One of the most common insider assumption in American politics right now is that the Republican Party, having richly indulged the tantrums of its radicalized conservative base going into the midterm elections, will revert to its grown-up habits in 2012 and nominate for president someone like that boring but respectable grown-up, Mitt Romney. Never mind that Romney’s long and unrepudiated championship of a health insurance purchasing mandate is going to be a major problem for him next year as congressional Republicans treat the ObamaCare mandate as a devilish product of the slavedrivers of collectivism; the Mittster has earned the right to the nomination by running a decent race in 2008, we are told, and GOPers will not be stupid enough to choose a Palin or a Huckabee or a DeMint.
Maybe that’s how it will all come down, but as John Ellis noted, Team Mitt is not making things any easier for him, as illustrated last week when one of his advisors deliberately dissed the Iowa Caucuses, where Romney’s 2008 campaign came to grief:

After the 2008 debacle, one might have assumed that Romney would clean house and get himself a new team. No dice. Roughly the same team is still in place. And they’re busy making new stupid mistakes which make Romney’s nomination as the GOP standard-bearer in 2012 less likely.
Consider the state of Iowa, home to the nation’s first presidential preference vote (a straw poll attached to precinct caucuses). Iowa has played host to the GOP’s first serious presidential straw poll for as long as anyone can remember. And it will again in 2012.
Not so fast, says Mr. Romney’s legal advisor Ben Ginsburg, who may be the only person in the world who thinks Iowa will not lead off the 2012 presidential campaign voting. Specifically, Mr. Ginsburg is quoted as saying: “Whether Iowa goes first in 2012 is up for grabs in unprecedented fashion….”

This is no small matter. Political activists in Iowa, as in New Hampshire, are acutely defensive about their “first in the nation” status, and do not tolerate even a hint of a challenge to that status from presidential candidates. Indeed, their willingness to puniish candidates for doing so is the real source of their power to maintain the status quo.
So the Romney campaign’s apostasy is not going to go unnoticed:

Iowans will translate Ginsburg’s musings as follows: “Romney really doesn’t like us very much, doesn’t want to campaign here, thinks Iowans are too difficult and prickly, so he’s going to do everything he can to lessen our influence on the nomination process.” ….
[D]issing the first-in-the-nation caucus state is an astonishingly stupid tactical error. That’s what the Romney campaign just did.

