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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

There is a sector of working class voters who can be persuaded to vote for Democrats in 2024 – but only if candidates understand how to win their support.

Read the memo.

The recently published book, Rust Belt Union Blues, by Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol represents a profoundly important contribution to the debate over Democratic strategy.

Read the Memo.

The Rural Voter

The new book White Rural Rage employs a deeply misleading sensationalism to gain media attention. You should read The Rural Voter by Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea instead.

Read the memo.

The American Establishment’s Betrayal of Democracy

The American Establishment’s Betrayal of Democracy The Fundamental but Generally Unacknowledged Cause of the Current Threat to America’s Democratic Institutions.

Read the Memo.

Democrats ignore the central fact about modern immigration – and it’s led them to political disaster.

Democrats ignore the central fact about modern immigration – and it’s led them to political disaster.

Read the memo.

 

The Daily Strategist

December 24, 2024

Demographic Destiny

With all the talk about the consequences of Barack Obama’s big victory in NC, there’s been less analysis than usual about how, exactly, he did it.
Tuesday morning, there were a lot of people who believed that the race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in North Carolina would be close. There were rumors that Obama’s support among white voters had plummeted, speculation that turnout among African-Americans might be down, and just days before Clinton predicted that North Carolina would be a “game changer.”
Then, the polls closed and the networks immediately projected Obama as the winner. On MSNBC, the language used to describe the victory was “decisive.”
So what happened?
Demographics.
Race
A Democrat needs a biracial coalition to win just about any race in North Carolina — particularly a primary. Clinton’s support among blacks was just 7 percent. As Matt Yglesias cheerfully pointed out, George Allen got 15 percent of African-American voters in neighboring Virginia in 2006. In the exit polls, black Democrats made up a third of the electorate on Tuesday. To offset that advantage Clinton needed to get better than 70 percent of the white vote, and it didn’t happen.
Geography
For a big part of the state’s history, by agreement, the governor’s mansion rotated back and forth between politicians from the east and politicians from the west. Each governor was limited to a single term and the state party was often controlled by a machine, so the transition was easy. But modern political history has been dominated by the eastern part of the state, which has provided a political base for governors like Jim Hunt and Mike Easley, senators like Jesse Helms and John Edwards, and even legislators like Senate President Pro Tempore Marc Basnight. Obama won the east easily, and that region made up a quarter of the state’s vote.
Cities
Everyone know that Obama was going to do well in North Carolina’s urban areas. To offset that advantage, the Clinton campaign dispatched the former president on a tour of the state’s rural areas, hoping to drive up the vote there.
It didn’t work.
The vote was so high in some cities that voters were still standing in line and waiting to vote even after CNN had called the race for Obama. Obama won the Charlotte area by 11 points, the Greensboro area by 16 points, and Raleigh/Durham by 30 points.
By the way, Obama also won the rural part of the state by a 52-45 margin.
Education
There’s been a lot said about Obama’s need to win “beer track” voters, but in North Carolina, those with at least some college education made up 70 percent of the electorate last night. Those with college and post-graduate degrees made up almost half of all voters. Obama won every single education group by double digits, but his margins among the college educated allowed him to run up the score.


Absentee Voting Bill May Transform Campaigns

Take a break from the rat-a-tat-tat of the horse race, and give a gander to Rob Capriccioso’s “Game Changer: Nationwide No-Excuse Absentee Voting” over at Campaigns & Elections Politics website. Absentee balloting has become an increasingly important factor in campaigns in recent years, with huge percentages of voters casting early ballots in states like California. But the patchwork of state laws regarding absentee voting falls well short of serving all voters who find it difficult to get to the polls on election day. As Capriccioso explains:

Currently, 21 states plus the District of Columbia restrict voters’ ability to vote absentee. In such states, the elderly, individuals with disabilities or an illness, and those who serve in the military are eligible to vote by mail. Excuses, like having to work, a lack of childcare, or jury service don’t cut it. Twenty-eight states now offer voters the option of voting by mail for any reason, and Oregon conducts its elections entirely by mail.

To help address the problem Rep. Susan Davis (D-CA) has introduced the Universal Right to Vote by Mail Act, which would permit every voter in every state the right to vote absentee for any reason whatsoever.
Some believe the bill would benefit the GOP. But as TDS co-editor Bill Galston points out in Capriccioso’s article:

“The traditional argument is that the more open the system is to people who are less strongly attached to it, the more likely you are to increase the share of young adults, first-time voters and moderates,” Galston said. “To the extent that that’s true, those factors would work to the advantage of Democrats.”

