Drew Westen’s HuffPo column, “Why the Democrats Are Losing Ground As Obama Is Gaining It” should generate some concern in Democratic Party circles. Westen, author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, cites recent Rasmussen polls, which indicate a worrisome trend for Dems:

As the latest Rasmussen polls show, in March the percent of voters who consider themselves Democrats dropped by 2 percent–four times the rate of decline among Republicans (even as the Republicans were publicly flailing, producing numberless budgets, and unwittingly branding themselves as the party of old ideas and the party of “no”). More ominous, the margin of voters supporting a Democrat over a Republican in a generic ballot for Congress dropped to its lowest point since both the Iraq War and the economy had clearly gone south by 2006: one percent (40 vs. 39%).

Westen attributes the decline in Democratic self-i.d. to a failure of political ‘branding’:

But the best products fail without good branding. In politics, you don’t win on ideas alone…Successful branding requires two things: creating positive associations to your own brand, and differentiating it from competing brands. In politics, that means offering voters a clear, memorable, emotionally compelling narrative about your party’s core principles, while presenting them with an equally clear, memorable, and evocative story about the other party that would not make anyone want to be associated with it. If there were ever a time Democrats could offer both stories, this is it.

While Westen’s premise would be more convincing if there were another poll or two indicating similar results, his corrective prescription makes a lot of sense, regardless. He points out that “repetition is essential psychologically, neurologically, and empirically to branding,” and FDR provided a useful template for Democratic presidents:

Roosevelt’s consistent branding of the Republicans as inflexible ideologues at the same time as he showed what progressive, pragmatic action and Democratic leadership could offer led to a political realignment that lasted 40 years.

Westen acknowledges that this has not been President Obama’s ‘style’ — the President prefers to criticize negative values like greed, rather than people, and it’s hard to argue with his success thus far. However, Westen believes that it’s critical for Dems to provide a credible voice to do the needed branding:

But someone needs to be in the fray other than the GOP. The worst thing to be in politics is silent, because it allows the other side to shape public sentiment uncontested. It wouldn’t hurt to have a Southern voice like Tim Kaine’s behind a megaphone with a “D” written on it. But whether it’s Kaine or someone else with credibility and charisma, somebody needs to start saying what Democrats and Republicans stand for other than Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, and Richard Shelby. That’s a lesson we should have learned a long time ago…In politics, there is nothing so deadly as silence.

Right now it’s hard to identify anyone south of the presidency who has the megaphone to make it stick. Westen’s point about the need for more of a ‘southern voice,’ including Governor Kaine, is well taken. Former Presidents Clinton and Carter are busy being statesmen, but it would be helpful if they joined the fray from time to time. Perhaps it’s time for Dems to organize a southern ‘echo chamber’ composed of southern governors, senators and house members in a concerted branding project.
On the positive side, the progressive blogosphere has made an excellent contribution towards branding the Republicans as the party that ran America into “the ditch…by the side of the road” Westen refers to, and some of it (not enough) has reverbed into the traditional media. But the blogosphere can’t do it all. The Democratic Party will now have to step up and lead the way in more clearly defining itself as the Party of solutions and progress.

Do check out David Waldman’s Daily Kos post, “GOP descends further into sick cynicism,” a body slam really, of the right-wing blowhards (in an excellent video montage) who were trying to nail twisted versions of the GOP’s traditional “weak sister” meme on Obama for his handling of the pirate attacks. Problem was, they were all taped at about the time that Navy Seals were engaged in a heroic rescue of Captain Phillips — on orders from President Obama. Should be fun watching the Republican mouthpieces equivocate their way around their comments in the days ahead. Here’s one of the juicier quotes from Waldman’s post:

While all of these pampered fops were sitting, doughy asses-in-chair and having their pusses painted up in TeeVee make-up, so that they could come on the air and go all in against America, actual heroes were at that very moment doing the real dirty work of executing that rescue.

In terms of political strategy, the rescue should give Obama some cred as a decisive commander-in-chief, who is clearly prepared to order a genuinely needed military operation, even though he didn’t don a flight suit and “prance around on the deck of an aircraft carrier,” as General Wes Clark once described the theatrics of his predecessor.

