The news for Dems is very good in Robert Creamer’s HuffPo post “Evidence Arizona Immigration Law May Be Fatal Mistake for GOP.” Creamer, one of the Democratic Party’s more astute strategists, reviews some recent polling data and finds Democratic candidates now even in the Texas gubernatorial race, pulling ahead in the Colorado Senate race and gaining in the contest for the California governorship — all because Republican immigrant-bashing is backfiring in a huge way. Creamer explains:

The passage of the Arizona “papers, please” anti-immigration law has forced Republican politicians around the country into a political box canyon that does not offer an easy escape. For fear of offending the emergent Tea Party – and other anti-immigrant zealots in their own base — they are precipitating a massive realignment of Latino voters nationwide.

Down in red-state Texas:

According to data released by Public Policy Polling (PPP), Texas Governor Rick Perry has lost his early lead over Democratic challenger Bill White and the race is now tied. The movement from a previous PPP poll in February comes entirely from Hispanic voters. PPP reports that:
“With white voters Perry led 54-36 then and leads 55-35 now. With black voters White led 81-12 then and 70 -7 now. But with Hispanics Perry has gone from leading 53-41 to trailing 55-21….there is no doubt the (Arizona) immigration bill is popular nationally. But if it causes Hispanics to change their voting behavior without a parallel shift among whites then it’s going to end up playing to Democratic advantage this fall.”
…As if to sharpen their anti-immigrant brand, last week the Texas Republican State Convention voted for a platform that included a plank calling on the state government to adopt a state law like the one in Arizona.

Up in Colorado:

PPP reports that its latest polls in Colorado show that incumbent Democratic Senator Michael Bennett has gone from tying his opponent Republican Jane Norton to a three-point lead largely because his lead among Hispanic voters has soared from 12 to 21 points.

And out in the Golden State:

California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman felt compelled to back tough anti-immigrant measures to get the Republican nomination. Now her support among Latinos is hemorrhaging, dropping from 35 to 26 points from March to May. Since the primary, Whitman has begun to waffle on her tough anti-immigrant stand but the damage has been done – what’s more, it’s memorialized in videos that Democrat Jerry Brown is sure to loop over and over on Spanish language TV.

Creamer notes that the AZ “Papers, please” law is viewed by millions of Latinos as a direct insult to their personal dignity and “a litmus test that tells a Hispanic voter whether or not a political candidate is on their side – the critical threshold test of voter decision making.” He describes the GOP as playing with “political fire” and “permanent marginality.” Even more ominously for the Republicans, Creamer adds,

A few months ago, no one would have predicted a massive turnout in November among Hispanic voters. That appears to have changed…If a surge of anti-Republican Hispanic voters destroys the careers of enough politicians who thought that pandering to anti-immigrant fear was good politics, the whole political narrative about immigration reform will change.

Creamer predicts that Republicans will try to repair the damage after the elections, to no avail. “…In all likelihood it will be very difficult to get the anti-immigrant toothpaste back into the tube.”

Probably no one in the United States has a better handle on long-term demographic changes and their impact on politics than TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira. So it’s a major event when Teixeira releases a new study that consolidates most of the recent work he’s done on this subject, along with some new thoughts about the implications of demographic change for the strategies of the two major parties.
Demographic Change and the Future of the Parties, a working paper published by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, contains Teixeira’s most detailed analysis yet of the demographic trends that have long convinced him that we are likely to be entering an era where Democrats hold a significant advantage in national contests.
The big picture Teixeira paints is familar enough: the future electorate is currently being shaped by the growth of relatively pro-Democratic groups–notably minorities, college-educated (and especially post-graduate-educated) white voters, younger voters, and those with no religious affiliation–and the decline of relatively pro-Republican groups, most importantly non-college educated white voters. Geographically, Democratic success in “mature” and “emerging” suburbs is more than offsetting Republican strength in exurban areas, while Republican majorities in high-growth states are being eroded by the very elements of their population that are growing most rapidly.
But what can Republicans do to deal with an electorate that is less sympathetic than today’s? Teixeira suggests that moderation on cultural issues is particularly critical if the GOP is to strenghten its position among college-educated white votes, and particularly “millienials” who have recently entered the electoral picture. But more importantly, he says, Republicans need to offer voters something other than tax-cutting and antigovernment populism. It’s rather obvious that Republicans at the moment are moving in a very different direction than the demographic trends would indicate.
Democrats, on the other hand, are positioned well with their demographic coalition, but must show that their policy agenda can successfully address the country’s problems:

Conversely, if the Democrats fail to produce–whether through ineffective
programs, fiscal meltdown, or both–even an unreformed GOP will remain very
competitive despite the many demographic changes that are disadvantaging the
party. The next few years will tell the tale.

