In every reasonably competitive election, there’s a natural tendency to choose some one category of voters as crucial. That’s occasionally true, when most of the electorate’s tendencies to vote or support one candidate or the other is pretty much static, while one category of voters is very unstable and breaks in one direction late in the campaign cycle.
But by and large, a vote’s a vote, and focusing on who “wins” one voter category tends to ignore that fact.
It’s with that fundamental objection in mind that I read Chris Cillizza’s post today on white Catholics as the most reliable “bellwether” voters in every presidential election:

Looking for a bellwether group to focus on in the final week of the presidential race?
Look no further than white Catholics, who have gone for the winner in every single presidential election for which exit polling exists. That means that since 1972, the candidate for whom the majority of white Catholics cast their votes has — like clockwork — claimed the presidency. For the non-math majors out there, that’s EIGHT straight elections.

But if you examine the exact numbers (which Chris usefully supplies), it quickly becomes obvious that white non-Hispanic Catholics have in recent years leaned Republican by a margin well outside the national margins of the winner. In the very close elections of 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush won white Catholics by 7 percent and 13 percent, respectively. But white Catholics have been steadily declining as a percentage of the electorate, from about one-quarter in the 1990s to one-fifth in 2004.
With that background, Chris’ notes about 2008 polling of white Catholics come across a bit differently:

For months, the Washington Post/ABC News poll, has shown John McCain holding a wide lead over Barack Obama among this key swing group, which in the past eight elections has comprised between 20 and 25 percent of the electorate as a whole. Back in mid-June, McCain was at 60 percent, with 34 percent for Obama — a margin that fluctuated somewhat as the summer wore on but by the end of the Republican National Convention had returned to a 19-point McCain edge.
And yet, since the Post/ABC began its daily tracking poll (interviews are conducted each night with the results combined into a three-day rolling average) on Oct. 19, Obama has been making steady gains on McCain among white Catholics.
On the 19th, McCain led 54 percent to 41 percent. By Oct. 24, that lead has shrunk to 51 percent to 46 percent. And then, in the tracks released on Monday night and Tuesday night, for the first time Obama actually moved ahead — taking 48 percent of the white Catholic vote to McCain’s 47 percent in each track.

Given his performance among African-Americans, Hispanics, and white mainline Protestants–not to mention the rapidly growing categories of non-Christians and secularists–Obama doesn’t need to “win” white Catholics to win the election. It’s just not a reliable bellwether anymore.

Despite all the blah-blah about supply and demand, it can’t be a complete coincidence that gas prices are tumbling exactly as early voting begins in states across the nation. The connection between gas prices and political approval ratings is exceptionally strong and well-documented. In addition to price gouging, voters in several states experienced shortages and long lines at gas stations during the last month. Atlanta residents had several days with no gas, and Georgia’s Governor Sonny Perdue got heat from more than a few angry voters.
Few experiences piss people off so much as having to wait in line for something that ought to be available on demand. The same principle applies to the long lines at the early voting polls — up to four hours at one Miami-Dade precinct, and two hour waits being reported in many localities across the country. More people are enduring longer lines at the polls than they experienced at gas stations.
As Democrats we still want to encourage early voting, even when it means waiting a couple of hours. It is still our best check against voter suppression and GOP obstructions. But we need not take the blame for the unnecessary long lines that are not of our making.
In the closing days of campaign ’08, this is a good issue for Democrats. Almost all of the delays at the polls can be attributed to Republican obstruction and mismanagement. One of the most consistent policies of Republicans at the federal, state and local level is to make it hard for people to vote, or at least people who are not likely to vote for GOP candidates.
It’s probably too late for the DNC to do a good ad about GOP obstruction of voting, although it would be worth doing, because now is the time it would resonate most powerfully and the issue fades as a priority as time passes. But Democratic candidates should make sure the message gets out via speeches and media interviews that voters have to wait hours to cast ballots because the Republicans opposed adequate funding for voting machines and they routinely obstruct reforms like weekend voting, internet balloting and more polling sites. This is true in state and local legislatures across the country, as well as in the U.S. Congress, with very few exceptions.
There has been a lot of good reporting on GOP vote suppression. (For starters, see this excellent report by Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.). But Democratic candidates, the national and state Democratic parties should do more to prioritize the issue at the optimum time than just grumble and gripe. It’s not one of the major issues of campaign ’08. But it is a good issue this week, particularly for the few remaining undecideds. A lot of voters are ticked off about it right now. It’s up to Democrats to make sure their anger is accurately directed.