The legislation would likely lead to changes in the way campaigns are organized, as Capriccioso explains:

Instead of planning for one Election Day in November, campaigns would have to be prepared to compete in a series of mini-rolling elections in every single state. And the audiences they would be playing to would likely be more diverse, since younger voters, moderates and elderly voters often disproportionately take advantage of absentee voting, if it’s available.

The bill has been approved by the House Administration Committee. Similar legislation is expected in the Senate.


Mood Swings

It’s been a crazy 18 hours or so in the Democratic presidential contest. The early take on the impact of yesterday’s primaries was that both candidates had lost the opportunity for a big victory, with HRC once again avoiding disaster by narrowly winning Indiana. As the staff post this morning showed, however, the media narrative quickly shifted to one of gloom and doom for Clinton. And Matt Compton was probably right in suggesting that a stampede of network pundits led by Tim Russert’s midnight declaration that Obama had won the nomination was largely responsible for this dramatic mood swing.
As a skeptic about the almighty power of the punditocracy to dictate political developments, my attitude today has been: Show me the superdelegates! Maybe Matt’s right that the trickle of new superdelegate endorsements for Obama (see his Update below) could soon become an irresistable tide. We’ll probably know within another day or two if the Supers are going to end this thing, or hold off for a while to see if Obama commits some terrible error that reinforces the Clinton campaign’s implicit claim that he’s unelectable. And as Matt points out, there are tactical reasons why the Obama campaign might want HRC to stay in the race until May 20.
But if superdelegates and party leaders decide, for whatever reason, to let the competition go on, I strongly suspect they are letting the Clinton campaign know it’s time to be very careful about criticizing Obama. If he commits some grievous mistake, or if something politically damaging about him suddenly emerges, I don’t think HRC is going to be in a position to “pile on” as she did with Rev. Wright or the “bitter-gate” controversy. Democrats are worried about the general election, and while that worry is the last, best hope of the Clinton campaign, she can no longer risk feeding that mood directly.


Perceptions

I think Ed’s post below is essentially right — the results in North Carolina and Indiana changed nothing in terms of actuality.
But yesterday, I watched MSNBC until just after midnight when Tim Russert said, “We now know who the Democratic nominee is gonna be, and no one’s going to dispute it.”
It’s amazing how much that one remark seems to have changed the perceptions of the race.
Perhaps the truth is that the press corps had already quietly come to the conclusion that the math mattered and Obama was going to be the Democratic nominee. Maybe they were just waiting for a word from Russert to validate that thought.
But for whatever the reason, the narrative has shifted. It now favors Obama, just as the math does.
The next 48 hours will be the test. If Russert’s pronouncement is influential enough to force a bevy of superdelegates to show their cards or switch support from Clinton to Obama, then his words will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The race will be over.
But then, how does the Obama campaign deal with the twin problems of West Virginia and Kentucky?
Just as demographics favored Obama in North Carolina, the voter makeup in these two states is clearly stacked in Clinton’s favor. Polling paints a pretty bleak picture for the Illinois senator. It’s just a fact that Clinton will likely win Kentucky and West Virginia whether she’s in the race or not.
How awful would it look for the presumptive Democratic nominee to lose these contests to a candidate who isn’t running anymore?
Last night was a good one for Barack Obama, but this race isn’t going to be over until at least May 20th. And honestly, that might be the best possible result.
Update: Maybe the superdelegates are listening. Four have announced their intention to support Obama today, compared to just one for Clinton.


