As you may have noticed, the latest right-wing “scandal” (at least for those who are not mesmerized by the “exposure” of liberal opinion in the leaked archives of the JournoList) is the planned construction of a mosque and Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero in New York. This is essentially a local land use issue of the sort that New York authorities deal with every day, but the “threat” of this mosque has already become a cause celebre around the country, particularly with the Tea Party folk.
But the most radical reaction so far has been not from any Tea Party spokesman or talk radio jock, but from the former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and a putative presidential candidate in 2012, Newt Gingrich. Check this statement out:

There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.

Yes, Gingrich is arguing that religious liberty for Muslims in the United States should be made contingent on religious liberty for non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia. Anything less is a “double standard.”
I suppose this sounds reasonable to people who think all or most Muslims are “Islamists,” or buy Newt’s dubious assertion that the name of the proposed facility, Cordoba House, is a deliberate Islamist provocation aimed at heralding some future armed conquest of the United States. But put aside the particulars here and think about the idea that a unilateral commitment to religious liberty by the United States represents a “double standard” inviting our destruction.
This isn’t a particularly new idea. For a very long time some American Protestants resisted full civil rights for Catholics on grounds that Catholic countries did not extend similar rights to Protestants. You’d think Newt Gingrich, as a very avid recent convert to Catholicism, would be aware of that history and its relevance to his “double standard” argument.
Newt’s line, of course, is an analog to the argument beloved of some conservatives that in the civilizational struggle with Islamism, American principles of decency–say, a reluctance to torture prisoners–are just signs of contemptible weakness that make our enemies laugh at us. It’s richly ironic that the kind of people who deeply believe in “American exceptionalism”–the notion that much of what is good on this planet would disappear if America began to resemble countries like Canada or England or France–are sometimes among the first to argue that America should abandon its distinctive beliefs whenever it is convenient. But Gingrich carries the freedom-is-weakness argument to a brand new extreme. Wonder how his fans would react if he suggested that the right to bear arms should be suspended for the duration of the War On Terror to keep guns out of the hands of Islamists? The mind reels.

One of the most common political journalism narratives of recent weeks has been that Republicans are about to pull off a truly historic sweep of governor’s races, setting up an absolute domination of redistricting and replenishing the GOP’s presidential bench.
Maybe so, but there are some interesting counter-indications as well, and in states that could have a big impact on redistricting.
As noted here often, Democrat Roy Barnes is by all accounts competitive against any Republican in Georgia, a state where Republicans control the state legislature and where the additional of a congressional seat will create a major redistricting fight.
Another big redistricting cockpit is Texas, and there Democrat Bill White is certainly competitive against Rick Perry.
And now comes a new surprise: a PPP poll showing Democrat Alex Sink with a sizable lead in the governor’s race in Florida.
It appears that the nasty Republican primary battle between Attorney General Bill McCollum and moneybags Rick Scott is hurting both candidates. And the independent candidacy by Lawton Chiles, Jr., assumed in the beginning to be a real problem for Democrats, may actually be helping Sink. At the moment, she leads Scott 36-30, with Chiles taking 13%, and she leads McCollum 36-23, with Chiles at 14%.
With the incumbent Governor, Charlie Crist, having left the GOP to run for the Senate as an independent, GOP prospects in Florida suddenly don’t look that sunny. And that could matter nationally, since Florida is a state where Republicans pulled off an impressive gerrmandering feat during the last decennial redistricting round, and might be expected to do so again if they hang onto the governorship and the legislature.
Perhaps a bean-count of states where Republicans control governorships will look pretty good after November. But in terms of the bigger states, and those with a palpable effect ont he future shape of the U.S. House, Democrats are showing signs of life in surprising places, and could do much better than expected.