Every now and then you read something that provides a valuable insight into an entire ideological persuasion. That’s what former Bush flack Ari Fleischer served up today on the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed pages.
Ari wanders all over tax policy in this piece, eventually presenting his own “plan” that would abolish payroll and (naturally) estate taxes; make income tax liability universal; and somehow ban any future tax changes that aren’t levied across all income categories. But the guts of his argument is the increasingly familiar conservative claim that po’ folks are deliberately looting rich folks by voting for “income redistribution” (i.e., for Democrats) while escaping the burden of paying for the goodies via income taxes.
If this theory were true, you’d figure that the bulk of federal spending would be composed of “redistribution” programs. But according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, as of last year “safety net” programs (other than in health care) targeting federal dollars to low-to-moderate income people amounted to about 11% of the budget. Add in another 7% for Medicaid and SCHIP, and that’s 18%, leaving 82% of the budget going for defense, Social Security and Medicare, and all the discretionary programs that aren’t aimed in any way at “income redistribution.”
So the “looters” are being pretty generous with wealthier Americans, particularly since the working poor pay payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare that represent a significantly larger percentage of their own incomes than those up high on the economic ladder. But I dunno: maybe Ari thinks people without income tax liability disproportionately benefit from the armed forces, the criminal justice system, highways or pollution control.
In any event, the argument that a progressive tax system leads to “redistribution” is based on the premise that voting behavior is largely motivated by a personal cost-benefit analysis of what each citizen gets back from government for his or her “investment” of tax dollars. Carried to its logical end, this point of view would make an effective democracy contingent on flat taxes–not just flat tax rates, but flat tax assessments, and the elimination of any means-tested programs whatsoever.
Tim Fernholz of TAPPED speculates that Ari and like-minded conservatives are developing a new doctrine of higher taxes to restrain federal spending:

It’s sort of a demand-side “starve the beast” strategy. Conservatives have already proven that you can’t cut spending by cutting taxes, because people like the government. Now they’d like to cut spending by raising taxes, thinking if they can use the government to tax people on the poverty line, they’ll presumably have a broader, more angry constituency for their tea parties. But of course that would require having GOP politicians campaign and vote for tax increases on working-class people, so good luck with that.

I personally think all the caterwauling about upper-income tax burdens is a little more subtle in its motivations: it’s an all-purpose excuse for the perpetual pursuit of lower taxes on the wealthy, and for overt GOP appeals to taxpayer selfishness generally. By projecting class-warfare motives onto the poor, conservatives are rationalizing class-warfare politics for those at the other end of the income spectrum. Add in some incendiary rhetoric about poor folks being “losers” who are parasites on the productive Atlases of the world, and Ari’s antiseptic exercise in tax policy numbers crunching turns very quickly into the demagoguery of Rick Santelli and Joe the Plumber.

Today Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com joins the pushback against Republican critics of the president’s alleged abandonment of “bipartisanship” and pursuit of “polarization,” a subject I wrote about last week. One problem with the theory, Nate suggests, is that GOPers haven’t exactly been making good-faith efforts to compromise:

If there is a credible case to be made that the Republicans — or at least the House Republicans — started out with any intentions of compromising, I have yet to see it. Instead, the House Republicans voted as a near-uniform block against issues as trivial as a bill to delay the date of the digital TV changeover. Not only have they not compromised, but they never seemed to have any intention to do so.

But Nate then raises a more pertinent question: what, exactly, would the critics have Obama do? Abandon his own agenda in favor of theirs?

What isn’t clear to me, however, is what exactly folks like [Jay] Cost would have liked the Administration to have done differently. Obama pressed hard — although with some hiccups — on the stimulus package, but its magnitude was less than what many liberals were hoping for. He is attempting to push forward, through his budget, issues like health care and cap-and-trade, but these things were at the core of his positioning throughout the primaries and general election.
Meanwhile, Obama has angered the left on a number of issues ranging from the decision to have Rick Warren give the invocation at the inaugural, to the bank bailout, to his abortive attempt to name Judd Gregg as his commerce secretary, to his appointment of Larry Summers, to his committing additional troops to Afghanistan, to his position on state secrets. Obama has also come in for some liberal fire for his purported lack of urgency on issues like the Employee Free Choice Act and repealing the ban on openly gay troops in the military.