At pollster.com, Thomas Holbrook has a useful piece summarizing current polling averages for 29 of the 31 gubernatorial contests being held this year. According to his calculations, Republicans are favored to pick up no fewer than ten Democratic governorships, but Democratic are favored to flip five Republican governorships, giving the GOP a sizable but not extraordinary net gain of five.
Looking more closely at the data, it’s obvious that some of the turnover involves relatively predictable switches where open gubernatorial slots in strongly red and blue states are returning to type (a trend that Nate Silver noted some time ago). Oklahoma and Wyoming fit this pattern among red states (so, too, do Kansas and Tennessee, which were not included in Holbrook’s analysis since there has been no recent polling in those states). Among blue states, Rhode Island, Connecticut, California and Hawaii have open Republican-controlled governorships.
Another pattern which is hurting Democrats is the backlash against the party in power at the state level in marginal territory. That helps explain current GOP advantages in PA, MI, IA, and OH.
The good news for Democrats other than their ability to offset large GOP gains with some pickoffs of their own is that the closest races could break in their direction. Holbrook has Republicans in the lead in FL, IL and OH; Democrats have made recent gains in the latter two states, and Republican candidate Rick Scott in FL has extraordinarily high negatives that probably set a low ceiling on his support. WI, GA, SC, and TX are definitely within reach for Democrats as well, with unusually strong non-incumbent candidates running in all four states (in GA, the serial ethics and financial problems of Republican Nathan Deal are a real wild card). A third-party candidate could make blue state Maine a sleeper for Democrats as well.
In any event, it should be remembered that gubernatorial contests are more likely to reflect local conditions than congressional races. I’m reminded of 1998, a relatively bad year for Democratic congressional candidates in the South, when nonetheless Democrats won upset wins in gubernatorial contests in AL, GA and SC. The “wrong track vote” in a midterm election isn’t always about national politics.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Every so often a confluence of individual events points toward an emerging reality. Today, that’s true regarding global trade. Consider the following from last week:
*On Monday the Wall Street Journal published a stunning but not surprising piece headlined “Americans Sour on Trade.” As recently as a decade ago, more Americans thought that free-trade agreements helped than hurt the United States. Last month, more than half said that these agreements were harmful, versus fewer than 20 percent who still think they are beneficial. The article noted that support for a policy of getting tough with China on the currency issue now crosses occupational, economic, and political lines: last week’s House vote to that effect gained the support of more than half the Republican caucus as well as nearly all Democrats.
·
*On Tuesday the Financial Times featured an op-ed by the redoubtable and respected economic commentator Martin Wolf. It began this way: “Has the time for a currency war with China arrived? The answer looks increasingly to be yes. The politics and economics of an assault on Chinese exchange rate policy are increasingly convincing. The idea is, of course, deeply disturbing. But I no longer believe there is an alternative.
·
*On Wednesday Stan Greenberg and James Carville published a Democracy Corps survey showing that attacking Republicans for supporting free-trade agreements and tax provisions that (allegedly) promote the outsourcing of American jobs is one of the two strongest arguments Democrats can make.
·
*Also on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner delivered a talk at Brookings in advance of this weekend’s IMF and World Bank annual meetings. His message was blunt: The necessary rebalancing of the world economy was “at risk of being undermined” by countries trying to prevent their currencies from rising in value. One consequence of this behavior, he said, was to depress consumption growth while “intensifying short-term distortions in favor of exports.”
The meaning of all this is pretty clear: The status quo is neither economically nor politically sustainable. If the United States cannot bring about a negotiated collective solution to imbalances in the world economy, we will be forced to act unilaterally, with incalculable consequences.
Nearly two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed that “[t]here are, at the present time, two great nations in the world [Russia and America] which seem to tend toward the same end . . . . Their starting points are different and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.” Tocqueville would not have been surprised that the conflict between Russia and America defined much of the twentieth century. It requires much less prescience to discern that the relationship between the United States and China will dominate the twenty-first. Much depends on the ability of both nations to keep their inevitable competition within the bounds of peace and mutual benefit. Developing a more sustainable relationship between our two economies is the essential first step.
Amid all the uncertainties of this process, which may require threats as well as more irenic forms of persuasion, one thing is clear: The faster we set our fiscal policy on a better path, the stronger our hand will be. Right now, the Chinese can argue that our savings deficit is at least as responsible for the trade imbalance as is their consumption deficit. Depriving them of that defense will ratchet up the pressure on them to change course.

In yet another indication that Dems are picking up mo against GOP mid term candidates, New Democratic Network President Simon Rosenberg has this to say in an American Prospect interview by Tim Fernholz:

You’ve got trend lines where one party is dropping and one party is gaining — it’s indisputable at this point. If you’re a Republican right now, and you look at this environment, the party that’s dropping a month out usually loses. If you’re a candidate or a political party in a close election and you’re dropping a month out, and the other guy’s rising, you usually lose, because those dynamics are very hard to adjust.
Republican efforts to create an agenda were sloppy and showed the Republicans weren’t ready to govern. The whole effort of [House Minority Leader John] Boehner’s economic speech in Ohio, up through the recent pledge, really defined the Republicans as being a political party not ready for prime time. It gave the Democrats a more appropriate contrast to remind the public about a political party that had not really reconstructed itself. If the Republicans made a fundamentally different offering, the way [Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron] had in Britain, you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. But they doubled down on a political philosophy and an economic philosophy that did grave damage to the national interest when they were last in power. … If you look at the Gallup poll from two weeks ago, they asked a question: “Who do you blame for what went wrong with the economy?” Seventy percent of the country still blames Bush and the Republicans.
We know the election has shifted. There’s been a four- to six-point shift toward the Democrats. Do those trends continue? Do the Democrats pick up another four to six points this month? The most reasonable scenario now of what happens in the next month is that the Democrats claim another three to six points and end up either even in the generic or slightly ahead, and certainly ahead in the non-Southern parts of the country.

