Lord knows I’ve written enough about today’s final big batch of primaries, here and elsewhere. But in advance of the results, it’s a good idea to think about the significance of the fact that two very unlikely candidates for the U.S. Senate are in a position to compete seriously for Republican nominations.
In Delaware, Christine O’Donnell is not exactly the kind of person you’d expect to become the Tea Party avenger against establishment candidate Mike Castle. She’s had the sort of tax, mortgage and student loan problems that afflict many Americans, but that most Tea Party folk have righteously condemned as as example of the irresponsibility that is the country’s chief vice. She’s launched what most conservatives would call a “frivolous lawsuit,” against a conservative organization, claiming gender discrimination, no less. And at a time when we are supposed to believe that conservatives are focused on fiscal, not cultural issues, O’Donnell’s main claim to fame and ticket to get on television has been her unusually extreme views on sexual behavior, which I won’t go into in detail at this family-friendly site.
She’s not from Delaware, and at present, has no visible means of support. That she might defeat Mike Castle, a man who’s won twelve straight statewide elections, and is the best and perhaps only hope for a Republican victory in November, is a red flashing sign of the extent to which Republican primary voters are elevating ideology among all competing concerns.
In New Hampshire, Kelly Ayotte is on paper the ultimate Republican dream candidate. She’s attractive to independents, but is also conservative enough to have won endorsements from Sarah Palin and several anti-abortion groups. She has none of Castle’s ideological or voting-record problems. She’s sort of the East Coast version of Carly Fiorina, without the history of laying off employees in the private sector or the powerful incumbent opponent or the daunting political landscape. Her fast-rising challenger, Ovide Lamontagne, most resembles Iowa gubernatorial candidate Bob Vander Plaats (who lost to establishment candidate Terry Branstad in June), a longtime soujourner in the social conservative fields without much money or pizazz. But Lamontagne has the backing of the New Hampshire Union-Leader, and its willingness to attack Ayotte every single day during the stretch drive to the primary, mainly for the sin of going along with a court-orderered settlement that gave Planned Parenthood $300,000 in legal fees after it sued the state over its parental-notification law, which Ayotte stoutly fought to defend.
There’s a lot going on in both states, and both Castle and Ayotte may well win. But the fact that either of them is in trouble speaks volumes about the current condition of the GOP, beyond the oft-mentioned fact that O’Donnell and Lamontagne would instantly make these two races an uphill climb against Democratic opponents. The big story of the primary season is that virtually every candidate in GOP contests has sought the “true conservative” mantle, and where right-wing insurgents haven’t won, they’ve pushed their opponents to the right.

While there is no denying that the Obama Administration is taking a big hit in opinion polls for the current economic state of affairs, the public is quite clear which President and which party deserves most of the blame, reports TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira in his most recent ‘Public opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress website. As Teixeira explains:

…In a just-released ABC News/Washington Post poll, 60 percent of the public thought the Bush administration deserved a great deal or a good amount of blame for the country’s economic situation, compared to 42 percent who thought the Obama administration deserved that level of blame.
Similarly, in an early September CNN poll, 53 percent of the public thought Bush and the Republicans “are more responsible for the country’s current economic problems,” compared to just 33 percent who thought Obama and the Democrats were more responsible.

It’s sometimes said that Americans have short memories and forgive quickly. But when it comes to assigning responsibility for ruinous economic policy, it’s a different story. As Teixeira puts it, “Conservatives may want to believe the public has forgotten how bad the Bush administration was and blame only the Obama administration for the country’s ills. But that’s clearly not the case.”