The bottom line is that a lot of the conservative carping about Obama’s “partisanship” is so disingenuous that its authors are exhibiting a lot of chutzpah in accusing the president of dishonesty about his intentions.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist
I disagree strongly with Jay’s analysis of Obama and polarization, but he’s being entirely straightforward in his arguments.

It’s no secret that arguments for economic inequality depend on two different kinds of rationales. One is simply that of efficiency: permitting a significant amount of wealth accumulation provides capital for investment and growth, while also creating incentives for hard work and innovation. But the other, which is powerful in our essentially moralistic land, is moral: those who create wealth and improve economic productivity deserve, via their hard work, talent, and willingness to bear risks, deserve a higher standard of living than their sluggish, mediocre, and risk-averse fellow-citizens.
A variation on this moral theme is that a nation where your standard of living (not to mention those of your children) is largely determined by the rewards and punishments of rigorous competition is a stronger and more virtuous country–indeed, an exceptional country that has earned certain hegemonic privileges by its virtue and prosperity.
But in determining national economic policies, the “earned privilege” rationale for inequality begins to break down when inherited privilege comes into play. And that’s why it’s more than passing strange that the estate tax–or as Republicans like to call it, the “death tax”–has such weak support in Washington even among politicians who profess no particular objection to progressive income taxes.
With his usual sharp writing, Michael Kinsley addresses this anomaly in a Washington Post column today, and briskly runs through the “small business” and “incentive to accumulate wealth” arguments for eliminating or greatly reducing estate taxes.
But he goes on to do something else: taking on the usual assumptions we make about earned privilege:

Perusing the Forbes 400 list of America’s richest people, it’s striking how few of them made the list by building the proverbial better mousetrap. The most common route to gargantuan wealth, like the route to smaller piles, remains inheritance. The ability to pass money along to your kids may motivate many a successful executive or investor to work harder, but it can’t possibly motivate those kids to inherit harder in order to pass it along once again.
Dozens of Forbes 400 fortunes derive from the rising value of land or other natural resources. These businesses are fundamentally different from mousetrap building. Land does not need to become “better” to increase in value, and that value increase doesn’t produce more land. Yet other fortunes depend directly on the government. The large fortunes based on health care and pharmaceuticals would not exist if not for Medicare and Medicaid. The government hands out large fortunes even more directly in forms as varied as cable-TV franchises; cellphone licenses; drilling, mining and mineral rights; minority small-business loans; and other special treatment.
Most important, every American selling anything benefits from doing so in the world’s richest market. An American doctor earns many times what the same doctor would earn in, say, India. This is not because he or she works many times harder. It’s not even primarily because our government doles out hundreds of billions for health care each year. It’s because we are a richer society, for reasons the American doctor had nothing to do with.

So the association between wealth and merit really isn’t as strong as it looks. And now you’d think it would be especially weak, in a big economic downturn, as millions of people who haven’t suddenly become slackers or lost their talent nonetheless lose their jobs or their assets. And that’s why it’s really odd that the “tea party” movement has emerged so rapidly this year, and that so many Republican politicians are embracing it avidly. Like the “going Galt” phenomenon with which it is closely associated, the “tea party” protests are largely being organized around the idea that virtuous and successful people are being excessively taxed to support depraved losers. And getting back to the two different rationales for economic inequality, the teapartyites almost exclusively rely on moral as opposed to prudential arguments for reducing taxes on “wealth creators.”
To be fair, some participants in “tea parties” may be more upset about bailouts of bankers than about bailouts of middle-class mortgage defaulters or “redistribution” of income to poor people or people who are by any definition simply “down on their luck.” But just as the Republican tax agenda in Washington depends on middle-class rhetoric while actually aiming almost exclusively at reduction of taxes on upper-income earnings, much of the caterwaulting about Wall Street subsidies among the protesters seems to thinly disguise a more fundamental hostility to the principle of ability-to-pay as being a legitimate factor in setting tax rates–again, on moral grounds.
In other words, the tea-party folks are really swimming upstream. At a time when the connection between virtue and economic success is especially weak in the minds of a majority of Americans, they’re ready to revolt against Washington for failing to reinforce it or to punish “losers.” And that’s why the undoubted righteous anger around the country about financial institution bailouts probably won’t congeal into some sort of effective political movement, aside from the influence it exerts on the two parties in Washington. The angry ones are angry for reasons that differ dramatically when you look just beneath the surface.