HRC’s Final Hope: General Election Polls

Last night’s Democratic presidential primaries in NC and IN changed nothing, or changed everything, depending on whose account you choose to accept (see the previous Staff post for a compilation of post-primary “reads.”)
From one point of view, HRC survived yet another definitive blow to her candidacy by pulling out a narrow win in IN, which mattered more than NC because it was perceived as a “toss-up” state. (Clinton’s own spin last night capitalized on Barack Obama’s ill-advised remark after PA that IN would be a “tie-breaker.”). The next state to vote is WV on May 13–a place where Clinton should win very big–followed by KY (another likely Clinton win) and OR on May 20, and then MT, SD and PR on June 3. In the middle of this final stretch comes the May 31 meeting of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee where Clinton is praying for a decision to seat at least some delegates from MI and FL, while retroactively validating her popular vote margins in the two states.
From another point of view (the one most often heard from media pundits last night), Clinton lost her one chance to throw a monkey wrench into Obama’s nomination by losing NC, and/or by losing the overall combined delegate and popular vote by a sizable margin (Obama basically erased the popular vote margin Clinton won in PA). She’s out of money again, as witnessed by her cancellation of today’s campaign events to focus on fundraising. Moreover, Obama is now clearly out of the tailspin that briefly threatened his candidacy when the Rev. Jeremiah Wright decided to claim headlines for several days. He can now afford to cut a deal on MI and FL, and exert pressure on superdelegates and party leaders to seal the deal well before the convention.
As Chris Bowers pointed out pungently in a late-night post, the “changes everything” interpretation is a little strange, insofar as the delegate and popular vote math that suddenly seems so compelling to the chattering classes after last night’s results has been pointing to the virtual certainty of an Obama nomination for well over a month now, and maybe longer:

All of the arguments that could be used by the punditry to declare the nomination campaign over could have been used really at any point since Wisconsin. For some reason, those arguments appear to be sticking tonight, whereas they weren’t earlier. According to the logic that ends the campaign tonight, there was no reason to torture us for the past two months, except to damage Democrats for the sake of damaging Democrats

Chris hints at one factor in the shifting media narrative of the contest that I’ve always thought was an irrationally big deal: the fixation of the media with “wins” and “losses” in particular states, compounded by a focus on beating expectations. In terms of the actual mechanics of winning the nomination, even if you care about non-delegate factors like cumulative popular vote, it really doesn’t matter at all whether one candidate or another “wins” the popular vote in individual states. This isn’t a general election, where a “win” gets you electoral votes. But without question, media coverage of the nominating process has given vast and undeserved attention to this phenomenon, for the obvious reason that it’s “better television” to “call” a state for Clinton or Obama–particularly if it’s an “upset”–than to report the slow, complicated cumulative math of pledged delegates and/or total popular vote. This is probably the price we pay for a system of nominating candidates that’s staged by individual states over a long period of time.
As we get closer to the final decision, however, the math has to take over, and absent some “upset” that’s viewed as a “game-changer,” that’s what seems to be happening in media perceptions today.
So where does that leave us? Assuming she can raise or lend herself enough money to give herself that option, Clinton’s candidacy now comes down to avoiding extinction by superdelegates and party leaders in the hopes that some external event–i.e., a “scandal” or major “gaffe”–will suddenly make Barack Obama look truly unelectable. For that reason, the best indicator to look at from now on is probably not pledged delegates or popular votes, or any particular primary outcome, but general election polls. HRC desperately needs a batch of polls showing that she’d beat John McCain handily while Obama would lose to him by a significant margin. Her campaign may even succeed in convincing superdelegates to hold off on shifting to Obama for a while just to make sure he doesn’t “crater” in general election polls after he’s become the putative nominee. But if such polls don’t give her what she needs (and they haven’t so far), it truly is over, sooner or later.
For history-minded readers, I can recall a precedent for HRC’s situation, way back in 1968, when Nelson Rockefeller (in tacit alliance with Ronald Reagan) launched a late challenge to the nomination of Richard Nixon. Rocky’s whole campaign was about electability: Nixon was famously a loser, and would lose to Hubert Humphrey in November. About a week before the Republican Convention, a major poll came out showing Nixon running better against Humphrey than Rockefeller, instantly croaking Rockefeller’s candidacy and guaranteeing Nixon the nomination. Like Rocky then, Clinton’s fate is now in the hands of the pollsters and the superdelegates and media wizards who consult them.