I’ve found this year’s primaries in my home state of Georgia to be very interesting. Clearly, Georgians do not agree. Despite a host of competitive contests in both parties, total turnout in yesterday’s primaries was about 22%, which is pretty pathetic.
In any event, the consequences wrought by those few voters were pretty interesting. On the Democratic side, former governor Roy Barnes took the next step in his attempted redemption from a huge stumble in 2002, when his grossly overconfident re-election campaign was upset by a party-switching good ol’ boy named Sonny Perdue. This time around Barnes impressively defeated an African-American statewide elected official by a three-to-one margin, doing especially well in heavily African-American urban areas. Two Democratic congressmen, Hank Johnson and John Barrow, survived primary challenges.
Republicans set themselves up for some potentially wild-and-crazy runoffs. Sarah Palin’s candidate, Karen Handel, will face Newt Gingrich’s candidate, Nathan Deal, on August 10. All kinds of nastiness between these two candidate broke out late in the primary contest; Handel has basically called Deal a crook and Deal has basically called Handel a godless liberal. It’s not likely to get more civil in the runoff.
The Republican congressional primaries produced some odd results, too. You have to have some sympathy for 9th district congressman Tom Graves. He won his gig after a special election in May and then a runoff in June, all because Nathan Deal resigned the seat to (take your pick) devote more time to his gubernatorial campaign or short-circuit an ethics investigation. Then he had to run for a full term in yesterday’s primary, and once again, he’s in a runoff against the same candidate, Lee Hawkins. So Graves and Hawkins will be facing each other for the fourth time in three months.
Then you’ve got state Rep. Clay Cox, who was endorsed by a who’s-who of Georgia Republican politics in his bid to succeed the venerable right-winger John Linder in a safe GOP district. Cox dutifully endorsed Linder’s hobby-horse, the “Fair Tax” proposal, and did everything else expected of him. But he finished a poor third, losing not only to Linder’s former chief of staff, Rob Woodall, but also to talk radio host Jody Hice.
In general, the August 10 runoffs will be mostly a Republican affair, and in that rarefied company, we can expect a lot of more-conservative-than-thou one-upsmanship. Looking forward to the general election, Democrats are in reasonably good shape to do relatvely well in this red state, in this bad year.

Granted, the year is only half done, but if they gave an annual award for the most ridiculous, sour grapes attempt to invalidate an election, it would probably be shared by the Minnesota GOP’s Ex-Senator Norm Coleman and Governor Tim Pawlenty. Perhaps the best account of their sorry attempt to unseat Senator Al Franken comes from Jay Weiner’s Salon.com article, “Get over it, Republicans: Al Franken won.” Nobody’s going to explain it any better than Weiner:

…Minnesota Majority, a very conservative “watchdog” group, released a report (PDF) on June 28 that claims a lot of things. But when you get to the bottom line, the group seems to be saying that according to its research, 341 felons in Hennepin and Ramsey counties who should have been ineligible to vote actually cast votes in the Franken-Coleman election.
The report, flawed in the opinion of most legal analysts, got legs and wings and Internet echo chamber reverberations from — who else? — Fox News last week, and then other news organizations chased it, and right-wing blogs jumped on it, and the Minnesota Republican Party called for a statewide investigation and Coleman called Franken “an accidental senator” and Gov. Tim Pawlenty said there was “credible evidence” that the alleged felons who maybe voted possibly could have flipped the election’s final result. Breathless.

Here’s the math:

Franken, if you remember, won by 312 votes….Now, let’s take one key stat that Minnesota Majority focuses on, that 341 alleged felons from heavily Democratic Hennepin and Ramsey counties voted. For the moment, take that at face value.
That would mean, based on voter turnout numbers, about 70 percent of them (240) would be from Hennepin and 30 percent (101) would be from Ramsey. Taking into account the percentages for Franken, Coleman and others in each of those counties, Franken would net 51 votes.
Remember, he won by 312. Let’s take away those 51 in this silly game. That still isn’t enough to switch the result.

Weiner, author of the forthcoming “This Is Not Florida: How Al Franken Won the Minnesota Senate Recount,” dissects the twisted logic of the report:

…What makes anyone think felons would vote only for Franken? Indeed, it was Franken’s legal team during the recount’s election contest trial that raised the prospect that felons voted in the election; Franken’s lawyers found one such voter in a northern Minnesota county who voted for Coleman. Dare I ask: If Franken opened the door on such an avenue, why didn’t Coleman’s lawyers pursue this felon-voting issue then? They had their chance. And why does the Minnesota Majority report focus on the core-city counties?