In the debate over “polarization” that’s roiled the commentariat this week, one particular point of contention is whether partisan polarization is bad for the country, or in some other sense “abnormal.” Yesterday Ezra Klein cited an analysis of congressional voting patterns from the late nineteenth century until recently to argue that “bipartisanship” is the anamoly:

This halcyon era of bipartisanship was a short blip that was primarily the product of a grotesque alliance between the anti-civil rights Dixiecrats and the conservative Republicans who would eventually absorb them. There’s very little to fondly recall about that.

But I think the story is a bit more complicated than this “short blip” interpretation would suggest. The data Ezra cites involves average voting differences between congressional Democrats and Republicans at any given time: average is the key word here. That’s a very different proposition than the sort of suspend-the-differences, hands-across-the-water connotations of the word “bipartisanship. From the 1940s through the 1970s, there was plenty of polarization in Washington; but it didn’t nicely comport with party lines. Some of the polarization was internal, within the parties, and some was between the parties, or external, depending on the issue. And you can certainly make the argument historically that party realignment occurs when internal polarization comes to outweigh external polarization.
During the civil rights era, for example, it’s not as though party differences disappeared; on the role of the federal government in economic life, there was a relatively stable divide between Ds and Rs regardless of region, with some variations. But on the issues related to civil rights, the alignment of southern conservative Democrats and conservative midwestern and western Republicans eventually became more important than the differences on other issues (including economics) that had long divided them. Because a similiar dynamic was underway that united non-southern Democrats and northeastern Republicans, the imbalance between internal and external polarization produced a party realignment and the ideologically homogenous parties we perceive as “normal” today.
The same thing’s happened at other points in American political history. Most famously, prior to the Civil War the Democrats and Whigs were quite polarized externally over tariff and banking policies. But on slavery, and even on the foreign policy issues (e.g., the Mexican War) that were influenced by the slavery issue, each party was internally polarized. This untenable situation led to the creation of the Republican Party, which absorbed non-southern Whigs and many non-southern Democrats, even as southern Whigs drifted into the Democratic Party and stayed there for another century.
Similarly, in the late nineteenth century, there was lots of polarization: we had some of the most savagely fought elections, with among the highest turnout levels, in U.S. history, although the two parties were mainly polarized over the tariff, patronage, and the residual racial issues left over from Reconstruction. Economic dislocations produced a growing internal polarization in both parties over monetary policy, farm policy, and regulation of corporations, and in 1896, a realignment began to occur, though this time it occured between the existing major parties rather than through the birth of a new party system.
I could go on and on, but the main point here is that ideological and partisan polarization has always existed, as has agreement across party lines, depending on which issue dominated the national agenda, generated votes in Congress, and influenced national, and particularly presidential, elections. Perceptions of polarization and bipartisanship are often made in hindsight, when the issues that dominate one period of political history are read back into the dynamics of the previous era. The partisans of the 1880s would have been shocked to discover that their successors mostly viewed their violent disagreements as trivial. And the partisans of the 1840s and would have similarly shocked at the subsequent view that the Democratic and Whig parties of that time were contrivances that existed simply to paper over the “real” battle over slavery that raged just under the surface.
In other words, we may not know for some time whether today’s partisan polarization is stable and semi-permanent, much less “normal.” So all the arguments in favor of or opposed to “bipartisanship” or “polarization” in the abstract may ultimately miss the point.

TDS Co-editor Ruy Teixeira has a post up at the Center for American Progress noting that complaints about too much government spending aren’t finding much of a sympathetic constituency, while a healthy majority of Americans believe creating jobs is the better way to “balance the budget.”

In a late March Democracy Corps poll, 61 percent agreed that, “In order to balance the budget in the long term, it is more important to make investments that will lead to new jobs and industries and create economic growth,” rather than, “In order to balance the budget in the long term, it is more important to limit the amount government spends on costly new programs” (37 percent).