For all I know, by now House Democrats may have already made the informal decision whether or not to force a vote on extension of middle-class tax cuts and expiration of high-end tax cuts.
I understand that if the votes aren’t there, they aren’t there. But it will be extraordinarily disappointing if they decide against forcing the vote on grounds that it will make some of their Members “uncomfortable.”
This is clearly the last opportunity prior to November 2 for congressional Democrats to make an impression on voters, not only about their own priorities, but about what sort of policies we can expect if Republicans gain control of the House. The GOP has been able to disguise or draw attention away from their own agenda throughout this midterm election cyle. Making them vote against tax relief unless the bulk of it goes to upper-income Americans exposes their hypocrisy on taxes and on federal budget deficits at the same moment. And this strategy also happens to be very popular, as TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg is expected to personally explain to the House Caucus later today.
There are few true no-brainers is the complicated business of politics, but this may qualify. Having cynically enacted tax cuts scheduled to expire at a date certain in the future in order to disguise their impact on the deficit, Republicans are in no position to label that expiration a “tax hike,” particularly since millionaires will benefit like everyone else from the portion of their income that falls into the lower brackets.
No matter what happens in November, Democrats are going to have to begin forcing comparisons of the two parties and what they stand for going into the presidential cycle of 2012, lest that election become another “referendum” whereby Democrats assume total responsibility for an economic and fiscal situation they largely inherited. This tax vote is the perfect opportunity to begin that process.

Those Democrats who think all the polling data is pointing in the wrong direction should read Sean Trende’s analysis today at the conservative-tilting RealClearPolitics site. It’s not all good news for Democrats, but it’s better than what you often read. Check this out, omitting the DE and NH races we’ve already talked about extensively here recently:

Connecticut Senate – Many race watchers had pegged the Connecticut Senate race as an “upset special.” After all, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal had committed what looked a self-inflicted wound when it was discovered that he had exaggerated his military service. Republican Linda McMahon was far from an ideal candidate, but she was the consummate political outsider in an outsider year, and she had infinite funds to spend on New York media. Rasmussen Reports showed a steadily tightening race, and Democrats became increasingly concerned.
So it had to come as a bit of a relief to Democrats when Rasmussen Reports showed Blumenthal back over 50 percent, and expanding his lead from 7 points to 9 points. He leads 53 percent to 44 percent. This could be statistical noise, but it also could be a signal that Blumenthal has bottomed out, and that McMahon has peaked after solidifying the 44 percent of voters that cast ballots for George W. Bush in 2004. Blumenthal leads by 9.5 points in the RCP Average.
South Dakota At Large – Herseth Sandlin was one of those members that observers were increasingly writing off for dead. She was consistently in the low forties in polling and her opponent, Kristi Noem, was above 50 percent. That’s a kiss of death for an incumbent. But Rasmussen Report’s latest polling shows those numbers reversing now, with Herseth Sandlin at 47 percent and Noem at 45 percent. This comes as Herseth Sandlin starts her ad buy, and as Noem has come under fire for her numerous speeding tickets (the last occupant of the seat resigned after a manslaughter conviction for killing someone while driving). There is a special importance here, because this has been a major Democratic talking point: that once Republicans’ records come under scrutiny, Democrats will rebound.
Nevada 3rd District – Likewise, Dina Titus (abetted by outside groups) has begun her ad barrage against her Republican opponent, Joe Heck. She’s increased her lead to 47/43, from 43/42. She’s still under 50 percent, and she’d like to see a bigger return on a one million dollar investment. But being an incumbent at 47 percent is much better than being one at 43 percent.
Iowa 3rd District – Leonard Boswell likewise looked like a dead man walking, having trailed his GOP opponent by double digits in several polls. Now, an independent polling firm, Voter/Consumer Research (commissioned by a conservative group), shows the Congressman leading his GOP opponent 48 percent to 39 percent. This comes as reports surfaced that the GOP’er, Brad Zaun, had shown up outside an ex-girlfriend’s house in the middle of the night and shouted obscenities at her and her new boyfriend. A word of caution: This was a poll of 300 adults; still, it is somewhat inconsistent with the earlier likely voter polls showing Zaun up by ten points and above 50 percent. There was a subsample of “certain-to-vote” voters that showed a 47.3-41.3 percent Boswell lead, but the margin of error here was likely huge.
Florida Governor – Sunshine/VSS polled the Florida Governor’s race, and finds Democrat Alex Sink leading Republican Rick Scott by two points, 44 to 42 percent. This is good news for Sink, because Sunshine/VSS also polled the Florida Senate race, and found Marco Rubio leading that three-way race by a fourteen point margin, the highest margin of any recent pollster. If we assume that this sample is on the high end for Republicans, then this confirms Sink’s lead. She leads by 4.2 in the RCP Average.
Nevada Senate – Harry Reid’s resurrection from the dead continues. Mason Dixon shows him doubling his lead over Republican Sharron Angle to two points. Okay, I’m being somewhat facetious, but the fact that Rasmussen Reports showed a 5-point swing last week suggests that Reid really could once again be opening this race up. He leads by 2.7 points in the RCP Average….
Oklahoma 2nd District – Dan Boren had shown some real weakness in earlier PPP polling, coming in right around 50 percent. This was terrible news for Democrats, suggesting that even very conservative Democrats could be in trouble this time around. He recently released a poll showing him leading his GOP opponent 65 percent to 31 percent. Even accounting for the fact that this is a campaign poll, it suggests that he is increasingly out of the woods.