Rosenberg sees the MSM as a tad dumbstruck by the Democratic rally underway:

Now the wave model has to be rejected and something else is happening. … I’m not arguing that the Democrats are going to pick up seats. But this notion that the Democratic Party would have made a six- to seven-point gain in September defies so many historical understandings of what was going to happen in this election that the dramatic nature of what just took place, I think, is being incredibly understated by the media.

He sees major weaknesses revealed in the GOP’s midterm campaign:

…the Republican Party is still not offering solutions for the future, has incredibly unattractive leadership, is ideologically divided, has elected far too many fringe candidates, and is way over-reliant on outside plutocratic money, which I think in the long term is going to become really problematic for them, because if they win the majority, they will have won it based on the contribution of 50 to 100 really rich people, which is unsustainable for them as a political party in this Internet age.
…The Republican Party was psychologically unprepared for what’s going on right now. It’s amazing how silent the national Republicans are right now in the face of it, and the reason why is because every time Boehner or [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell go on television, it hurts them.

Rosenberg also has an interesting explanation for why Dems have seemed a little timid in attacking Republicans this year:

Part of what went wrong with the Democrats in the last two years is that too many Democrats have political Stockholm syndrome. Many Democrats grew up in an era with a conservative politics that was ascendant and center-left politics was in decline. What happened in 2008 was the conservative jailers left, and were defeated, the door to the ideological jail opened up, the sun was shining, the Democrats could leave, and they didn’t leave.

And Rosenberg believes the Great Wingnut Ad Juggernaut made possible by the Citizens United decision is programmed to backfire:

The other thing you’re going to see is that, as the Republican ads go up on the air, it’s going to motivate Democratic voters because it’s going to remind the Democrats how much they hate the Republicans. The ability for the Democrats to label them bad Republicans — just like those Republicans who hurt the country — is not a difficult task in the next month. And I think that’s Obama’s job in the last weeks.

Rosenberg’s take, coming from one of the more astute political analysts, is good news indeed.

The Majority Leader of the United States Senate is currently locked in a tight race for re-election against an obscure state legislator once notorious for lonely, extremist positions. But though Sharron Angle has sought to clean up, or at least mute, her act since winning the Republican Senate nomination in Nevada, she can’t seem to stop herself from crazy talk.
Witness this latest example, from an AP wire story:

U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle told a crowd of supporters that the country needs to address a “militant terrorist situation” that has allowed Islamic religious law to take hold in some American cities.
Her comments came at a rally of tea party supporters in the Nevada resort town of Mesquite last week after the candidate was asked about Muslims angling to take over the country, and marked the latest of several controversial remarks by the Nevada Republican.
In a recording of the rally provided to The Associated Press by the Mesquite Local News, a man is heard asking Angle : “I keep hearing about Muslims wanting to take over the United States … on a TV program just last night, I saw that they are taking over a city in Michigan and the residents of the city, they want them out. They want them out. So, I want to hear your thoughts about that.”
Angle responds that “we’re talking about a militant terrorist situation, which I believe it isn’t a widespread thing, but it is enough that we need to address, and we have been addressing it.”
“My thoughts are these, first of all, Dearborn, Michigan, and Frankford, Texas are on American soil, and under constitutional law. Not Sharia law. And I don’t know how that happened in the United States,” she said. “It seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing a foreign system of law to even take hold in any municipality or government situation in our United States.”