Nor is the “Obama is trying to do too much” meme generating a lot of support:

And the public doesn’t buy the conservative line that Obama is trying to do too much by pursuing health care reform, clean energy, and a 21st-century educational system (as he does in his budget) when he should be focused only on the economy. In the same poll, 63 percent agreed that, “The challenges America faces are too big to ignore. President Obama is right to seek solutions on health care, energy, and education while still making the economy his top priority.” That’s compared to just 33 percent who thought that “President Obama is trying to do too much. He should put his entire focus on the economy and deal with health care, energy, and education when we’re through this crisis.”

The “blame Obama” for our “economic situation” meme isn’t getting any traction either, and an even more significant majority is very clear about who caused the current economic mess, as Teixeira notes:

According to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll, the public has not forgotten Bush’s culpability—not by a long shot. When asked how much blame the Bush administration should be assigned for the country’s economic situation, 70 percent said “a great deal” or “a good amount.” The analogous figure for the Obama administration was just 26 percent.

All of which adds up to a pretty solid mandate for the Obama Administration and the Democrats.

The word of the week in the chattering classes seems to be “polarization.” Based largely on a new Pew Research poll showing the gap between Barack Obama’s approval ratings among Rs and Ds being higher than those of six previous presidents at the same point in their tenures, conservative observers, and some progressives, are happily burying “bipartisanship” as a strategy associated with the administration.
Yesterday James Vega cited and then demolished a Michael Gerson column making the “most polarizing president” argument. But as someone who wrote approvingly of Obama’s strategy of “grassroots bipartisanship” back in December, I want to come at the “polarization” claim from a different direction: was all of Obama’s bipartisanship talk on the campaign trail and in his first days as president just a shuck or a big mistake?
I don’t think so.
Now one could take issue with the Pew analysis of contemporary polarization, pointing out that those previous chief executives at this point in their presidencies were still getting their act together and basking in the fading glow of post-election good feelings, whereas Obama basically had to act as proto-president–without any actual authority– the day after the election, and has been forced to press forward with policies guaranteed to accelerate the usual partisan fissures. No president since FDR has had to take so many immediate steps so certain to arouse partisan opposition.
But even if you take the Pew approval rating comparisons as fair or relevant, the inference that Obama’s bipartisan strategy has failed misses the very important point that successful polarization was always one option the strategy was designed to produce. Obama’s bipartisan rhetoric and outreach was aimed at presenting Republicans politicians and activists with a choice that would be beneficial to the administration and the Democratic Party no matter which way the decision went: either enough GOPers would cooperate to make enactment of the Obama agenda much easier–perhaps splitting the GOP in the process–or they’d go to the mattresses and isolate themselves, helping Democrats expand their coalition in both the short- and long-terms. Republicans have decisively chosen the second course, and are harvesting increased support from a shrinking party base.
The reaction to another new poll, the New York Times/CBS survey, has focused on the generally positive reviews of Obama’s performance and the future direction of the economy and the country. But the more striking numbers reflect the self-isolation of the Republican Party. As Christoper Orr pointed out yesterday, the overall favorability rating of the GOP is at the lowest level in the 25 years that the Times has been measuring it. At the same time, the percentage of the electorate self-identifying as Republican is down to 23%, the second lowest level (the lowest being two months ago) since 1992, while the gap between D and R self-identification is 16 percentage points, compared with 7 points on the eve of both the 2008 and 2006 elections.
And there’s evidence the shrinkage of the GOP could continue. Despite every effort of Republican officials in and out of Washington to present the fight over the Obama budget as a manichean choice between socialism and Americanism, 27 percent of self-identified Republicans approve of Obama’s budget priorities, and about the same percentage explicitly favor Obama’s approach to the economy over that of congressional Republicans. Talk all you want about how low rank-and-file Republican support for Obama has sunk: there’s still a sizable gap between 27 percent and zero–the percentage of congressional Republicans voting for the administration-backed budget resolution.
Meanwhile, as Charlie Cook and others are pointing out, Obama’s support among the increasing percentage of the electorate self-identifying as Democrats or independents is sky-high among the former and at a steady three-to-two positive margin among the latter.
This doesn’t look like a failed strategy to me. It doesn’t, of course, look like “bipartisanship,” either, because the Republican Party made a corporate decision that unity and partisan differentiation were more valuable than a bipartisanship that most GOPers didn’t want in the first place. And that decision largely explains the tone of hysteria that has infected most conservative interpretations of the Obama agenda, so similar to the tone exhibited by the McCain-Palin campaign when it was on the ropes last October. All the shrieking about “socialism” is intended, consciously or unconsciously, to mask the extent to which the GOP has, amazingly, moved to the right as the post-Bush era begins.
I happen to think Republicans were determined to make this shift to the right in any event, but the fear of being contaminated by cooperation with the Obama administration or congressional Democrats probably accelerated it. No one should be fooled by the the ludicrous crocodile tears wept by some conservatives about mean old Barack’s unwillingness to play pretty by scrapping everything he campaigned to accomplish.
And this is why I don’t agree with those progressives who think Obama really should have been polarizing and hyper-partisan all along, and who are happy to cooperate with conservatives in burying the rhetoric of bipartisanship once and for all. A big chunk of the public does want bipartisanship, but it wants our leaders to get things done even more. Obama offered to get things done according to a specific agenda that largely reflected the progressive consensus on a wide arrange of issues, and offered to cooperate with congressional Republicans on the details if they would agree to the agenda itself. They emphatically slapped his hand away, and without any doubt are delighted to be united as the “party of no,” hoping that Obama fails so decisively that the opposition will inherit power by default, no matter how far to the right they have to drift to maintain the maximum level of partisan differentiation.
For my money, Obama’s strategy of “grassroots bipartisanship” has helped to fuel a successful polarization of the two parties that a simple right-from-the-start slugfest could not have produced. And it’s helped keep his own personal approval ratings higher than the partisan dynamics can completely explain, giving him political capital he may critically need when the deal goes down on big issues like health care reform.

