-only households.
We’ll know the truth soon enough, but it’s comforting to know that the poll-assessment industry seems to be growing as fast as the public polling industry itself. Certainly Democrats hope that Gallup is making a mistake this year that rivals its famous prediction in 1948 that Dewey would crush Truman.

Assuming the representation of cell-phone-only respondents has been properly addressed in the most recent polls and absent a Democratic midterm turnout juggernaut of historic proportions, it appears likely that Republicans will win a majority in the House. Sabato predicts a net GOP pick-up of 55 House seats, with 39 needed to win a majority. Nate Silver sees the GOP gaining about 53 seats. Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium predicts a 52 seat increase for the Republicans. There seems to be a consensus among poll analysts that Dems will narrowly hold the senate.
Wednesday will bring the soul-searching, finger-pointing and “what if?” scenarios Eugene Robinson touched on in his WaPo column last week. As Robinson put it:

What if President Obama and the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill had pushed through an authentic, righteous, no-holds-barred progressive agenda, perhaps with a thick overlay of pitchfork populism? How different might the political landscape look? Would predictions for the party’s prospects on Election Day still range from gloom all the way to doom? Or would triumphant Democrats be preparing to leave the GOP — or what remained of it — dazed and confused?
This question is being asked, in all seriousness, by thoughtful progressives. They argue that the Obama administration’s political mistake wasn’t pushing its liberal program too hard but not pushing it hard enough. And they contend that the White House seriously misread both the public anger and the national interest when it came to dealing with Wall Street’s greedy excesses — punishing miscreant bankers with love taps rather than cudgel and mace.

Numerous progressives have expressed versions of this contention, none more persuasively or with more cred than Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, who has eloquently argued that the Administration’s stimulus was way too weak. And had Obama tweaked his Wall St. reform agenda with a little more “pitchfork populism,” who knows, it might have helped Dems some.
But Robinson also sees a sort of progressive myopia regarding the Republicans numerical strength in congress:

The problem is that for all the talk of changing the way Washington works, you still have to get actual legislation through an actual Congress. In the House, Democratic ranks are swollen with Blue Dogs and other moderates, many of them elected in swing districts as part of the 2008 Democratic landslide. The votes for a full-fledged progressive agenda — single-payer health care, for example — simply were not there.
In the Senate, the terrain was even less favorable. With the Republican caucus voting no as a bloc, passing any piece of legislation meant making concessions and compromises to keep together the needed 60 votes to bring a bill to the floor. The votes weren’t there for a health-care bill that would have been cleaner and more transformative than the one that passed, or for climate-change legislation with teeth, or for rules that could really transform Wall Street’s toxic culture, or for . . . fill in the blank.

Robinson concedes that progressives make some credible points and that President Obama’s unrequited bipartisan outreach amounted to “self-defeating concessions to Republicans who had no good-faith intention of seeking compromise.” That Obama had to make a strong initial appeal for bipartisan support is to me defensible. But the continued outreach to Republicans, which met with repeated rejection, appeared to waste time and political capital.
Robinson less persuasively dismisses the contention that Dems should have put jobs before HCR, noting “there’s no way the economy could recover 8 million jobs so quickly, no matter what Washington did. And health-care reform would still be a distant dream.”
Nobody expected the recovery of all 8 million jobs in two years, but a larger reduction in unemployment may have been possible. If Dems made 2010 the “year of jobs,” as William Galston argued, it may well have helped them. Robinson is likely right, however, that the “jobs first” strategy would have precluded any significant health care reform, even if it meant that Dems would be in better mid term position.
Speculation about the outcome of untried strategies is an enduring political ritual following every election, and, in the long run, Obama’s health care reform strategy may prove to have been the wisest course. In the end, however, “what if” scenarios don’t help much in terms of formulating strategy going forward. Regardless of all pre-election speculation, it’s more important that Dems learn the lessons of the midterms as revealed by the exit polls on Tuesday — and get focused on honing the best strategy for 2012.