The two incidents Angle was talking about are, of course, completely imaginary–just made-up agitprop for Muslim-haters and for Christian theocrats who like to promote the idea that it’s impossible for the state to be neutral towards religion. The mayor of Dearborn quickly set the record straight:

Dearborn Mayor Jack O’Reilly called Angle’s comments “shameful.” He said tea party groups inaccurately spread the word that his Detroit suburb was ruled by Islamic law after members of an anti-Islam group were arrested at an Arab cultural festival in June because a Christian volunteer complained of harassment.
“She took it as face value and maligned the city of Dearborn and I consider that totally irresponsible,” he said. “If she wants to come here, I will take her on a tour. I will show her we follow the Constitution just as well as anyone else.”
Angle, a Southern Baptist, has called herself a faith-based politician. Among her positions, she opposes abortion in all circumstances, including rape and incest and doesn’t believe the Constitution requires the separation of church and state.

If Angle is elected to the Senate, the level of extremism in that chamber will rise significantly, making Jim DeMint look almost like a representative of the mainstream. If Republicans win control of the Senate, Angle could actually chair a subcommittee. Let’s hope it’s not one that requires basic familiarity with objective reality.

Democrats have always complained about the effect of corporate cash bankrolling massive ad campaigns and the problem has become vastly worse since the Citizen’s United court decision made secret contributions from unknown sources essentially the most important source of funding for political campaign advertising.
The Center for American Progress dropped an elegant depth charge into this secret world by exposing the facts that the Chamber of Commerce – a major source of this money – does not even keep money from foreign corporations separated from the domestic funds it uses for political ads and insultingly dismisses all calls for openness by essentially saying “it’s none of your F-ing business.”
The details make it even worse, with Chamber employees giving pep talks about the importance of the 2010 elections to foreign members of the organization – even to foreign firms that directly benefit from the export of American jobs overseas.
This provides great ammunition for populist attacks on the tidal wave of secret spending. But Democrats will not be taking advantage of the full power of this issue if they restrict their criticism to this particular line of attack alone.
The emergence of secret corporate cash as a major last-minute issue in the election gives Dems the opportunity to reduce the effectiveness of all Republican advertising — using a fundamental principle derived from social psychology.
In general, Americans know that the advertisements they see on TV are not “real”, even when they feature testimonials by average looking people with a caption below them that says “not a professional actor.” Many years of familiarity with commercials have trained the audience to be able to maintain a basic skepticism– because they know the ad is paid for by the seller — but still entertain the idea that the message being communicated might nonetheless be valid. Generally, viewers do not cognitively categorize commercials as simply either “true” or “false” but rather as either “plausible” or “implausible.” The audience knows, for example, that the square-jawed cowboy praising his Toyota Tundra as a rugged ranch vehicle probably doesn’t drive one, or necessarily even like the machine. But if the commercial is well made, it can still convince the viewer that the Tundra is worth considering as a rough-terrain truck.
Political advertisements work in much the same way. Viewers know that the ads are all one-sided propaganda for the candidates and not “facts,” but they still allow themselves to be influenced by messages that seem sufficiently plausible or convincing.
One basic finding from social psychology, however, is that, if a viewers’ conscious attention can be diverted from the content of an ad to suspicion about the motives of the communicator, the effectiveness of the ad actually does decline tremendously. In effect, if the viewers’ skepticism is consciously activated, the usual “Well, who knows? I know it’s just a commercial but what it says still might be true” reflex is inhibited. The viewer’s attention becomes focused on the commercial itself rather than the message it delivers.
Since Democrats all over the country are now being swamped with a tidal wave of nasty attack ads funded with secret money, every attempt to make voters focus their attention on the secret money behind the ads – rather than on the words of the ad itself – can have a very significant effect. The way to most effectively execute this strategy is with messages that directly and dramatically challenge voters to actively and skeptically think about the commercials they see at the moment when they appear on the TV screen.
Here are several examples of the kinds of messages that can substantially increase voter resistance to secret money anti-Democratic ads.