Based on statistics and analysis provided by Michael McDonald of George Mason University, Nate Silver’s reached one clear conclusion about early voting patterns across the country:

The African-American population share is the key determinant of early voting behavior. In states where there are a lot of black voters, early voting is way, way up. In states with fewer African-Americans, the rates of early voting are relatively normal.
This works at the county level too. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio (Cleveland), which about 30 percent black, twice as many people have already voted early as in all of 2004. In Franklin County (Columbus), which is about 18 percent black and also has tons of students, early voting is already about 3x its 2004 total.
So when McCain’s pollster talks about Obama’s black vote being “locked in”, he is at best getting the story half-right. It’s true that there aren’t very many African-Americans who are reporting themselves as undecided. But any polling based on 2004 assumptions about what black turnout will look like is probably going to miss the mark significantly.

Most notably, early voting this year has already exceeded 2004 totals in three states: GA, NC, and LA. Based on Voting Rights Act compliance data, the African-American share of the early vote is 35% in GA (25% of total vote in 2004), 36% in LA (27% in 2004), and 28% in NC (26% in 2004).
It’s notable that the African-American share of early voting in these three states (especially the battleground state of NC) seems to be dropping steadily as Election Day approaches, which could validate (though I certainly hope not) my own theory that we’re beginning to see a southern white backlash to news reports of heavy African-American early voting. But with Obama adding somewhere between 5% and 10% to John Kerry’s 2004 margin among black voters, even a proportionate increase in African-American turnout will yield a significant net vote bonanza.

There’s one kernal of truth in all the conservative talk about a Democratic victory next week being calamitous for the economy. It would definitely produce Depression-level job losses for Republicans in Washington.
In Politico today, Daniel Libit laid out the grim prospects for Republican staffers, both those likely to lose jobs in Congress, and those who might have spent years planning for a lucrative landing amongst the K Street lobbying shops:

Consider the abounding whammies:
Twenty-six Republican congressmen are retiring at the end of this session, and expectations are that Democrats will pick up at least that many seats on Tuesday. If the average congressional office has 14 to 18 full-time staffers (plus paid interns and part-timers), that’s a couple of hundred job opportunities that could soon vanish in electoral smoke.
The average Senate office has 34 staffers, and with polls showing Democrats poised to take anywhere from five to 10 of those seats, that could be an additional 150 to 300 Republican Hill jobs gone the way of the dodo bird. Scores of Republican committee staff slots would also get wiped out, too, as the GOP would control a smaller portion of the committee personnel budgets in both chambers.
Of course, with fewer Republicans on the Hill, there are fewer needs for lobby shops to refill their GOP cartridges….
All of this, and we haven’t even touched on the direct effect of an Obama victory: If the Democrats take the White House, that’s up to 3,000 displaced Republicans looking for jobs after the Bush administration.

That last number is definitely on the low side.
I take no personal pleasure at the idea of anybody being out of a job. But Republican policies have contributed enormously to the current economic crisis, and the recession sure to come. And far too many conservatives have long promoted the moral calamity of confusing economic success with personal virtue. So there’s a certain rough justice in the fact that Hard Times are aborning for many of those eager Young Republicans who came to Washington at some point over the last fourteen years, looking to overturn the New Deal/Great Society legacy.

It’s been obvious for a while that attacks on Barack Obama for favoring “redistribution of wealth” and other “socialist” beliefs is the final gambit of the McCain-Palin campaign. They’re reached this essentially ridiculous position for a variety of reasons:
(1) It’s highly congenial to conservative “base” voters, who think virtually all Democrats are “socialists,” and who also view much of the New Deal/Great Society legacy as “socialist.”
(2) It’s also arguably persuasive to some swing voters, who may not like or trust either candidate, and are trying to figure out who represents the greatest risk.
(3) It intersects with the McCain campaign’s heavily tax-and-budget based approach to the economy, which it is intensifying in the absence of anything much to say about what he would do to deal with the actual economic crisis the country faces.
(4) It also intersects with the sleazier aspects of the McCain/GOP/conservative assault on Obama, aimed at painting him as a dangerous radical who “pals around with terrorists” and is secretly close to anti-American, black nationalist, and perhaps even Jihadist Islamic elements.
So anything Obama’s ever said and done that can be twisted into support for “redistribution of wealth” is being avidly promoted by the GOP. The latest example is a 2001 Chicago public radio intereview in which Obama the law professor discusses the reluctance of the judicial branch to engage in “redistributive” efforts.
This is really, really a reach, as Obama legal advisor Cass Sunstein explains at The New Republic. Obama was in fact articulating approvingly a conservative legal theory about the hamhanded nature of direct judicial intervention into social policies that don’t involve fundamental rights:

In answering a caller’s question, he said that the court “is just not very good at” redistribution. Obama added, with approval, that the Constitution “is generally a charter of negative liberties.”
Obama’s principal claim–about the institutional limits of the courts–was made by many conservatives (including Robert Bork) in the 1960s and 1970s: Courts should not attempt to guarantee “positive” rights, or interpret the Constitution to redistribute wealth. Obama is squarely rejecting the claim that was made by many liberal lawyers, professors, and judges at the time–and that is being made by some today.

So this latest attempt to show that Obama’s a “socialist” is almost completely bogus.
But facts aside, there are two other reasons these sort of attacks aren’t getting much traction.
First of all, most Americans generally understand that there are a variety of longstanding and very popular policies in this country that involve “redistribution of wealth” to some extent or other. Certainly Medicare and Medicaid aren’t “pay as you go” programs. Nor is public education. And the basic principle of progressive taxation is inherently redistributive.
Second of all, we are at a point in U.S. history when upper-income and corporate complaints about “redistribution” are going to fall on an awful lot of deaf ears, given the consequences of regressive conservative economic policies over the last eight years. As I noted in an earlier post about progressive taxation, a majority of Americans right now appear to actually support the use of the tax code to redistribute wealth from the rich to lower-and-middle class folk, which is what Obama is unfairly being accused of covertly supporting.
In general, the McCain-Palin campaign’s attack lines on “redistribution” and “socialism” are poorly timed, as were earlier efforts to brand Obama as an “extreme liberal.” This is one election cycle where given the choice between the economic policy status quo and a more liberal approach, “change” is the preferred option regardless of how it is mischaracterized with alarmist terms.

HuffPo Founder Arianna makes the case that it’s time for Obama to spread some of his campaign wealth around with other Dem candidates. It’s an important suggestion, and one which is sure to provoke some strong disagreements within the Democratic Party.
It’s a tough decision, arguably THE toughest decision going forward. “With victory within sight,” she asks, “the question becomes: how much change can he deliver if Democrats don’t reach a filibuster-proof 60 seats in the Senate?”
There is an understandable tendency within every political campaign to deploy all political assets within the campaign. There’s always the potential for an upset, and it’s hard to accept that things are going so well that the campaign can spare a little jack for the down ballot Dems. The very idea of surplus money does not compute, especially for Democrats, who are more often playing catch-up with their GOP competitors in terms of cash assets. Yet, as Arianna notres:

Republicans, while still holding out hope for a “McCain Miracle,” are increasingly worried that McCain is losing in a way that, as David Frum put it, “threatens to take the entire Republican Party down with him.” As a result, Frum and other Republicans are urging party officials to shift the emphasis off the presidential race and on to preserving as many Senate seats as possible.

Because we Dems have been out of the white house so long and have lost the last two presidential elections by small margins, we can be forgiven for a little monomania, when it comes to protecting Obama’s lead and securing a big win on Nov. 4. And then there is the argument that a huge Obama margin will lift all Democratic boats.
But there are a number of very close House and Senate races that could be won with a timely cash infusion. Think about Dems on the cusp of victory, who just need a little more cash to bring it home. Think about the filibuster-proof majority and what it could do for America. As Arianna notes,

In the just-ended 110th Congress, obstructionist Senate Republicans, led by human roadblock Mitch McConnell, mounted a record 104 filibusters (and that was with Bush in the White House; imagine how much more intransigent they would be with Obama). To put that number in context, in the previous Congress, the 109th, in which Democrats were in the minority, there were just 54 filibusters.