Three guesses on that one. Weiner has more to say, reflecting unfavorably on the integrity of Governor Pawlenty, who is frequently mentioned as a possible GOP Presidential candidate:

As for the governor, he has spoken three times about the recount, and he’s been a bit fast and loose with his facts. First, in the early days of the recount, he spread — on Fox News — the completely untrue story about Minneapolis ballots that were supposedly being driven around in the alleged trunk of an unknown and nonexistent elections official. He spoke of this days after it was reported that the story was a fable.
Later, in a call with reporters, he overstated by thousands of percentage points the increase of absentee voters in 2008, trying to say that Franken won the election because of that…In fact, Franken won the recount by 49 votes before absentee ballots were counted.
Now, there are his comments — on Fox News — about the Minnesota Majority report and how it’s “quite possible” felon voting tipped the election. The facts aren’t there.

Pawlenty’s transparently blundering partisanship is not likely to sit well with mainstream MN voters, who have already endured an excruciating marathon recount process for the Franken-Coleman race. With his latest wallow in the sour grapes, Coleman may be destroying whatever fading chance he had for a re-run against Franken.
Franken, meanwhile, is doing an exceptional job of establishing himself as an able legislator and a happy warrior with a great sense of humor — a worthy heir to Paul Wellstone.

It’s very clear that the 2010 midterm elections will revolve around turnout patterns, not some big change of public opinion since 2008. Intensifying an already strong tendency in midterm elections, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents at present are looking marginally more likely to vote than Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. Here’s how Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling expresses it:

There continues to be no doubt this fall’s election will have more to do with whether Democrats can turn out Obama voters than keep them in the fold. Very few voters are shifting their allegiance from the 2008 election- 8% of Obama voters say they’ll vote Republican this time but an almost equal 6% of McCain voters say they’ll vote Democratic this time. When it comes to voters switching sides it’s basically a wash, but Republicans are doing well across the country due to Democratic disengagement.

So voter enthusiasm matters, particularly when it happens to coincide with the longstanding pattern in midterm elections of older, white voters turning out at significantly higher levels than young and minority voters, who were a big part of the Democratic base in 2008. But how’s about all the talk about “excitement,” and the exceptional energy the Tea Party movement is said to have brought to the Republican Party? Here’s Jensen again:

Among voters who are ‘very excited’ about voting this fall Republicans hold a 52-40 advantage. How much that matters is up for debate though. Scott Brown led the Massachusetts Senate race 59-40 with ‘very excited’ voters but won by only 5. Chris Christie led the New Jersey Governor’s race 60-34 with ‘very excited’ voters but his final margin of victory was only 4 points. As I’ve said before unexcited voters count the same as excited ones and our polling so far this cycle has suggested the Democrats who answer our surveys vote, whether they’re excited about it or not. So I’m not sure how much the wide GOP advantage with ‘very excited’ voters really matters.

So to sum it up, enthusiasm matters up to the point that it motivates someone to vote. Beyond that, a vote’s a vote, and you only get to vote once. It’s a simple point, but one often lost on people in both parties who value “energy” and “excitement” a bit too much. Unless their mood is communicable, or translates into campaign activity of some sort, super-psyched voters who snake-dance to the polls as part of some “movement” have no more weight that those who hold their noses and vote unhappily. That’s worth remembering next time you see one of those measurements of voter “excitement.”

Today’s another primary day, this time in my home state of Georgia, and there are a host of contests on tap in both parties, though indications are that turnout will be mediocre at best.
If you are interested in a full rundown, check out my preview over at FiveThirtyEight. I’ve also done an update on the Palin versus Gingrich dimensions of the Republican gubernatorial race for The New Republic.
The very latest news is a poll of that race by Magellan Strategies that shows Karen Handel executing a Nikki Haley-style surge into a dominating first-place position, and longtime front-runner John Oxendine collapsing into a poor fourth place. Magellan also shows Nathan Deal and a rapidly climbing Eric Johnson battling for a runoff spot opposite Handel. What makes the poll seem credible is that it reflects an intensification of trends in the contest that have been apparent for a while. And if Handel does romp in the primary and eventually get the nomination, the hype for Palin will be formidable, since the Alaskan won’t be competing with a trumped-up sounding “sex scandal” for the credit for her candidate’s ascendency, as she had to do in South Carolina.