• That TV ad you are watching right now – guess what? It was paid for by the same people who shipped your job overseas. Are you really going to take advice from people like them?
• If a guy came into your house wearing a mask and tried to tell you who to vote for, would you listen to him? Well, that’s exactly what a commercial paid for with secret money does.
• That TV ad you saw last night – the corporations who paid for it are ashamed to even put their names on it. Do you really think you should believe what the ad says?
• If a corporation won’t even put its name on a TV ad it pays millions of dollars for, shouldn’t you assume that every single thing it says is probably a flat-out lie?
• Honest TV ads at least let you know who paid for them. Ads that don’t aren’t honest. It really is that simple.
• A political ad that hides the identity of who paid for it is no better than a nasty comment about a girl written on a barroom toilet wall.

These are just examples. The general point they illustrate is that, to the extent that Democrats can make viewers focus their conscious attention on the ads themselves rather than the messages they communicate, they can significantly reduce the impact of this years’ secret money advertising.

There’s been an interesting exchange over at TNR between Jonathan Cohn and Jonathan Bernstein on a subject that’s not discussed much publicly but that’s in the back of most Democrats’ minds: is there some sort of silver lining in the possibility of a Republican-controlled House or Senate? Cohn outlines three such potential silver linings; and Bernstein disputes them.
I tend to agree with Bernstein that Cohn’s supposition of enhanced Democratic unity and an exposed Republican congressional leadership in the wake of a Republican sweep is questionable.
But I think Bernstein is underestimating the extent to which the massive contradictions of Republican policy messaging will blow up on them if they control either House of Congress, for the simple reason that they will be responsible for drafting a budget resolution that cannot possibly accomodate their promises to reduce the defict and cut taxes without touching extremely popular programs or going after the Pentagon. Bernstein suggests they’ll just inflate the deficit as they did under Bush and blithely blame Obama. But the one clear policy implication of the Tea Party Movement’s rise is that deficit reduction, if not (as many Republican candidates are promising this year) an actual balanced budget, is extremely conspicuous in Republican messaging and cannot be discarded as it has been in the past. Nobody with an R next to his or her name is saying “deficits don’t matter” any more. That means a Republican-drafted budget resolution is going to either split the GOP ranks or force them into politically perilous territory on domestic spending cuts, with the 2012 Republican presidential field being forced to take sides on every controversial decision.
In any event, the Cohn-Bernstein discussion is missing a pretty crucial qualifier: a Republican takeover of the House or Senate should be judged as compared to the alternative: Democratic control of Congress by margins that make any effective action absolutely impossible. Yes, it matters who controls Congress in terms of the ability to control floor and committee schedules, investigations, and (in the case of the Senate) confirmations. But the extraordinarily methodical use of obstructionist tactics by Senate Republicans over the last two years really has limited the fruits of majority status. I don’t want to overstate this argument, but you can certainly make a case that the real stakes this November are about which party will preside over congressional gridlock, and be held accountable for it.

I apologize if this site has lately become “enthusiasmgap.com,” but for Democrats, properly understanding the turnout patterns we are likely to see on November 2–what they do and don’t represent–is going to be kind of important to the strategy chosen going forward.
Nate Silver has definitively weighed in on the subject, and reached conclusions that we’ve been offering for a good long while now: much of the “enthusiasm gap” between the two parties is structural, and has to do with the differential turnout patterns of various demographic groups in midterm elections (with Democrats currently more dependent than in the past on low-midterm-voting groups like under-30s and Latinos); and part of it is that a radicalized conservative base is indeed very excited by their conquest of the GOP:

The enthusiasm gap has more to do with abnormally high levels of Republican interest in the election than with despondent Democrats.
Gallup periodically asks a question about whether voters are more enthusiastic than usual about voting in the midterms. When they did so in March, shortly after passage of the health care bill, 57 percent of Democrats said they were more excited than usual about voting in the November elections. This was, in fact, the highest figure that Gallup had ever recorded among Democrats in a midterm year (they began tracking the question in 1994). The problem for Democrats? Some 69 percent of Republicans also answered the question affirmatively. As I wrote at the time, “if the Democrats’ total was record-breaking, Republicans just blew the competition away in Usain Bolt-type fashion….”
Also, we should remember that the Democrats usually have some trouble turning out their base at the midterms, since they rely on constituencies, like young voters and racial minorities, who traditionally do not vote in large numbers in these elections. Their 2010 numbers, therefore, mostly reflect a return to normal (in fact, perhaps slightly better than normal). It was 2006, when Democrats were energized by the Iraq War and other perceived excesses of the Bush administration, that was the odd year out.

There are two big takeaways that Democrats must understand from the enthusiasm gap data. The first is that it’s a mistake to primarily assign turnout disparities to an insufficiently progressive agenda from the Obama administration. Maybe a different agenda would have been a good idea on policy grounds, or might have had a different impact on the congressional dynamics. But there’s really little evidence that the discouragement we see among progressive elites is that widely shared among rank-and-file Democratic voters, whose relative likelihood to vote or not to vote is more easily explainable by structural factors.
Second, Republicans may be benefitting today from the hyper-excitement of its radicalized conservative base. But they will pay a price in the long run for the sort of agenda and rhetoric they are being driven to. That will become immediately evident in the 2012 cycle, when GOPers are forced to disclose their extremist hopes and dreams for the country, in the context of an electorate that is automatically less favorable.
For those who simply can’t buy the idea that there hasn’t been a calamitious deterioration of support for the Democratic Party since 2008, it’s important to remember that the electorate we are likely to see on November 2 would have almost certainly vaulted John McCain to the presidency two years ago. The 2008 coalition isn’t dead; it’s quite literally not showing up, by the sort of small margins that only matter on election days.
And those who are engaged in GOTV activities this year should take courage in the fact that they are not only helping offset the impact of an excited conservative base right now; they are also setting the stage for a 2012 battle in which the political winds are very likely to change direction, even before Republicans finish celebrating whatever gains they secure on November 2.

Stan Greenberg and James Carville have sent out a Democracy Corps Memo entitled “October Surprise?,” which offers data-based hope that, contrary to the common wisdom, a broad rout of Democratic candidates is not a done deal — and with the highly specific messaging tested, Dems can do much better than expected. Their analysis is based on a poll conducted 10/2-4 by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps. As the authors explain in the Analysis:

We are very close to believing that the 2010 election can move to a new place. Our latest poll shows the Democrats with a 6-point deficit–and any shift will have a significant impact on the number of House seats and the hold on the Senate. This conclusion and recommendations on strategy and message are based on a special program of weekly October polling aimed at producing an ‘October surprise.’
The national poll conducted October 2-4 by Democracy Corps and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner shows real movement — similar to changes reported by NBC News/Wall Street Journal and ABC News/Washington Post in the past week. The changes are summarized below:
* The Republican lead in the named congressional ballot with likely voters has come down 4 points.
* The image of Republican incumbent members (named) has become less positive in the last month.
* The number of strong Democratic voters has gone up 4 points.
* The mood about the state of the economy has become slightly less negative.
* Democrats have gained on the Republicans on key issues: the economy, the deficit and being on your side, and Democrats have re-emerged with an advantage on Social Security and retirement.

Greenberg and Carville warn, however,

Now, it is still ugly out there. Over 60 percent still say the country is on the wrong track, unchanged; the president’s disapproval is stuck at 52 percent; Republicans are marginally more popular than Democrats, though not much; Republicans maintain their standing on government spending and health care. Unfortunately, voters now are still more inclined to cast a vote against spending than against big corporations and for the middle class — very much in line with the vote.

Nonetheless, say the authors,

These results are full of opportunity. When you have a wave election, nothing moves and your messages fall flat, but that is not the case a month before the election. Voters respond to messages — and we can change what this election is about. The messages tested here reduced the Republican margin another 3-points — significant in itself — but more importantly, they revealed voters who are starting to pay attention and respond to clear statements about the stakes and choice.