As Teixeira observes, the GOP’s current strategy seems to depend almost entirely on Democratic policy failures, along with turnout advantages that make their minority coalition more powerful than their numbers would suggest.
Now I suspect that most conservatives, if confronted directly with Teixeira’s findings, would object that he’s placing too much emphasis on trends within demographic groups as measured by a single presidential election, 2008, in which Republican policy failures, not the core message of the GOP, was repudiated. In other words, voters rejected the “big government conservatism” of the Bush administration, and are now showing they did not endorse a shift to “big government liberalism” under Obama. That’s an argument that is at least superficially plausible, but the trends Teixeira is talking about have been underway for decades, so writing off 2008 as a temporary reaction to George W. Bush is a dubious proposition, and there’s almost no evidence that fast-growing demographic groups are attracted to the current anti-government populism of the GOP. At the moment, at least, likely Republican gains in 2010 are attributable to very big turnout disparities and to the low-hanging fruit created by big Democratic gains in 2006 and 2008, not to some fundamental shift in the ideology of the electorate.
Some conservatives of a more apocalyptic bent seem to be under the impression that the events of the last two years–the financial sector collapse, double-digit inflation, TARP and other “bailouts”, the stimulus package, ObamaCare–are producing a massive conservative shift in political attachments similar to the pro-Democratic shift generated by the Great Depression. In other words, you can forget all the data and ignore all the long-range trends; we’re in entirely new political territory now.
That sounds a lot like wishful thinking among ideologues who have always been able to divine, beneath the surface and despite the facts, a conservative majority in the electorate which is always on the brink of being manifested once and for all.
So as a Democrat, it’s fine by me if Republicans want to toss all the objective evidence in the nearest trash can and put their faith in the proposition that 2010 likely voter tracking polls, not long-term trends, are the best evidence of where the country is going over the next few decades. But meanwhile, Teixeira’s analysis should remind Democrats that even the most favorable demographic landscape won’t produce electoral majorities if policies fail to improve real-life conditions in the country. Particularly for the party of public-sector activism, governing matters most.

Tunku Varadarajan of The Daily Beast, a conservative analyst, has a nicely succinct take on the President’s dismissal of Gen. Stanley McChrystal:

Obama has reason to be delighted with himself right now: He has sacked a recalcitrant big-mouth; he has entrusted said big-mouth’s job to a certified hero and military star; and he’s taken that star out of contention for 2012, making his own re-election that much more likely, given the headless turkey that is currently the GOP.

You don’t have to buy into the dubious idea of a 2012 Petraeus presidential candidacy to see the move as a political masterstroke, if only because conservative idolatry of Petraeus means this is one move that the Right cannot attack.

Every once in a while you’ll get a statement of such unvarnished honesty from a politician that it takes your breath away. Check out this excerpt from a Politico interview with Sen. Lindsey Graham about his recent backtracking on climate change, which has unraveled many months of negotiations and placed any and all Senate action in question:

The two-term senator explained that the idea of increasing offshore drilling “resonated with people” back home. Once the BP spill took that possibility off the table, Graham figured he’d be foolish to jump on board with climate change legislation without getting his biggest ask.
“The problem is, the people I did business with, climate change is a religion to them,” Graham said. “This has been a business deal for me. They heaped praise on me when I was advancing their agenda. And now I’m re-evaluating and reassessing what I can and will do, and all of a sudden, I’ve become the bad guy. Well, I’m the same guy.”
“I think people somehow misread that I somehow woke up one morning with a message from God to go save the planet,” he said. “That never motivated me. What motivated me was an opening, a vacuum. You had EPA regulations coming. I’m a big nuclear power advocate. I saw the ability to put together a deal that would be unique and different.”