Wrap Up Wrap Up

We try to be even-handed regarding Democratic candidates in the posts we flag for our readers. This morning, however, despite the split decision in IN and NC, it’s hard to find much encouragement for Senator Clinton on the blogosphere or MSM. Some examples:
Reuters political correspondent John Whitesides’s WaPo article cites Obama’s net pick-up of nine delegates is a “big step” towards his winning the nomination.
L.A. Times reporter Mark Z. Barabak says Obama “remains well-positioned to win the nomination…but has not mustered the strength to finish off Clinton.”
Politico‘s Ben Smith says Obama took “a large and potentially decisive step toward the Democratic nomination” with his huge NC win and strong second-place finish in Indiana.
Clinton supporter Todd Beeton’s MyDD post observes with regret “there is no way to spin away what happened tonight: Senator Clinton had a really bad night and Senator Obama had a phenomenal one.”
James A. Barnes of the National Journal Online notes “Nothing short of a sweep in the remaining contests — including Montana, Oregon and South Dakota, where Obama is favored — is likely to alter the view that Obama is the party’s likely nominee and prevent superdelegates from coalescing around him.”
John Nichols’s post in The Nation, “Obama’s Very Good Primary Night” (via Alternet) gives a solid edge to Obama, who added to both his popular and delegate vote totals.
Open Left‘s Chris Bowers argues that the IN and NC primaries were redundant in the sense that the nomination was already pretty much decided, while his Open Left colleague Tremayne believes Tuesday was more significant because the MSM finally gets it that “the math argument is now unassailable.”
Slate‘s John Dickerson says “tough arguments are all that’s left for Clinton since she didn’t get the win she needed.”
The Grey Lady’s Jeff Zeleny sees “a boost of momentum” for Obama and a strengthened case for superdelgate support for the Illinois Senator.
Salon‘s Walter Shapiro says HRC is “one day and two important primaries closer to oblivion.”
Alan Silverleib and Mark Preston of CNN‘s Washington Bureau have a little encouragement for Clinton: “Looking ahead, there are some bright spots for the Clinton campaign. Next week the campaign shifts to West Virginia, where the demographic and socioeconomic terrain ought to favor her. On May 20, the candidates will battle it out in Kentucky and Oregon. Clinton is also expected to do well in Kentucky, while she will try to defy expectations in Oregon. Her support among Hispanics may bode well for her on the June 1st Puerto Rico primary. Two days later, Clinton will battle it out with Obama in Montana and South Dakota — the final two states to weigh in on this marathon primary season. But unless she scores landside victories in the remaining contests, most pundits predict the delegates will be split about evenly”


A Small Curiosity

We at TDS will have plenty to say tomorrow about the NC and IN primary results, and what they mean in terms of the Democratic nominating contest. But for tonight, I just want to note a small curiosity: when’s the last time in a highly competitive contest that one candidate conceded, and another claimed victory, before the networks called the race? That just happened with respect to Indiana, where every network other than CBS (which called it early for HRC) is waiting for the results from Lake County, which Obama is expected to win by a large margin.
The Obama campaign almost certainly doesn’t think it can get enough votes from Lake to completely erase Clinton’s statewide lead. Still, given the importance of an election night victory claim for HRC–which, predictably, she made by quoting Obama’s ill-advised “tiebreaker” comment about IN–you’d think the Obama folks would have used the reticence of the nets to keep the waters muddy until most television viewers had gone to bed. It’s probably another sign, reinforced by the overall “unity” theme of Obama’s NC speech, that they’re focused on ending the nomination contest gracefully. Unless, of course, they’re playing with the idea of some sort of Truman-like “surprise” if Lake somehow pulls out the Hoosier State for them. That’s unlikely, but this has been an unlikely political year, hasn’t it?


More NC Clues

This morning, my mom drove out to our rural precinct location on her way to work. She collected her ballot at 7:00, filled it out, and fed it through the voting machine. The polls had opened just 30 minutes before, and there wasn’t a line, but more than 300 people had already voted.
I’m hearing a lot of similar stories when I talk to friends in North Carolina, and the same message is coming from election officials in the state. All the signs indicate that we’re in for a day of record turnout.
That’s unsurprising.
But it means we’re going to be left with some serious questions when the polls close at 7:30 tonight. How long is it going to take for results to be calculated? What are the exit polls going to tell us?
There was a staff post earlier today which linked to a story in The Politico outlining some good places to look for answers. Much of that analysis was really sound, and I’d only add a couple things.
Clinton should do best in the western part of the state, and if election returns come back similarly to how they did in Virginia, that area should report first. Can she build up a lead there that is big enough to cut into Obama’s advantages elsewhere? I’ll be watching the totals in Buncombe county to get an idea for how Clinton should do in the Appalachians.
To get a measure of Obama’s performance, I plan to be watching the vote totals in Durham and Mecklenburg counties, where there is a big African American population and a lot of college educated voters. If turnout in those two counties is in the hundreds of thousands, he’s in for a good night.
One last thing — the State Board of Elections has just upgraded the results page for its website. It’s pretty snazzy.