here. A more detailed description of the methodology is presented here
The results are significant for more than simple bragging rights or partisan propaganda. Ed Kilgore and many other Democratic election analysts have been arguing that structural factors – the typically more conservative-leaning demographic turnout in mid-term elections and the unusual number of Democrats defending seats in basically Republican districts — will explain a large part of the Republican victories, much more than the “enthusiasm gap” that has been detected in the opinion data.
The size of mass demonstrations provides an important source of information about relative levels of “enthusiasm” – one that is independent of opinion polling. If the Republican storyline were correct – that the coming vote will reflect a growing, passionate rejection of the Obama and Democratic agenda by the American people, one would expect to see an increasing arc of conservative mass mobilization as more time passed, more outrage accumulated and the critical elections neared.
Instead, the September 2009 Tea Party march in Washington D.C. – which had at best 90-100,000 participants marked the high point of attendance. This year’s September Tea Party march was only a fraction of that number and Beck’s heavily promoted “Restore Honor” rally was only about the same size. The fact that the March for Sanity was double the size of Beck’s rally suggests that any Republican spin about “All Americans (except a small minority) are rising in rebellion against the Dems” is simply not supported by the data on mass mobilization.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The inevitable loss-induced “struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party” has already begun. In a New York Times op-ed, The Nation’s Ari Berman has written that liberals should “Boot the Blue Dogs,” suggesting a smaller but more ideologically homogeneous Democratic congressional caucus would be happier, more effective, and more progressive [see J.P. Green’s earlier analysis of the essay].
I disagree with Berman’s argument on substantive grounds–particularly the CliffsNotes version that the Times’ word limit imposed on him–but in addition, isn’t this a really weird time to be talking about a purge of Democratic moderates? After all, Republicans are poised to do the job themselves, seizing so many seats that they’ll drastically shrink the size of the Congressional Blue Dog Caucus.
How many of these moderates will actually be left after November 2? Currently, there are 54 members of the Blue Dog Coalition in the House. Four of them are retiring, and two others–Brad Ellsworth of Indiana and Charlie Melancon of Lousiana–are running for the Senate. All six of these open seats are very likely to flip to the GOP.
Looking at Nate Silver’s very precise projections of House races, there are 47 incumbent Democrats that he rates as having a better-than-even chance of losing. Of those, 21 are Blue Dogs. If you assume they all do lose, then add in the six open seats, and acknowledge there are likely to be no reinforcements from the tiny Democratic class of 2010, this leaves you with a Blue Dog Coalition of 27 members, exactly half the current number.
With some luck, the numbers could be higher, but they could be a lot lower, too; four more Blue Dogs are rated by Silver as having a 40 to 50 percent chance of losing, and three more make his list of those with a 30 to 40 percent probability of getting booted.
Silver’s entire projection estimates a net loss of 53 seats by Democrats, leaving a House Democratic Caucus of 203 members. In that scenario, a Blue Dog Coalition of 27 members would represent 13 percent of the caucus, as compared to 21 percent today.
In other words, progressives won’t have much purging to do. It’s hard to assess the influence that this far-smaller group of Blue Dogs would have on the Democratic minority, particularly in a House of Representatives controlled by the most ideologically coherent Republican caucus in history. But it is worth noting that talk about “booting the Blue Dogs” seems beside the point–and it might only aid the Republicans who may soon be attempting to lure Ben Nelson or Joe Lieberman across the line to gain control of the Senate.

At pollster.com, Margie Omero takes a fascinating look at the gender gaps in polls involving female candidates in some major races. There’s a lot going on in her charts, and thanks to the variable availability of crosstabs, she has to rely on polling data of variable reliability.
It’s clear, however, that by and large, all those “Mama Grizzly” Republican candidates aren’t exactly pulling women across the line. The two races with the largest gender gaps actually involve women running on both tickets, the OK and NM gubernatorial contests (unfortunately, dreadful performance among men has kept both Democrats from being competitive, though NM is much closer than OK). But there are also sizeable gender gaps in two races involving Democratic men and Republican women (the Senate races in NH and CT).
The female Republican candidates who do seem to be seriously appealing to women in a race against a man, creating an unusually small or even non-existent advantage for Democrats among women, are, surprisingly, Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell. Keeping in mind that this is a Rasmussen poll we are talking about, O’Donnell is actually running slightly better among women than among men, though she’s losing the former by 11 points and the latter by 12. The only Republican women in Omero’s analysis who are actually leading among women are Oklahoma’s Mary Fallin (who’s going to win very big because she’s leading among men by 50 points), and SC’s Nikki Haley (a favorite to win, but not by a lot), both by four point margins.
All in all, there’s not much evidence that the much-noted emergence of conservative women is having a big impact on women’s votes, though it is helping the GOP achieve some desperately needed diversity in the ranks of its candidates.