Here we go again with the talking about ‘independents’ as if they had a coherent, unified ideology. Writing at Dailyfinance.com, Pallavi Gogoi describes independents as “an important, influential and powerful voting bloc,” disregarding the fact that Independents have varied political leanings. Some are too liberal for both major parties, some are too conservative, while others see themselves as right in the middle between them. Still others simply dislike both parties, and many others don’t have a clue about what either party stands for.
Golgoi does, however, cite a useful statistic of particular interest to Democrats, the fact that 59 percent of Independent respondents in an ABC News/Washington Post poll support extending unemployment benefits (compared to 80 percent of Democrats and 43 percent of Republicans). She points out that in March, 12 percent of Independents were unemployed, compared with 11 percent of Democrats and 6.5 percent of Republicans, according to a Gallup poll analysis prepared for DailyFinance.
In other words, Republican leaders bad-mouthing and/or opposing the extension of unemployment benefits may be scoring points with the arch-conservative element of their constituencies. But a healthy majority of the politically-amorphous group self-identified as Independents, and even 43 percent of Republicans, think they are wrong. Democrats would be wise to emphasize the extension of jobless benefits as critically important to the economy, as well as to the jobless, in a series of nation-wide ads.

Like most political junkies, I spend a lot of time staring at polls, and for a complete amateur, I have a reasonably good understanding of what makes for good and bad polls, and also know that (1) averaging lots of comparable poll data is usually how you get a decent handle on reality, and (2) comparing data from the same sources is a relatively good way to identify trends.
But now and then a major poll comes along with a blare of trumpets that raises so many red flags that you generally need to toss back a shaker of salt before you even read the thing.
That’s true of the new “Power and the People” series initiated today by Politico.
Aside from the cheesy title, let me briefly count the ways in which this instrument for weighing public opinion is suspect:
It involves (1) internet-based polling, (2) conducted and (3) analyzed by Mark Penn, with a separate sample of (4) “DC elites;” determined according to (5) arbitrary definitions of “political involvement” and (6) even more arbitrary income and educational levels; with the whole thing getting a (7) huge, Tea Partyish spin of comparing the fat-and-happy liberals of Washington with the despised and suffering masses of Americans, who don’t like Barack Obama or any of that guvmint stuff. I could add Politico‘s own sensation-seeking involvement as suspect factor #8, but they are respectable enough as journalists to give them just one mulligan for running a headline that is sure to thrill Fox News.
On factor number (7), I have to object especially to the neo-Marxist planted axiom in an inflammatory sidebar article that suggests the godless liberal elites don’t understand America because the economy in DC is booming, thanks to the “massive expansion of government under President Barack Obama” that has “basically guaranteed a robust job market for policy professionals, regulators and contractors for years to come.” You woundn’t know from this hammerheaded story that the major battle going on in Washigton recently was over Democratic efforts to maintain unemployment insurance and avoid massive state and local layoffs, in the teeth of Republican resistance; or that the Pentagon budget, which conservatives treat as the ultimate sacred cow, is the single biggest driver of the DC economy; or that the most sizable areas of increased domestic spending do not involve “policy professionals, regulators and contractors” but automatic spending on Social Security and Medicare, which has almost no impact on the bank accounts of “elites.”
I will try to force myself to look at this series more carefully as it unfolds, but at this point, it sure looks like a heavily loaded contribution to an anticipatory zeitgeist keyed to the viewpoint of future Republican “elites” that Politico expects to rule Washington directly.

Now that all possible angles comparing the 2010 mid terms to those in 1994 have been explored, Rebecca Kaplan argues at Slate.com that the more relevant comparison is the 1982 elections. According to Kaplan’s post, “The Lessons of 1982: Why Democrats need not fear the ghosts of 1994“:

…Speculation is running rampant, particularly in the media and especially among Republicans (and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs), that 2010 could be a replay of the Democrats’ lowest political moment in the last half-century: the 1994 midterms, when Republicans seized 52 seats in the House and eight in the Senate, taking control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. But the similarities between 2010 and 1994 are superficial. The more relevant election–the one that gives a better gauge of the magnitude of losses the Democrats may see–is the 1982 midterms. Although some political scientists were predicting that the Democrats would gain as many as 50 seats, on Election Day they took only 26 seats from the Republicans.
…In many respects, today’s economic conditions are identical to those in 1982. The yearly change in real disposable income per capita is a key factor in predicting midterm outcomes: When their wallets are fuller, people are more likely to send their representatives back to Washington. And right now this number is almost the same as it was at this point in 1982. For the third quarter of 2010, Moody’s Economy.com is predicting a 0.4 percent increase in real disposable income per capita from last year–a fairly stagnant number that does not show much economic growth for the average citizen. In the third quarter of 1982, the change in real disposable income per capita was 0.5 percent–also fairly flat. The unemployment rate is also eerily familiar; it’s now pushing 10 percent, while in 1982 it was 9.7 percent. In 1994, meanwhile, the economy was in better shape than it is now or was in 1982, with a 6.1 percent unemployment rate and 2.3 percent increase in personal disposable income from the third quarter of 1993.