Late Primary Challenges: Not Unprecedented

I’m probably a bit too inclined to criticize political writers who don’t seem to know a lot of political history. Sometimes it’s very relevant, but sometimes not so much: history does get made with each new electoral cycle.
But when a political writer makes a historical claim that’s, well, just not accurate, that’s another whole thing. In a new piece in The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert pens a familiar complaint that Hillary Clinton’s extended challenge to Barack Obama is selfishlessly destructive. But she bases that judgment not just on HRC’s slim prospects for victory, but on the the idea that this kind of late challenge is unprecedented in its defiance of the natural process that quickly crowns front-runners:

Presidential-primary races tend to proceed along self-reflexive lines. The candidate who is ahead—or who is perceived to be—receives more press coverage. He collects more contributions and endorsements, and these generate still more media attention, which brings in more money, more votes, and so on. Meanwhile, his opponents find that they cannot pay their staffs, or afford to hire a bus, or attract more than a clutch of peevish reporters to their news conferences. Hoping to make it onto the short list for Vice-President, the laggards throw their support to the front-runner, and the contest comes to an abrupt, if not necessarily satisfying, close.
Hillary Clinton is perhaps the first candidate in primary history to run this process in reverse. The longer the race has gone on, the lower the odds have become that she will finish the season leading either in the popular vote or in elected delegates…. Nevertheless, rather than growing weaker, she seems to have become more formidable.

You don’t have to go back to the Whigs to assess Kolbert’s assertion that HRC is the “first candidate in primary history” to mount a late, apparently hopeless challenge. The primary-dominated nominating process began in 1972 on the Democratic side, and arguably in 1976 on the Republican side. During that relatively brief period, late primary challenges to the virtually assured nominee occurred among Democrats in 1976, 1980, and 1984, and among Republicans in 1976 and 1980. While the 1976 Democratic challenges by Frank Church and Jerry Brown, and the 1980 Republican challenge by George H.W. Bush, produced mixed results, Reagan ’76, Kennedy ’80, and Hart ’84 represented powerful late-season campaigns that threatened to deny the nomination to the overwhelming front-runner. Kennedy and Hart won particularly impressive late-primary sweeps. And in 1984, the currently notorious Democratic superdelegates made news for the first and last time prior to this year by nailing down Walter Mondale’s nomination in the teeth of a late-primary Hart gale-force wind.
It’s true that none of these late challenges succeeded, and that all of the eventual nominees (other than the slightly threatened Ronald Reagan of 1980) lost the general election. So make what you want of the implications of HRC’s current challenge. But she’s not the first to launch one.


Where to Get Early Clues on NC, IN

Politico‘s Carrie Budoff Brown has some good tips for getting the early skinny on today’s primary elections in North Carolina and Indiana. For NC Brown advises “keep an eye on Raleigh-Durham area turnout,” which is a quarter to a third of the state-wide turnout. She quotes Morgan Jackson, a North Carolina political consultant, who says if turnout approaches 40 percent, it’s “good news” for Obama. Brown adds:

…Durham, which is 44 percent African American, could provide a gauge on turnout among one of Obama’s most loyal constituencies. Charlotte, Greensboro and Winston-Salem, all at least one-third black, are also worth watching. Obama needs strong turnout in towns with black colleges and universities, such as Elizabeth City in the northeastern corner of the state…
…Kokomo’s Howard County is the bellwether to watch…It is urban and rural, with a mix of African Americans and blue collar workers, some employed in the Chrysler plants…it tends to back the winner in gubernatorial, congressional and state legislative races.

For Indiana, Brown advises monitoring the turnout in Indianapolis, Gary and Bloomington, expected to be Obama strongholds. In terms of overall turnout, Brown says:

Analysts are expecting far bigger turnout this year than in 2004, when about 22 percent of voters cast ballots in the presidential primary, said Russell Hanson, a political science professor at Indiana University-Bloomington…A much bigger turnout is good news for Obama because it means “those who haven’t been politically engaged in the past are coming out,” Hanson said. “If that is not happening, then that is working in Clinton’s favor because the traditional [party] machinery is working.”

All good tips. Check also local television stations, like Raleigh’s WNCN 17 (NBC) and WRAL (CBS). For Indiana, check Indianapolis ABC affiliate WRTV and Fort Wayne’s WKJG (NBC). For newspapers, The Gary Post-Tribune, the Kokomo Tribune and The Charlotte Observer should be good for turnout updates.