Now it’s not every day that a U.S. Senator boasts about his own cynicism, proudly identifies himself as an agent for a particular industry, and then mocks people with motives that aren’t so crass. But you have to appreciate that to a guy like Graham, letting anyone back home in South Carolina Republican circles think that he might just have a sincere interest in dealing with global climate change would be potentially fatal. Cutting a deal for the nuclear industry back home is acceptable; caring about the planet is not.

Yesterday’s one statewide primary (not runoff) was in Utah, where two contests of national significance played out pretty much as expected.
Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson, a Blue Dog who fell just short of the 60% of delegates needed to win the nomination at the State Democratic Convention last month, defeated retired schoolteacher and progressive activist Claudia Wright by a comfortable 68-32 margin. The rumored Republican crossover vote for Wright didn’t appear, and local progressives are probably satisfied they got Matheson’s attention before knuckling down to help him get re-elected.
The Republican Senate primary between entrepreneur Tim Bridgewater and attorney (and former SCOTUS clerk) Mike Lee was, as anticipated, very close, but Lee won 51-49, a margin of just under 4,000 votes. Lee fought Bridgewater pretty much to a draw in the major population centers of the Wasatch Front, and won the runoff with a 60-40 victory in southwest Utah’s Washington County.
The national resonance of Lee’s narrow win derives from its importance to national conservative forces, notably Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund (which became a campaign issue on grounds that DeMint was intervening in the state to secure a dumping ground for SC nuclear waste), FreedomWorks, the Tea Party Express and Erick Erickson of RedState. Indeed, some of Lee’s national supporters insisted on treating Bridgewater as no better than vanquished incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett, who finished third at the state convention and thus didn’t qualify for the primary.
As I noted in the runup to the Utah primary, the Lee-Bridgewater contest showed how rapidly the GOP is moving to the right, because supposed RINO Bridgewater held a variety of policy positions (including abolition of corporate and personal income taxation and the phasing out of several major federal departments) that would until recently have placed him on the far fringes of the conservative movement. And redefining conservatism to require ever-more-extreme positions is precisely what the out-of-state forces supporting Lee want to do.

Brooklynbadboy at Daily Kos flags a new DNC video clip and does a particularly nice job of framing it:

This is the second ad and it is much tougher than the first. The way to capitalize on Barton is not to ask him to step down, it is to make sure everyone knows Barton is what you’re going to get if Republicans win the election.
People talk about how they want to get away from negative ads, but I’m not buying it. The choice is binary. People appreciate knowing who stands for what. This fall, what they need to know is that the Republican Party is nothing more than an extremist group of nutcase fringe. If they get power, they will get back to destroying America just like they did under George W. Bush.
My hat is off, finally, to the administration for getting in gear. Keep it up. Attack Republicans. Every. Single. Day.

Here’s the ad:

That’s the spirit.