Alan Abramowitz has a post just up at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball on “Diverging Coalitions: The Transformation of the American Electorate.” His topic is the demographic changes that led to Senator Obama’s election and why President Obama can push a more progressive agenda than other recent Democratic presidents.
While it is no revelation that Obama benefitted from the rapid growth of the non-white population of the U.S. in recent years, Abramowitz sheds fresh light on the dramatic increase in non-white voters, including,

…it has accelerated in the last quarter century. It is a result of increased immigration from Asia, Africa and Latin America, higher birth rates among minority groups, and increased registration and turnout among African-Americans, Hispanics, and other nonwhite citizens. Moreover, this shift is almost certain to continue for the foreseeable future based on generational differences in the racial and ethnic composition of the current electorate and Census Bureau projections of the racial and ethnic makeup of the American population between now and 2050.
…In the 16 years between 1976 and 1992, the nonwhite share of the U.S. electorate increased only slightly–going from 11 percent to 13 percent. However, in the 16 years between 1992 and 2008 the nonwhite share of the electorate doubled, going from 13 percent to 26 percent. Helped by an aggressive Democratic registration and get-out-the-vote campaign in African-American and Hispanic communities, the nonwhite share of the electorate increased from 23 percent in 2004 to 26 percent in 2008 with African-Americans going from 11 percent to 13 percent, and Hispanics going from 8 percent to 9 percent.

Regarding strategy inside the poltiical parties, Abramowitz adds,

…Along with liberal whites, nonwhite voters constitute the electoral base of the modern Democratic Party while conservative whites constitute the electoral base of the modern Republican Party….Moreover, evidence from national exit polls indicates that both parties’ base voters have become more loyal over the past 32 years. In 1976, Jimmy Carter received only 74 percent of the vote from white liberals and nonwhites while in 1992 Bill Clinton received 81 percent and in 2008 Barack Obama received 85 percent. Similarly, in 1976, Gerald Ford received only 73 percent of the vote from white conservatives while in 1992 George H.W. Bush received 82 percent and in 2008 John McCain received 89 percent.