As for the specific constituencies Democratic candidates can leverage to good effect:

The biggest shift in the vote comes with:
* Younger women, under 50 years (a 9-point net shift in congressional vote)
* Unmarried women (+8 points)
* West and Northeast (+8 and +6 points, respectively)
* Moderates and independents (+7 points)
* White seniors and white older women (+6 points)
Indeed, it is now clear that Democrats can make late gains with independents and moderates, women and older voters. Strategically, we must first act to extend Democratic support to independents and other groups that have been highly supportive in recent years; and then second, we must act to engage Democratic voters.

And all Democratic candidates and campaigns should pay close attention to Carville and Greenberg’s carefully-focused messaging suggestions:

This survey points strongly to two dominant messages and attacks:
1. The first and strongest centers on changing Washington to work for the middle class and American jobs, not corporations and Wall Street. It is strengthened by attacks on Social Security and Medicare, critical for the middle class. The messages are strongest with voters under 40, younger women and unmarried women. It is strong with ‘winnable’ and base voters – giving it greater prominence.
2. The second, very strong message, centers on made in America, creating American jobs and opposing Republicans who support trade agreements and tax breaks for companies that export American jobs. This message is powerful with older women and seniors – and it is buttressed by attacks on Social Security and Medicare and on trade issues.
In future polls and focus groups, we will seek to integrate and short-hand these messages.
The strongest message is set out…below. The Democrat is the one who wants to change Washington so it is not run by corporate lobbyists and Wall Street, but works for the middle class. He or she supports tax cuts for middle class and small business and new American industries, while the Republican has pledged to maintain tax cuts for the top 2 percent and protect the right to export American jobs.
“We have to change Washington. That means eliminating the special deals and tax breaks won by corporate lobbyists for the oil companies and Wall Street. (REPUBLICAN HOUSE CANDIDATE) has pledged to protect the tax cuts for the top two percent and the big tax breaks for companies who export American jobs. I’ll take a different approach with new middle class tax cuts to help small businesses and new American industries create jobs. Let’s make our country work for the middle class.”
This message is quite powerful with the ‘winnable’ voters Democrats need to get to expand their support; also with white unmarried women and whites under 40 years. These last two groups were critical to the new Democratic base of 2006 and 2008 – but support has lagged. But they seem ready to move.
Please note that this message is weaker if it fails to begin with a ‘change Washington’ message. That straight middle class/corporate message is much weaker with these groups. Democratic candidates must be talking about change – with a populist tinge – to get heard this year.
There is a second message that centers on made in America, creating American jobs and opposing the Republicans who supports trade agreements and tax breaks for companies that export American jobs. The message is strongest with older women and seniors and with independents. These can be used in a targeted way, while working in our next poll and focus groups to bring these two messages together.
“My passion is “made in America,” working to support small businesses, American companies and new American industries. (REPUBLICAN HOUSE CANDIDATE) has pledged to support the free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea and protect the loophole for companies outsourcing American jobs. I have a different approach to give tax breaks for small businesses that hire workers and give tax subsidies for companies that create jobs right here in America.”
This message framework for the election is helped by an attack on the Republican candidate for supporting trade agreements and tax breaks that lead to lost American jobs. Those attacks are very strong with white older women and seniors.
We did test a robust form of the message that the president is using. It is painfully weaker than these messages. We made the message very populist and focused on continuing efforts to help unemployed, new industries that create jobs, and ending tax breaks for exporting jobs. It says that the economy shows signs of life, but the Republican candidate wants to go back to Bush and the old policies for Wall Street that cost us 8 million jobs. It is very strong with core Democrats and African-American voters, but compared to the other messages, it falls very short: 25 points weaker with ‘winnable voters’ and whites under 40 years, 20 points weaker with white unmarried women, and 9 points weaker with white older women. That message framework cannot extend the Democratic vote.
The strongest attack on the Republicans centers on Social Security and Medicare – that have re-emerged as issues as Republican candidates, the Tea Party and House Republican leaders decided this is not a third rail. It is the strongest attack here.
“(REPUBLICAN HOUSE CANDIDATE) has pledged to make sweeping cuts, including cuts to off-limit programs for the middle class, like Social Security and Medicare. The Republicans plan to privatize Social Security by shifting those savings to the stock market, and ending guaranteed benefit levels. Medicare as we know it will end, as seniors will have to purchase private insurance using a voucher that will cover some of the costs.”
This attack raises serious doubts with almost 60 percent of the ‘winnable’ voters and white older women.
Democrats must engage voters – and indeed, there is some evidence that Democrats are starting to come back into the electorate – reflected in the polls. The message with the greatest intensity for self-identified Democrats is our form of the “don’t go back to Bush” when Wall Street ruled and 8 million jobs were lost – and the Obama message centered on an on-going agenda.
The ‘don’t go back to Bush’ message scores no more strongly than the ‘change Washington for the middle class’ message among our strongest voters (37 percent of the electorate) and with the 43 percent currently voting Democratic for Congress – and much weaker among the group of winnable Democratic voters. That leads us to recommend against this message. Except for African-American voters, our messages to extend our vote do as well with the base as our base-oriented message. This allows for much greater unity of message.