North Carolina was a happenin’ place politically in 2008, particularly for Democrats, with a very exciting and important presidential primary, and of course, a general election in which the Tar Heel State was one of three southern states carried by Barack Obama. There was also a competitive governor’s election and a couple of very interesting House races.
But this year? Not much excitement so far. In the May Democratic Senate primary, turnout was a languid 425,00, down about 40% from the turnout in the last midterm competitive Senate primary in 2002. But in yesterday’s highly competitive runoff, only 157,000 voters bothered to show up. Nor was this just a Democratic problem: in the three competitive U.S. House runoffs for Republicans yesterday, turnout was 15,241 in the 8th District, 6428 in the 13th District; and 2770 in the 12th District. The apathy was infectious: I had to use the search function on the Charlotte Observer site today to find any coverage of the runoffs.
In any event, in the Senate runoff, Elaine Marshall did a much better job of navigating the circumstances than did her opponent, the DSCC-recruited Cal Cunningham, beating him 60-40 in a race where the only public poll (back in mid-May) had the two candidates tied. A look at the county returns indicates that Marshall pulled third-place primary finisher Ken Lewis’ supporters into her camp, while Cunningham did little to expand his appeal.
While some made this out as an ideological struggle between the more progressive Marshall and the more centrist Cunningham, it looks to me like the latter simply failed to make a good enough case as to why North Carolina Democrats should prefer him to a very familiar figure who, after all, has won four times statewide, including a victory over NASCAR legend Richard Petty.
Having symbolically avenged her 2002 Senate defeat to another nationally-recruited candidate, Erskine Bowles, Marshall must now prove her viability against incumbent Sen. Richard Burr, an invisible man in Washington and to some extent in NC, who could be the ideal representative of an apathetic population. All joking aside, Burr’s small footprint in the Senate could make him vulnerable, even in a pro-Republican year like this one.
The aforementioned GOP House runoffs largely went as expected. In the 8th, the self-immolation of wild-man self-funded conservative Tim D’Annunzio ended in a 61-39 loss to Harold Johnson. In the 13th, BP/Obama conspiracy theorist Bill Randall–like SC’s Tim Scott, a hard-core African-American conservative–easily defeated Bernie Reeves. And in the 12th, past nominee Greg Dority won the nomination to take on veteran Rep. Mel Watt in the runoff that only 2770 voters chose to participate in.
Maybe NC political races will heat up later this summer or sizzle in the fall. But right now, it’s as though 2008 soaked up all the energy anyone wants to expend for a while.

As I expected, the cluster of organizations and interests that represent the most conservative wing of the increasingly very conservative Republican Party had some real fun last night in South Carolina’s runoff elections.
Nikki Haley, the Mark Sanford protege who had staked out the “most conservative” territory in her gubernatorial race long before anything was said about her sex life or ethnicity, won the runoff over congressman Gresham Barrett by a two-to-one margin, essentially winning everywhere other than a few counties in Barrett’s upstate base. Similarly, another Sanford protege with a can’t-outconservative-me rep, state legislator Tim Scott, beat Charleston County Councilmember Paul Thurmond by better than two-to-one for an open congressional seat.
I’ve written enough about Haley over the past few weeks; suffice it to say that she won this race the moment her old staffer, blogger Will Folks, accused her of marital infidelity in a way that failed to convince much of anybody but made the entire campaign All About Nikki. And it was especially appropriate that Sarah Palin endorsed Haley just before the Folks furor began; the Haley saga was a pitch-perfect projection of Palin’s own persecution complex–you know, the Good Old Boys and the liberal lamestream media trying to smear a brave Mama Grizzly for telling the simple right-wing truth.
Scott’s victory was equally interesting, and perhaps an even bigger deal for the Republican Right, which will have an African-American spokesman in Congress for the first time since J.C. Watts retired. The symbolism of an African-American defeating the son of Strom Thurmond within shouting distance of Fort Sumter is obviously very striking. But it’s not as though Scott’s win repudiated any aspect of Thurmond’s legacy other than the blatant racism he abandoned by the 1970s; Scott was himself co-chairman of ol’ Strom’s last Senate campaign.
The third great event for South Carolina conservatives was the absolutely humiliating 71-29 defeat of U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis by Tea Party vehicle Trey Gowdy. This result will serve as an enduring reminder to GOP elected officials that The Movement will find someone to run against them if they stray from orthodoxy. Inglis’ fatal act of sacrilege was probably telling fist-shaking protestors at a town hall meeting to stop paying attention to Glenn Beck.
South Carolina has always been a special place for the more radical variety of conservatives. They certainly seemed to have the whole state wired last night.

Those who think that TX Rep. Joe Barton’s views on the British Petroleum oil spill are outside the mainstream of the Republican Party should read Eugene Robinson’s WaPo column on the topic. Says Robinson:

The Texas congressman’s lavish sympathy for BP — which he sees not as perpetrator of a preventable disaster but as victim of a White House “shakedown” — is actually what passes for mainstream opinion among conservative Republicans today…Barton was only echoing a statement that Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) had issued a day earlier in the name of the Republican Study Committee, a caucus of House conservatives whose Web site claims 115 members. The statement groused that there is “no legal authority for the president to compel a private company to set up or contribute to an escrow account” and accused the Obama administration of “Chicago-style shakedown politics.”
…Just to review: A group constituting roughly two-thirds of all Republicans in the House takes the position that President Obama was wrong to demand that BP set aside money to guarantee that those whose livelihoods are being ruined by the oil spill will be compensated. In other words, it’s more important to kneel at the altar of radical conservative ideology than to feel any sense of compassion for one’s fellow Americans. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how today’s GOP rolls.