First and foremost, for Democrats to beat the odds next Tuesday, our get out the vote operations must function flawlessly. Basically, these operations must defy the “likely voter” models that have dictated the gloomy scenario in most polls.
There is little question that between the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the DNC’s Organize for America (OFA), the individual campaigns, and Democratic allies like AFSCME, AFL-CIO, SEIU, MoveOn.org, USAction, NEA, Center for Community Change, et al, Progressives are conducting the most effective Get Out the Vote (GOTV) effort of any Mid-term in history. Many Latino, African American and women’s organizations are also conducting special programs targeting their communities.
Many of the veterans of the Obama campaign — which ran the most effective GOTV program in American history — are deeply involved. The culture and systems developed by the Obama field structure will go a long way to creating well oiled, efficient GOTV organizations. Well organized coordinated campaigns are functioning in key states, focusing heavily on early voting and mail vote in many, and this accounts for a robust showing by Democratic-registered voters in many states. And they all plan massive 72-hour voter contact drills and Election Day operations to run votes.
Democrats are relying heavily on door-to-door contact, while Republicans use paid phone calls and mail. But studies show conclusively that door-to-door contacts are far superior to phones and mail.
Over the next five days, Democrats have to deliver in the field if they intend to upset the odds. We must make millions of door-to-door and phone contacts. We must repeatedly contact voters who would vote Democratic, but our unlikely to vote. We need to explain to these voters how critical it is that they vote. And we need to deliver that very effective Election Day message: “I won’t get off your porch until you vote!”
Everyone, no matter where you live can increase Democratic effectiveness in getting out the vote. Pick up the phone and call your local campaign, Democratic Party, your union, or MoveOn.org. Volunteer to go door to door or get on the phones.
We know from research that the more we contact mobilizable voters, the more likely they are to vote. You don’t have to “persuade” them, you just have to contact them. You just have to get their attention, and the likelihood they’ll vote goes way up.
And if you don’t live where there is a critical campaign, you can still get involved. OFA and MoveOn both have programs that allow you to call voters in swing states from the comfort of your own home.
To volunteer, go to OFA.BO/GOTV
To call swing districts: Call.BarackObama.com. That will automatically give you a targeted list of voters in a swing district.
To volunteer with MoveON with a campaign near your home, go here: www.moveon.org/2010
If you want to call from home, go here: pol.moveon.org/2010
If you want to go to a MoveOn campaign event, go here: pol.moveon.org/event/lastchance

One of the most interesting spectator sports of this election cycle is to watch Tea Party-oriented candidates rant and rave about government spending being a threat to liberty, and then change their tune entirely when asked about a specific, popular program like Social Security and Medicare. Here (via Dave Weigel) is Forbes‘ Shikha Dalmia, who wants to cut entitlement spending bad, complaining about Tea Party gutlessness:

[P]olls by the New York Times and Bloomberg have found that although a vast majority of Tea Party supporters favor smaller government, they don’t want cuts in their Medicare or Social Security, a contradiction perfectly captured in a sign at a Tea Party rally: “Keep the Guvmint out of my Medicare.” Indeed, the Bloomberg poll discovered that even though Tea Partiers dislike ObamaCare, they want Medicare to offer more drug benefits and the government to force insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions. The upshot is that while the rhetoric on entitlements has become bolder during this election, the discussion about reform has become tamer.
In fact, setting aside the lapsed witch of Delaware, Christie O’ Donnell, in the most visible Senate races where Tea Party or Tea Party-anointed candidates are running, only two have stuck to their crosses on entitlement reform. One is Joe Miller of Alaska, a man so unfamiliar with the First Amendment that he conducted a citizen’s arrest of a reporter for asking tough questions. The other is Sharron Angle of Nevada, a genuine bright spot in an otherwise bleak Tea Party landscape, who admirably admonished Harry Reid to “man up” and admit that Social Security had a problem.
Literally all of the others are equivocating if not completely backing off from their original plans to give at least partial ownership of Medicare and Social Security to individuals themselves.