Trende goes on to note unhappier polling news for Democrats in Pennsylvania, Oregon, North Carolina and Michigan (and potentially bad news in Iowa), but at a time when the zeigeist suggests an undifferentiated pro-GOP tsunami, it’s good to know that actual data indicates that candidate quality, message, and effort matter for Democrats.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
It’s still a close race, but the odds are that Washington, D.C., mayor Adrian Fenty will lose to D.C. Council chairman Vincent Gray in the dispositive Democratic primary next Tuesday. And many observers are already deploring the racial polarization of our nation’s capital that may be evident in the results, with Gray winning mainly because of overwhelming support among African Americans.
The storyline, written many times, is that Fenty has focused on tough reforms, most especially of D.C.’s horrid public school system, that are mainly of interest to the upscale white gentrifiers who have been colonizing the District in recent years. He has meanwhile ignored, critics say, the economic concerns of the suffering black voters who live outside of, or are being pushed out of Washington’s boom areas by rising rents.
If Gray wins, there’s no doubt that national pundits will immediately associate Fenty’s demise with the political prospects of Washington’s most famous resident, Barack Obama, who has also, it’s often said, forgotten his base.
But as a former resident of the District, who lived in Washington back in the days when Marion Barry dominated local politics, I have to say that the racial polarization present in the Fenty-Gray race seems comparatively benign.
In his later mayoral campaigns, Barry stood forthrightly for the proposition that District government existed to provide jobs for middle-class African Americans (many of them non-District residents), not to deliver services. He depended on what was then called the “Lorton vote,” the families of prisoners in D.C.’s jail. And every issue was polarized on racial lines, with Barry, deploying an argument familiar to ethnic politics of every variety, constantly suggesting that any reform idea was intended to reduce Chocolate City’s self-government.
Then came the mayoral reign of Anthony Williams, who rendered the idea of competent government services non-racial, if not entirely non-controversial.
Adrian Fenty rode into office on Williams’s legacy, and the long-awaited backlash against coldly rational government reforms is manifesting itself. But let’s not treat this as an overwhelmingly racial issue. Vincent Gray is not Marion Barry, and his victory, if it happens, would mainly be a matter of making District government more sensitive to the needs of citizens, mostly African Amercians, who are not doing well economically. Gray’s constituency includes public employees hostile to needed reforms. But he’s hardly promising a wholesale gutting of Fenty’s initiatives.
The bottom line is that racial polarization in voting can be toxic or healthy. The presidential competition between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008 became extraordinarily predictable on racial and ethnic grounds even though, or perhaps because, they differed little on policies. Either one of them would have pursued a similar agenda in the White House. That may be the case in the D.C. mayoral primary too, if Vincent Gray wins and understands his victory as mandating a modification rather than a reversal of Adrian Fenty’s policies.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Among Tuesday’s primaries is a suddenly red-hot contest in usually mild-mannered Delaware, where Republicans have been counting on picking up Joe Biden’s old Senate seat since the day Congressman Mike Castle announced for the race. But now Castle is suddenly looking vulnerable to a right-wing uprising which, in turn, could make Democratic candidate Chris Coons the front-runner going into November. If that happens, Democrats hoping to defend the Senate will become less dependent on wins by vulnerable incumbents like Patty Murray, Barbara Boxer, and Russ Feingold.
To cold-blooded political junkies, the idea of Delaware Republicans tossing Castle is nuts. He’s led every poll from the beginning, has won no fewer than twelve statewide elections in Delaware, and has demonstrated appeal to independents and Democrats. His primary opponent, Christine O’Donnell, is an erratic, if very energetic, conservative Catholic religio-political activist mainly known for outspoken views about sex that would have been considered a bit too rigid in 1950. She also holds the distinction of having unsuccessfully sued a right-wing think tank for gender discrimination after it fired her, and she possesses a history of personal financial woes that would not normally appeal to the pay-your-own-damn-mortgage Tea Party crowd. But she’s had a lot of exposure on conservative national media, and managed to win the GOP nomination against Biden in 2008, garnering 35 percent of the vote that November.
More importantly, Castle is far more vulnerable to the deadly RINO charge than most of the Republican politicians who’ve been given that designation by conservatives. He voted for the House climate-change bill. He’s crossed the gun lobby. And he’s pro-choice. As for association with the much-suspect establishment, Castle has been a statewide official in Delaware for 30 years, as Lieutenant Governor, Governor, and at-large congressman. He went from Dover to the U.S. House in 1992, in an apparent arrangement with Tom Carper generally referred to as “The Switch,” which enabled term-limited Governor Castle to run for Carper’s House seat while Carper (now the state’s senior senator) ran for governor. For Tea Party types, in other words, Castle bears many Signs of the Beast. And O’Donnell’s piled on by rather unsubtly questioning his masculinity, if not his sexual orientation.