This last point regarding joblessness is not so reassuring. Looking at it from a slightly different angle, if the economy was better in ’94, and we still got creamed, how is that encouraging for Dems?
Kaplan points out that Dem and GOP congressional candidates are spending about equally now, as they did in ’82. While in 94, Republicans outspent Dems by an average of $91,383 in each race — or nearly $5 for every $3 spent by Dem candidates. Clearly, Democratic candidates have got to match their GOP adversaries in 2010, if they want to keep running the House and Senate. Kaplan goes out on a bit of a limb, noting “Without outspending the Democrats, it is unlikely the Republicans will be able to achieve all the pickups they are hoping for.”
As Kaplan explains, Republicans, under Gingrich’s “message mastery” did a particularly good job of working existing media in 94, while Democrats have a significant edge with new media in 2010. She adds that Clinton “lost control of the national conversation” and was distracted by non-economic issues, while Republicans hammered away. That is not the case today.
In a sense, however, all comparisons are not as relevant as some would have us believe. The information revolution that has occurred since ’94, and even more so since ’82, is a huge wild card. Political messaging has been transformed by the internet, Fox-TV and now MSNBC. Not to diminish the importance of economic indicators, but it matters a lot that candidates now have more opportunities to communicate with voters, and progresives seem to have an edge over conservatives in tapping this vein — for now.
Kaplan makes another good point in noting the deepening division in the GOP constituency exemplified by the tea party circus, which has produced some dicey candidates, like Rand Paul and Sharron Angle, while Dems have so far eschewed the circular firing squad of earlier years.
Here’s hoping Kaplan’s insights pan out. The key thing for Dems is to learn from electoral history, not to be limited by it. If Kaplan is right, the key challenges for Dems are to keep “control of the national conversation” and invest the bucks needed to fire up the base and win a healthy share of the persuadables.

It’s been obvious for quite some time–dating back at least to the fall of 2008–that the Republican Party is undergoing an ideological transformation that really is historically unusual. Normally political parties that go through two consecutive really bad electoral cycles downplay ideology and conspicuously seek “the center.” Not today’s GOP, in which there are virtually no self-identified “moderates,” and all the internal pressure on politicians–and all is no exaggeration–is from the right.
But as Jonathan Chait notes today, there are two distinct phenomena pulling the GOP to the right this year: there’s ideological radicalism, to be sure, but also what he calls “tactical radicalism:”

Obviously the conservative movement is intoxicated with hubris right now. Part of this hubris is their belief that the American people are truly and deeply on their side and that the last two elections were either a fluke or the product of a GOP that was too centrist. It’s a tactical radicalism, a belief that ideological purity carries no electoral cost whatsoever.

This is what I’ve called the “move right and win” hypothesis, and it’s generally based on some “hidden majority” theory whereby every defeat is the product of a discouraged conservative base or some anti-conservative conspiracy (e.g., the bizarre “ACORN stole the election” interpretation of 2008). As Chait observes, there is a counterpart hypothesis on the left, but is vastly less influential, and anyone watching internal party politics these days will note the major difference in tone between Democratic primaries where moderation is generally a virtue and Republican primaries where it’s always a vice.
While many Democrats (including Chait in the piece I’ve linked to) are interested in the short-term implications of tactical radicalism, such as the possibility that GOP candidates like Sharron Angle or Rand Paul could lose races that should be Republican cakewalks, there’s a long-term factor as well that no one should forget about for a moment. If, as is almost universally expected, Republicans have a very good midterm election year after a highly-self-conscious lurch to the right, will there be any force on earth limiting the tactical radicalism of conservatives going forward? I mean, really, there’s been almost no empirical evidence supporting the “move right and win” hypothesis up until now, and we see how fiercely it’s embraced by Republicans. Will 2010 serve as the eternal validator of the belief that America’s not just a “center-right country” but a country prepared to repudiate every progressive development of the last century or so?
That could well be the conviction some conservatives carry away from this election cycle, and if so, what would normally pass for the political “center” will be wide open for Democrats to occupy for the foreseeable future.