Indeed, the Man Who Would Be Speaker, John Boehner, seems to be moving in a very different direction, according to David Frum:

On the Sean Hannity radio program this afternoon, Speaker-presumptive John Boehner was interestingly cautious about promising actually to do anything in the new Congress.
But there was one thing Boehner did specifically pledge: Republicans would call a vote on restoring President Obama’s cuts to Medicare.

Clearly, the impending collision between Republican rhetoric on budget deficits and their specific spending and tax cut commitments is going to be pretty massive, and this time, it’s not something that will go without notice.

At present, the CW about November 2 is that Republicans will win the House while Democrats retain the Senate, and if GOPers complain about the spin being a split decision, they have no one to blame but themselves for their year-long orgy of triumphalist rhetoric.
Perhaps anticipating a sense of disappointment among Republicans, RCP’s Sean Trende tries to cheer them up today with some analysis about the nature of Senate contests and what should be reasonably expected. His main point, which should come as no surprise to those who remember this started out as a cycle in which Democrats thought they might actually pick up Senate seats, is that the Senate seats that happen to be up this year are disproportionately held by Republicans already. Thus, the Senate landscape is tougher than the House landscape, as Trende explains by looking at the states and districts from the perspective of PVI (Presidential Voting Index, the generally accepted measurement of the partisan character of any given jurisdiction):

To take the ten seats they need to win the Senate, Republicans have to either run the table in every state that is D+5 or better, or make up for any misses in even bluer states. To put this in perspective, for House Republicans to pull off the same feat, they would have to pick up about 123 seats! The landscape is also more difficult for Republicans given that four of the GOP’s five most Democratic seats are open this cycle.

This is all true, but the same PVI data that makes the likely Senate results look better than they might first appear also creates some needed “perspective” for contextualizing likely House gains:

[B]ecause of Democratic gains in Republican-leaning districts over the last two cycles, House Republicans have been waging this election on relatively favorable turf. If Republicans defeat every Democrat in an R+4 district or better, they’ll pick up 47 seats. Almost 100 seats are held by Democrats in districts that were D+3 or better, i.e., in swing districts or districts leaning toward Republicans.

Turn that insight around, and you can say that Republicans can pick up 47 seats without beating a single Democrat in a district where the PVI is better for Democrats than R+4. That would be an impressive GOP win, but hardly the stuff of any big pro-Republican long-term trend, particularly if you take into account (1) the especially large age-related Republican midterm turnout advantage; (2) the economy; and (3) the near-universal phenomenon of midterm losses by the party controlling the White House.
As Sean says, it’s all a matter of perspective.

We are often told that this year’s GOP/Tea Party uprising is some sort of act of self-defense by Americans resisting the takeover of their lives by Big Government, and that the whole right-wing “movement” is about fiscal issues and constitutional liberty, not cultural resentments or ethnic/racial fears.
Funny, then, that so many political ads this year dwell not so subtly on The Others In Our Midst. Salon‘s Alex Pareene has collected some doozies that he has awarded with what he calls the “Baitys.” Here’s his summary:

Are you scared of gang-banging Mexican illegals? Islamic sleeper cell jihadists? Chinese people? Then this was the election cycle for you! From the primaries through the week before election day, America’s been blanketed with race-baiting political campaign ads from insufficiently guarded border to shining sea. Today’s the day when those countless hours spent by soulless political consultants poring over stock images of young Latino men looking for the shot that screams “about to kidnap your daughter” pays off.

Some of the ads about illegal immigrants are especially over the top, which is interesting insofar as rates of immigration have been dropping rapidly of late. And any Democrat who has failed to wax hysterical about the so-called Ground Zero Mosque is subject to attack as a conscious agent of radical Islam bent on subjecting good Christian folk to Sharia law.
What’s most striking about these ads is how generic they are, with little connection to the actual issues in any actual electoral contest. But then again, given the highly centralized nature of the conservative attack ad machine, it’s small wonder that cookie-cutter race-baiting has spread across the land like pestilence.