Nobody gave O’Donnell much of a chance until very recently, but the stunning victory of Joe Miller over Senator Lisa Murkowski in Alaska seems to have convinced the Tea Party Express to deploy heavily in Delaware on O’Donnell’s behalf, followed, at the last possible moment, by endorsements from the NRA, Sarah Palin, and Jim DeMint. It’s true that these latter worthies weighed in too late to offer anything other than moral suasion, but it has increased the perception that O’Donnell is a hot property. And late Sunday night, Public Policy Polling, which has been tracking Delaware opinion for a while, released a survey showing O’Donnell moving ahead of Castle among likely primary voters by a 47-44 margin, with 55 percent saying Castle is “too liberal.”
Any way you slice it, the tightening Delaware Republican race is pretty good news for Chris Coons, who led O’Donnell 44-37 in an August PPP poll, and has run well enough against Castle to benefit from the bad feelings generated by O’Donnell if Castle survives.
Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that Delaware is also one of the rare places where Democrats think they have a good chance of picking up a House seat: Mike Castle’s House seat, as it happens, where former Lieutenant Governor John Carney, who narrowly lost the 2008 gubernatorial primary to Jack Markell, looked very strong in an August poll against the two Republicans fighting for the nomination to face him.
If Delaware does throw a monkey wrench into Republican plans for control of Congress, no one would be happier than the vice president of the United States, whose first elected office 40 years ago was to the New Castle County Council, then represented in the state senate by Mike Castle, and now supervised by County Executive Chris Coons. Delaware is a very cozy place politically, where Christine O’Donnell stands out like the crazy out-of-state cousin who moved in and wouldn’t leave.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In most of the major competitive Republican primaries this year, three interrelated factors–money, ideology, and influential backers–have been on display in eyecatching ways. The political furies of 2010 have lured an unprecedented number of self-funding neophytes onto the ballot; Meg Whitman, Rick Scott, and Linda McMahon being just the most profligate examples. It’s the rare Republican primary where most, if not all candidates decline to call themselves “true conservatives” and impugn the ideological purity of their opponents. And it’s been a banner year for endorsements and counter-endorsements, with numerous candidates benefitting (and in some cases suffering) from identification with the national GOP, national or local Tea Party Groups, Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint, and other richly symbolic figures.
All these factors are at work in New Hampshire, whose Republican U.S. Senate primary on September 14 is the marquee contest in that state. The prize is the nomination to succeed retiring Republican Senator Judd Gregg. The race has drawn national attention because–well–it’s New Hampshire, whose citizenry plays such an outsized role in the selection of our presidents, and also because this is one of the open Republican Senate seats that Democrats hope to win in order to counteract the slaughter of their incumbents elsewhere.
Early on in this race, the gods of the Washington Republican Establishment settled on Attorney General Kelly Ayotte as their New Hampshire candidate. She was presentable, had no voting record to exploit, and seemed appealing to independents; yet she was also entirely acceptable to “movement conservatives,” particularly New Hampshire’s very influential anti-abortion lobby. Best of all, polls showed her running comfortably ahead of the putative Democratic candidate, Congressman Paul Hodes. When Ayotte obtained the coveted Mama Grizzly endorsement from Sarah Palin in mid-July, most outside observers figured she’d locked it all up, despite annoying attack ads run by a very free-spending businessman, Bill Binnie, whom Palin went out of her way to slur as a RINO.
But it turned out the fun was just beginning. Binnie has tossed well over $5 million of his own money into the race, allowing him the important luxury of heavy advertising on expensive Boston media, and drawing blood from Ayotte by accusing her of unwillingness to go after illegal immigrants, along with negligence in monitoring a notorious Ponzi scheme that had been in the news for months. Ayotte responded in kind, and the two have engaged in a slugfest, wherein each constantly accuses the other of being “liberal.” In this classic murder-suicide dynamic, both candidates’ negatives have risen, creating an opening for the two other major candidates, fiery “true conservative” veteran Ovide Lamontagne, a past gubernatorial nominee, and another self-funding businessman, Jim Bender.
At the end of August, an endorsement far more powerful than Sarah Palin’s occurred, when the infamous 900-pound troglodyte of Granite State politics, the New Hampshire (formerly Manchester) Union-Leader, came out for Lamontagne, providing invaluable free media coverage and a barrage of criticism aimed at Binnie and Ayotte. The latter has been under constant attack by Lamontagne and the Union-Leader for appearing to support Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court nomination, and for agreeing to pay out $300,000 in state funds to Planned Parenthood as part of a court-ordered settlement of a suit against a state parental-notification law.
The one recent poll of the contest, a September 1 survey by Magellan Strategies, showed Ayotte at 37 percent, Lamontagne at 21 percent, Binnie at 17 percent (with a 54 percent unfavorable rating), and Bender at 13 percent. Lamontagne has since hit the airwaves for the first time, calling himself the “only conservative” in the race, and Binnie’s apparently decided to go all in for an appeal to independents and the ever-shrinking ranks of Republican moderates by trumpeting his pro-choice views.
Going into the last few days of the primary campaign, Ayotte is still the favorite, but if Lamontagne catches her by Tuesday, it will be one of the more improbable upsets of the year, and a distressing one for national Republicans–who are well aware that he’s the one candidate running behind Paul Hodes in published polls. The possibility that rich “RINO” Bill Binnie’s many attacks on Ayotte could indirectly nominate Lamontagne goes to show that, even amid all the cacophony this Republican primary season, money can still speak the loudest.