Think about empowering Obama to not merely occupy the white house, but to actually lead congress.
Here’s how she urges Obama to do it:

…Immediately guarantee a loan to the DSCC that will allow Democratic Senate candidates to spend whatever amount is necessary to secure a 60-seat majority. With Obama’s donor list, he’ll be able to wipe out that loan with a single post-election email. Money should not be the reason Democrats don’t put themselves in a position to defang the obstructionists.

Obama is going to face daunting challenges in securing peace, economic and health care reforms. Every extra Democrat in the House and Senate will help him succeed and win re-election. In that sense, every unleveraged dollar in his campaign coffers when the polls close on November 4 is a failure of strategy that works against his success.
For her best clincher, Arianna quotes a Norm Coleman ad echoed in numerous other GOP candidate ads this week

“Want real change? Put Democrats in control.”

Oh hell yes.

Well, wonders never cease: in the space of just one week, there are two Michael Barone columns that transcend GOP agitprop and add real value to our understanding of the November 4 elections. The second, published by US News today, examines why Barack Obama appears to have a robust lead in PA despite signs of weakness in the Northeast and Southwest quadrants of the state.
The simple answer is that Obama’s holding an enormous lead in Southeast PA, where Gore and Kerry’s Philadelphia leads were partially offset by GOP voters in the Philly suburbs. And Obama’s strength in those suburbs, suggests Barone, is probably a function of collapsing home prices, which disproportionately affect upscale voters:

High-income, high-education voters in the suburbs of big metro areas, my hypothesis goes, are preoccupied with long-term wealth accumulation—and react sharply against the Republican Party when their wealth is suddenly sharply diminished when there is a Republican president. Modest-income, modest-education voters in less affluent surroundings, it seems judging from McCain’s relatively good showing in Pennsylvania outside the heavily populated southeast, react much less sharply, because they have never expected to accumulate all that much in the way of wealth anyhow, consider themselves reasonably well protected by the existing safety net and feel free to vote (as more affluent Philly suburbanites have done in better times) on the basis of their opinions (conservative in their case) on cultural issues.

This is the same phenomenon that afflicted George H.W. Bush in certain suburban areas (particularly California and New England) in 1992. It’s a lot more pervasive now than then.
We’ve already known for a while that Democratic gains this year appear likely to rest on winning upscale, college-educated voters, while reducing losses among non-college educated white voters. Barone offers one reason why that is happening.
To be clear, Barone partially ruins his column by concluding with a lot of deeply annoying and anachronistic comparisons of a future Obama administration to the disastrous John Lindsay tenure as mayor of New York. But as long as he limits himself to staring at numbers, he’s still occasionally worth reading.

Lots of states are claiming to be potential kingmakers next Tuesday. But as the battleground states become more narrowly defined, Florida is shaping up as the Gettysburgh of campaign, ’08, at least in terms of resources deployed. Certainly, no battleground state is attracting more ad money, candidate/surrogate appearances and ground troops massing for the closing week of the campaign.
Political junkies will have no trouble finding good reporting on the battle of Florida. As for the latest opinion polls, a Reuters/Zogby poll released just today has Obama and McCain tied at 47 percent, within two points of the percentage for Obama in nearly all of the most recent October polls posted by Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com. Taking a range of factors into consideration, however, Silver gives Obama a 75 percent chance of winning Florida. CQPolitics.com Polltracker, cites a Suffolk University poll of LV’s, conducted 10/23-26, giving Obama a 49-44 edge in the Sunshine State, but notes “telltale signs of the race tightening” in bellwether counties.
E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s column in today’s WaPo, “The Endgame in Florida,” explains why “even Republican bastions are starting to crumble.” In his post “Obama’s Florida Shot: A Key to Victory,” Mark Silva of the Chicago Tribune Washington, D.C. Bureau’s ‘The Swamp’ adds:

…In this state traditionally insulated from national economic woes, unemployment has risen above the national average, the housing market has collapsed and foreclosures are epidemic…the stunning decline of the stock market, and with it the portfolios of a state home to millions of retirees, and an unsettling federal intervention in the banking industry have stood to benefit a candidate who already had vastly outspent and out-organized his rival. Obama has outspent McCain by three-to-one in TV ads here and his drive to register new, particularly young voters, his 50 field offices and plan to turn voters out to the polls represent a Democratic drive unseen in this state before.