Some Republican leaders smelled the impending danger in putting the profit priorities of a British corporation above the legitimate concerns of working Americans, and tried to back-pedal away from the “shakedown” rhetoric. But others could not restrain their proclivity to grovel before their corporate contributors. As Robinson notes,

While the party leadership has managed to squelch members of Congress who might have been tempted to weigh in on Barton’s side, the conservative amen chorus can’t help itself. Rush Limbaugh called the agreement on the $20 billion escrow fund “unconstitutional” and accused the administration of acting like “a branch of organized crime.” Newt Gingrich said the White House was “extorting money from a company.” Stuart Varney of Fox News claimed — falsely — that Obama had moved to “seize a private company’s assets” and complained that the action was “Hugo Chavez-like.” Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol said that “I have no sympathy for BP,” but then proceeded to be sympathetic, offering that “it’s not helpful for the country, for the economy as a whole, for the president to bully different companies and different industries.” I’d advise these people to get a grip, but they’re just saying what they believe. It just happens that what they believe is absurd.

As TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira has just explained, an overwhelming majority of the public wants BP to take responsibility for the disaster the company has caused, in stark contrast to the aforementioned Republicans. If progressives can successfully remind swing voters in the mid-terms that Republican leaders still cling to a policy of giving corporations — even abusive foreign ones — a free ride, it just might save the Democratic majority.

This is the last multi-primary Tuesday we will see until August, with runoffs on tap in North Carolina, South Carolina and (not so you’d really notice it) Mississippi, and primaries in Utah.
I’ve written up the Carolina runoffs here and the Utah primary here for FiveThirtyEight, so you can check out those posts if you are interested.
To the extent that the MSM even notices today’s primaries, the big news is almost certain to be from South Carolina.
Top billing will be given to Nikki Haley’s gubernatorial runoff win in SC, which will be largely treated as a stirring account of the triumph of an Asian-American woman over slander and bigotry in the paleolithic Deep South. Much less noted will be the fact that Haley’s win will represent a major victory for Jim DeMint’s brand of take-no-prisoners conservatism. Indeed, the ideological character of Haley’s candidacy has been (outside SC in particularly) largely lost in the storms of controversy (real or contrived) about her sex life, ethnicity and religion. The challenge for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Vincent Sheheen between now and November will be to refocus attention on Haley’s ideology–which could be too radical even for South Carolina–and away from her “story” and her Republican tormenters.
Another South Carolina “story” we are likely to hear a lot about tonight involves Tim Scott, an African-American conservative state legislator who is in a runoff with Strom Thurmond’s son (Paul) for the GOP nomination for a relatively safe Republican congressional seat. Like Haley, Scott comes right out of central casting for the conservative movement, and he’s favored over Thurmond today.
The third SC headliner will likely be the mandatory retirement of conservative Republican U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis, who ran a relatively poor second in the primary to Tea Party favorite Trey Gowdy. Inglis’ primary sin was a vote for TARP.
Today’ weather in the Palmetto State is (appropriately) steamy with a chance of thunderstorms, which could hold down what is already expected to be low turnout.
In NC, it’s really too close to call in the Senate Democratic runoff between Secretary of State Elaine Marshall and Iraq War vet Cal Cunningham, but with turnout expected to be relatively terrible, I’d bet on Marshall as the favorite of party activists both locally and nationally.
And out in Utah, the Republican Senate primary between Tim Bridgewater and Mike Lee has become a fascinating struggle between two candidates who are far to the right of what very recently passed for mainstream conservatism. Yet as I noted in my FiveThirtyEight post, Bridgewater is being treated by Lee supporters as some sort of godless liberal RINO. If Lee wins (and it’s anybody’s guess who will prevail), the entire Utah campaign could serve as a case study in how rapidly the GOP has moved right in the last year-and-a-half.