Conservative and Republican surrogate organizations are launching their fall midterm ad campaigns this week in a big way — big enough to overshadow ad spending by pro-Democratic groups. The ads offer interesting insights to what the GOP perceives as pivotal constituencies, Democratic weak spots and, perhaps the GOP’s vulnerabilities. As Jeremy P. Jacobs reports in his Hotline On Call post, “Starting Lineup: 60 Plus Steps Into The Election“:

…60 plus, which bills itself as the conservative alternative to AARP, is going up with nearly $4M worth of ads in 10 congressional districts Thursday and Friday. The group plans to stay up with the ads for four weeks and this is just the beginning of what 60 plus plans to spend this year, a source with the campaign tells Hotline On Call.
The ads are another example of the advantage Republicans hold this year among third party groups. When added to the millions the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Americans for Prosperity and American Crossroads are spending, 60 Plus’ ads show that the Democrats are at a distinct disadvantage this year in this area.
The ads are all similar. They feature testimonials from senior citizens and criticize the Democrat in the race for backing health care reform and siding with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

Jacobs links to this sample ad, said to be similar to others, which strikes me as more ‘preaching to the choir’ than crafted to win swing voters. Here it is:

What is interesting about the ’60 plus’ ad is the targeting of seniors, as well as the shameless fear-mongering about HCR. But does sneering at “liberals” really win any new hearts and minds? Perhaps it’s a ‘turn-out-the-base’ ad, a clue to the GOP’s overall strategy. In this opening series, they may be banking that most swing voters will stay at home, or perhaps they will address swing voters in another ad later on.
Clearly, the Republicans are not taking seniors for granted, hopefully because their internal polling indicates many seniors have a problem with Republican fooling around with Social Security and Medicare. There should be more than enough material for Dems and progressive groups to launch a counter-offensive targeting seniors. The problem is money to buy ads. Now would be a good time for Democrats to contribute to support pro-Democratic ads, since time and available ad space is limited.
Jacobs says the ad buys are targeted to specific House races:

The ad buys are in districts that are both must wins for the GOP this year — such as Rep. Allen Boyd’s (D) FL 02 and Rep. John Boccieri’s OH 16 — and districts that would likely represent the GOP winning back the majority — such as Rep. Joe Donnelly’s IN 02 and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ in AZ-08.
The districts, broken down below, do share one common thread: In each, the Republican challenger is at a substantial cash-on-hand disadvantage to the Democrat. These ads, like the other conservative third-party group ads, will be critical to GOP challengers’ — and the NRCC’s — efforts to combat the Dems’ cash advantage.
The ads will go up in the following districts on Thursday, with the size of the ad buys in parenthesis: AZ 01 ($395K), AZ 05 ($460K), AZ 08 ($164K), FL 02 ($340K), FL 08/24 (same ad — $925K), PA 03 ($194K), PA 11 ($250K), TN 08 ($485K)….Ads will go up in OH 16 ($463K) and IN 02 ($200K) on Friday.

Jacobs also links to a GOP ad for the campaign to hold Republican Senator Richard Burr’s seat. This one seems more designed to win swing voters, albeit with the shopworn ‘Democrats are spendthrifts’ meme. What gives it additional buzz is that the same actors were featured in a pro-Democratic ad which was credited with helping to unseat Republican Senator Elizabeth Dole two years ago — a clever idea. I’m not sure it’s effective, though. You decide:

Note that seniors are also the lead characters in this ad, although a 20-something woman is thrown into the mix to cover another demographic they are worried about. I would hazard a guess that Elaine Marshall, his opponent, is polling well with young women in NC. This ad requires a more creative response to piggy-back on the existing ad buzz in this campaign (maybe a humorous depicting of Burr as an empty suit, or maybe The Invisible Man, since his lack of concrete accomplishments is already a bit of a meme in NC political circles). But Democrats would be well-advised to take the senior vote as seriously as do their adversaries.
The other thing that these ads share in common is that they are attack-focused, with a little “not like us/me” tacked on at the end of the NC ad. There’s not much else an obstructionist party can do but attack the pro-active party and its candidates. In response, Democratic challengers and incumbents alike should not waste too much time playing defense. The “He/she distorted my record” whine is the swan song of the loser. Especially for the post-Labor Day segment of midterm campaigns, the best defense is a ferocious counter-attack in ads and in every opportunity for media sound-bites.
The formidable challenge for Dems in the coming weeks is adequate funding for ads. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is reportedly budgeting $75 million for political ads, almost all of it for defeating Democrats. Many other conservative groups have ponied up big bucks for ads to defeat Democrats. Such are the rancid fruits of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission.