Democrats are not likely to find a more well-reasoned analysis of the current political moment — nor get better messaging guidance.

To those used to this year’s significant variation in polling results for different contests, the latest batch of contradictory surveys may not seem different. But what’s happening now largely reflects the switchover most pollsters have completed from the use of less to more selective samples (or in some cases, the same samples with new weighting or adjustment factors) as part of an effort to determine likely voters.
Nate Silver’s got a good summary of the wild variations produced by different LV models in terms of the generic congressional ballot:

Just this past weekend, for instance, a Newsweek poll showed Democrats 5 points ahead among registered voters — already a good number for them — but with a larger lead of 8 points among likely voters (Newsweek calls them “definite voters”, but it’s basically the same thing ). That is, it showed a 3-point likely voter gap in the Democrats’ favor. By contrast, as we noted, the Gallup poll shows as much as a 15-point swing in Republicans’ favor when a likely voter model is applied.

Mark Blumenthal has published a very good basic primer on why LV numbers differ so much from each other, and from other measurements of the electorate. He begins by presenting the most famous model, that used by Gallup, which combines a series of questions to poll respondents about their intent to vote and their past voting history, with an adjustment based on an overall estimate of turnout. Blumenthal then notes the other best-known approaches:

* The CBS/New York Times variant, which is similar to the Gallup approach except that rather than select specific respondents as likely voters, it weights all registered voters up or down based on their probability of voting.
* The use of two or three questions to simply screen out voters at the beginning of the interview that say they are not registered and not likely vote.
* The application of quotas or weights to adjust the completed interviews to match the pollster’s expectations of the demographics or regional distribution of likely voters.
* The application of quotas or weights to match the pollster’s expectations of the party affiliation of likely voters. I break this one out separately because it remains among the most controversial likely voter “modeling” tools.
* Sampling respondents from lists that draw on official records of the actual vote history of individual voters, so that when the pollster calls John Doe, they already know whether Doe has voted in past elections.
* Finally, many believe that the use of an automated, recorded-voice methodology rather than a live interviewer is itself a useful tool in obtaining a more accurate measurement of the intent to vote.

Hardly just technical differences in these approaches, eh? And without impugning anyone’s motives, it should be obvious that LV models that depend on imposing some sort of expectation about the partisan composition of the electorate could nicely coexist with partisan bias.
In any event, most LV models tend to converge a bit and become more accurate as election day approaches and registered voters make up their minds whether to participate. At present, though, it’s important to have some idea about how individual pollsters determine likelihood to vote, and how that might reflect the results. . .