The New York Times has a new video clip on “The (Surprising) Battle for Florida,” which cites Obama’s inroads in securing the Hispanic and Jewish vote as instrumental in Obama’s improving Florida prospects.
Dave G. at Digital Journal has an update on what is being done to reduce confusion over polling sites. But after the Republican Secretary of State ordered a new computer match system implemented in September, election officials found that 75 percent of some 20,000 voter registration applications were mismatched “due to typographical and administrative errors,” according to a CNN report. Democrats are outnumbering Republicans 3 to 1 in early voting, according to today’s edition of the Miami Herald. And Timothy Martin has an Alternet post up today, describing a classic Florida Republican tactic to suppress Democratic votes:

Many here have criticized the Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections, Deborah Clark, as being responsible for the long waits and irregularities. Clark, considered a partisan Republican, decided to open only three early voting locations countywide. That’s down from seven locations in 2004, despite more interest in early voting. Early voters tend to vote Democratic here, and will likely skew even more toward Democrats given Barack Obama’s visit to neighboring Tampa on Monday, Oct. 20, where he emphasized the importance of voting early in this election.
Clark’s decision to scale back the number of polling stations was blasted in an editorial by the major local daily, The St. Petersburg Times, which had ironically just endorsed her for reelection.

It is estimated that 40 percent of Floridians will vote early, but Republicans have a big edge in absentee voting, says Nicholas Azzara of the Bradenton Herald.

For Democrats, one of the fun things about the runup to November 4 has been the atmosphere of “precriminations” among Republicans getting ready to spin a likely top-to-bottom defeat. Some GOPers are simply blaming the McCain campaign’s ineptitude, with the Palin choice figuring large, small, or even countervailing in their accounts of what went wrong.
But the more important intra-Republican debate is over the party’s ideology, and Ross Douthat has done a good job reporting and then rebutting the movement conservative spin, as expressed by Rush Limbaugh.
Douthat makes a lot of sense, but given the exceptional dominance of conservative opinion by people like Limbaugh, I strongly suspect that the prevailing conservative post-election spin will be that John McCain failed to campaign as a conservative, just as George W. Bush failed to govern as a conservative. In the long run, this will contribute to a state of denial that will thwart Republicans. In the short run, it helps guarantee that Republicans will fight a Barama administration like wolverines. Any GOPer who cooperates with Democrats after January 20 is going to face a lot of wrath from a conservative base who think McCain lost by running against George W. Bush from the Right.

After an extended period of exhibiting relentless optimism about Barack Obama’s prospects on November 4, I have reason to offer one note of pessimism. Having just spent a stretch of time in my home state of Georgia, there are definite signs of a racial backlash developing–against Obama himself, to be sure, but also against the heavy early voting turnout of African-Americans.
Heavy early voting has been a regular local news story in Georgia for several weeks now, and the visuals, along with much of the commentary, has made the disproportionate turnout of African-Americans a centerpiece. And among conservative white folk I’ve talked to, a sense of genuine racial panic seems to be setting in, fed, of course, by the McCain-Palin campaign’s incessant references to Obama’s scary character and ideology. While black turnout in Georgia and across the Deep South is definitely going to be up significantly over 2004, I now think it’s going to be partially offset by higher white turnout.
Now Georgia was always going to be a reach for Obama, but the same dynamics are probably in play in North Carolina, another state where heavy African-American early voting has been in the news:

More than 210,000 blacks who are registered as Democrats have cast early ballots in the Tar Heel State — compared with roughly 174,000 registered Republicans overall. Four years ago, the number of GOP early and absentee voters was more than double that of black Democrats.

African-American early votes have already been “banked,” of course, so I’m not suggesting that any backlash would exceed them in electoral power. But it could be a factor in a close race in NC (less so in Virginia, where restrictive rules on early voting have made it less dominant in campaign reporting).
The phenomenon I’m talking about isn’t, to be clear, any sort of “Bradley Factor,” wherein white voters tell pollsters they are voting for an African-American candidate, while ultimately going the other way. The voters I’m talking about are loud and proud, and sometimes openly racist, about their sentiments. But they may turn out at significantly higher-than-normal levels, as the racial polarization virus spreads.
If I’m right, is this a problem for down-ballot Democrats in GA and NC like Jim Martin and Kay Hagan? Maybe, but maybe not. I talked to several frenetic quasi-racist McCain voters in GA who nonetheless are voting for Martin. They may fear Barack Obama, but they don’t much like Republicans this year.