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In recent days, as increasingly negative projections regarding the November election have appeared, a substantial number of Democrats have been seized with a genuine sense of panic. Many political commentaries have tended to suggest that what is happening may not be just the result of structural factors like the lower participation of pro-Obama groups in off-year elections or the deep recession. Rather, they suggest that a major shift in basic attitudes is occurring – that many Americans are now shifting their allegiance to the Republicans and abandoning Obama and the Democrats. Many Democrats have a sinking fear that support for Obama and the Dems is somehow collapsing.
In order to seriously evaluate this view we have to begin by recognizing that the raw data collected in opinion polls does not come with its own built-in framework for interpretation. Rather, most political opinion poll data is cognitively “shoehorned” into one of two distinct mental models: the “horse race” model or the “sociological” model.
The horse race model is based on the image of two candidates in competition for office and assumes that most voters are continually listening to and evaluating information about the candidates and are therefore very strongly influenced by campaign events like party conventions and televised debates as well as by the daily news headlines. In one formal model in political psychology — called the “online processing” model — voters are visualized as keeping a constantly updated running tally of their impressions of both candidates.
Most national political commentary implicitly accepts the horse race model and generally describes voters as though they were indeed constantly reviewing and revising their impressions and evaluations of candidates and policies. In consequence the ups and downs of candidate approval or voting intentions measured in opinion polls are assumed to be a real-time reflection of this ongoing process.
The sociological model, on the other hand, visualizes a voter’s political attitudes, including decisions about which political party or candidate to vote for, as to a substantial degree determined by an interlocking set of basic value systems that are acquired during childhood socialization and which are then used to determine what the person considers “good” or “bad” and “right” or “wrong.” Once any particular candidate, policy or issue is clearly labeled, categorized and judged within a person’s network of basic value systems, the process of then deciding whether or not to support the candidate or express approval of a particular policy is essentially automatic. Change in these value-based attitudes occurs slowly if at all.
A person’s basic value systems are inherently and inescapably rooted in his or her specific culture and, after the 2000 election, political commentators became very sharply aware of the deep social division of America into the two distinct cultures of “Red vs. Blue” America – the “Red” America that tended to be white, male working class, rural, small town and southern vs. the “Blue” America that tended to be urban, coastal, educated, female and non-white. Numerous commentators noted that these two cultures had very distinct value systems that shaped the evaluation of particular candidates, political parties, polices and issues in dramatically different ways.
In academic political science there is vast literature that studies the demographic and social roots of attitudes like political partisanship, views about issues and candidate choice and few if any political commentators would seriously deny the importance of these underlying social and demographic factors. But, as a practical matter, most daily and weekly political commentary adopts a purely horse race model in which voters are implicitly treated as if they were completely autonomous decision-makers who are reacting entirely to the latest political events.
This approach is understandable since political commentators necessarily try to focus on what is new and novel. The drawback, however is that this perspective can also induce very severe tunnel vision. It needs to be balanced by also looking at current opinion data from a large-scale sociological perspective as well.

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When John Boehner sent up his raise-the-age-for-Social Security-Benefits-to-70 trial balloon back in June, he caught some predictable flack. Maybe not enough, if the current street protest demonstrations in France against raising the age for retirement benefits are any indication.
Yes, I know, unions are much stronger in France, as is class consciousness in general. France is far more progressive in terms of social benefits than the U.S., as well as other European countries. And yes, there is growing and broad discontent with the Sarkozy government’s performance on a range of economic concerns, which helped to get those huge crowds out in the streets of Paris and across France.
Nonetheless, it was President Sarkozy’s proposal to raise the age of eligibility for minimum retirement benefits from 60 to 62 ( from 65 to 67 for a full pension) that sparked the most massive protests demonstrations France has seen in two decades. It’s not just the graying of the French population. It’s also the feeling among middle-aged and young workers that they are about to get screwed because Sarkozy’s center-right government has mismanaged the economy. Apparently, the U.S. isn’t the only country in which the government’s primary retirement security program is a ‘third rail.’
Sarkozy isn’t the first French leader to catch hell for trying to weaken retirement benefits. In 1995, President Jacques Chirac withdrew his proposal to weaken retirement benefits for transport workers after strikes crippled France.
The differences between French and U.S. politics notwithstanding, American seniors don’t like politicians weakening their government retirement benefits any more than do their counterparts in European countries. They may not take it to the streets quite so readily, but they will take it to the polls, and they vote in disproportionately large numbers, especially in midterm elections.
Boehner’s proposal wouldn’t fully kick in for 20 years — intended no doubt as a buffer zone to protect his party from angry seniors. But many seniors are rightly suspicious of any screwing around with Social Security, as a ‘slippery slope’ that sets a dangerous precedent. And the 20 year buffer zone wouldn’t come as much comfort to middle-aged workers, who are also a large midterm demographic — the age 45-59 demographic were 34 percent of mid-term voters in 2006. It’s up to Democrats to remind them, again and again, that Boehner’s idea delays their retirement eligibility.
So the events in France may indicate that Boehner got off way too easy. A little grumbling here and there doesn’t get it as a response, when the guy who will be running the House of Representatives if his party carries the day on November 2nd starts setting the stage for screwing millions of American workers.
No, it’s not as much an issue of immediate concern as jobs and economic recovery. But Boehner’s putting the weakening of Social Security benefits on the table ought to merit more outrage. As usual the print and broadcast media let him off easy, but that’s partly because Democrats didn’t raise enough hell about it. That can be changed by raising the issue more frequently in speeches and ads, and maybe in time enough to do some good on November 2nd.