Moderate whites are stil a key constituency for Dems, explains Abramowitz:

Moderate whites are the swing voters in presidential elections. They generally split their votes fairly evenly between the Democratic and Republican candidates, shifting slightly toward one side or the other depending on short-term factors. According to the 2008 national exit poll, Barack Obama received 53 percent of the vote among moderate whites. This was similar to the results for other newly elected Democratic presidents: Jimmy Carter received 49 percent of the vote of this group while Bill Clinton received 57 percent.

Abramowitz crunches the data and sees a profound change in the Dems’ base:

The Democratic base has gone from the smallest of the three voter groups in 1976 to by far the largest in 2008. When Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976, moderate whites made up 45 percent of voters, conservative whites made up 30 percent, and liberal whites and nonwhites combined made up only 25 percent. Sixteen years later, when Bill Clinton was elected, these proportions had changed only slightly–moderate whites made up 43 percent of voters, conservative whites made up 27 percent, and liberal whites and nonwhites combined made up 30 percent. By 2008, however, the electorate looked very different–conservative whites still made up 27 percent of voters but moderate whites made up only 32 percent, and liberal whites and nonwhites combined made up 44 percent.

In addition to the base, he notes a transformation of the “electoral coalition” that undergirds the Democratic party:

Evidence from the American National Election Studies displayed in Table 3 shows that over time the Democratic electoral coalition has become less white and more liberal while the Republican electoral coalition has become less moderate and more conservative. Moderate-to-conservative whites made up 59 percent of Jimmy Carter’s electoral coalition, but they made up only 33 percent of Barack Obama’s electoral coalition. And conservative whites made up only 48 percent of Gerald Ford’s electoral coalition but they made up 61 percent of John McCain’s electoral coalition.

In terms of policy, Abramowitz believes “President Obama cannot afford to ignore the views of moderate-to-conservative white voters,” but he will likely “pursue a more liberal policy agenda than earlier Democratic presidents” who were more anchored by “the support of moderate-to-conservative whites.”

Even though DC is all abuzz about Twitter, the service still has plenty of skeptics and even some of its regular users don’t understand its potential.
That is why it is worth paying attention to this week’s political protests in Moldova.
Yesterday, more than 10,000 young Moldovans converged on the capitol in opposition to the Communist leadership after the communists won a recent set of parliamentary elections that some believe were rigged.
The protesters caught the government off guard. They materialized seemingly out of nowhere and reported to no leaders.
This kind of instant crowd formation has a name — flash mobs — and it isn’t a new phenomena. But Twitter and social networks like Facebook make it easier to form these crowds and make them far more adaptive to situations on the ground.
For the most part, before Twitter, communications technology was either broad and immobile or limited and portable.
In 2005, I could send my friends a text message to tell them to join me in a protest — limited and portable. Or I could put my rally cry on a blog — broad and immobile.
Even if every single one of my friends had a cell phone, the network I could reach from the streets of a protest was limited. That shortcoming is even true of email (all the more so because most people still cannot access email on their cellular phones).
Of course, I did have access to a world-wide audience with a blog. But even if I had the ability to update my website as the situation on the ground changed (no sure thing), most of those joining me in protest would not be able to access that information.
That’s the genius of Twitter — the means of targeting a massive audience on the go.
The protests in Moldova illustrate this point perfectly:

[T]he gathering on Monday night drew only several hundred people. The protesters agreed to gather the next morning and began spreading the word through Facebook and Twitter, inventing a searchable tag for the stream of comments: #pman, which stands for Piata Marii Adunari Nationale, Chisinau’s central square.

The government, not understanding the forces at work, responded to the rallies by shutting down the Internet in the capitol city. At that point, the protestors simply began to generate updates using their mobile phones.
In other, less-violent settings, Twitter has the same utility. The immediacy of the format has made it the application of choice for all kinds of real-time events. Users have created hashtags to aggregate comments about moments in time ranging from the presidential debates to college basketball games. Last year, tech-savvy attendees of the Democratic National Convention used the service to navigate crowds, find parties, and meet up with each other. In August, Republican members of Congress organized a “Drill Here, Drill Now” protest on the floor of the House using their Twitter feeds.
All proof that some in DC are starting to get it: Twitter is a powerful tool for political organizing, and its potential is only now being fully realized.