In case you missed it, the robo-pollsters at Rasmussen have released a survey showing that an independent presidential run by Stephen Colbert would net 13% support in a Clinton-Giuliani contest. Just as surprisingly, comparison of the three-way test with Rasmussen polls of the Big Two alone seems to indicate that Colbert pulls significantly more support from Rudy than from HRC. Less surprisingly, Rasmussen finds that the comedian does really, really well–around 30%–among voters under the age of 30.
There is one very obvious reason to dismiss these “findings”: Asking poll questions about an unserious candidate invites an unserious answer.
So why am I writing about it? Because when polls came out a few months ago showing Mike Bloomberg with similar levels of support in a three-way race, many thousands of words of serious analysis were spilled in print and online. But the truth is that polls offering any well-known “third choice” typically elicit significant support well in advance of elections–support that tends to evaporate as actual voting grows nigh. The alleged Bloomberg Boom wasn’t any more serious than today’s Colbert Boom.
Still, to suspend disbelief for a moment, it is fun to wonder why Colbert would cut into Rudy Giuliani’s base of support so disproportionately. Are there actually a lot of Colbert viewers who don’t understand that his Fox Bloviator shtick is a joke? Or is Rudy benefitting from a hitherto-undiscovered segment of the electorate that doesn’t understand he’s dead serious?

In a final note on Family Research Council’s “Value Voters” Summit, Sarah Posner of The American Prospect‘s FundamentaList has this interesting reminder on Mike Huckabee’s performance at the event last year:

At last year’s Values Voter Summit, Huckabee got a pretty stony reception for suggesting that the Christian right work with feminists to combat porn, with gay rights activists to combat AIDS, and with unions to make better workplaces. But this time he came back with all the venom — and stock humor — that sells to the FRC audience. Starting with a joke about the Nobel committee needing to count more chads before finalizing Gore’s prize, Huckabee went on to call for sealing the border to stop illegal immigrants, fighting “Islamofascism,” ending “the holocaust of liberalized abortion,” and preserving “the holy word of God as it relates to the definition of marriage.”

Mike Huckabee may be renowned for the healthy eating tips associated with his own significant weight loss. But when it comes to wowing right-wing audiences, he’s figuring out that a strict diet of red meat is the key to adding political muscle.

Emily’s List is featuring a chart ranking the state legislatures according to the percentage of legislators who are women. The chart’s data comes from the Rutgers University Center for American Women in Politics, and the gap between the highest and lowest-ranking states is surprisingly large, with Maryland at the top (34.6 percent) and South Carolina at the bottom with 8.8 percent, which may not bode well for Senator Clinton in that state’s upcoming primary.
As you might guess, the ten bottom-ranking states are disproportionately southern, although a few southern states rank better, including Florida (ranking 22nd) and North Carolina (24th). Georgia is sort of mid-range at 32nd, ahead of Rhode Island (36th) and New Jersey (41st). The big surprise in the bottom 5 is Pennsylvania, ranking 46th among the 50 states, with women holding just 12.6 percent of the seats in the state legislature. Clearly the problem is more complicated than backward southern attitudes towards women’s political empowerment.
Impossible to say from this data whether not enough women are running for the legislatures, or men and even women are just not supporting women candidates when they do run, or perhaps some combination. While no state has achieved parity, the large disparities suggest that something can be done to improve womens’ political empowerment in the lower-ranking states.
Women were 56 percent of voters and 63 percent of swing voters in the U.S. presidential election in 2004, according to Emily’s List, and all polls are showing Democrats with a significant edge among women voters — a 7 percent gender gap favored Kerry in ’04. All of which makes me wonder if a more substantial investment in recruitment, training and campaign support for Democratic women, particularly in the low-ranking states, might be money very well-spent.

A good catch by Michael Crowley, who noticed that the latest LA Times/Bloomberg national poll revealed a very strange finding: among the one-third of GOP voters who say they’d go third-party if Republicans nominate a pro-choice, pro-gay-rights candidate, the plurality choice for that nomination is none other than Rudy Giuliani. These, uh, rather counterintuitive folk amount to only about 8 percent of GOP voters, but it’s still an interesting mystery. Do they not know about Rudy’s history on these issues, and his continuing refusal to support a direct overturning of Roe v. Wade or a national constitutional ban on gay marriage? Or do they buy his arguments that he “hates” abortion and wants states to control gay marriage? Is he benefitting from ignorance, or from persuasion?
In the same post on the same poll, Crowley suggests the numbers support Clinton pollster Mark Penn’s recent assertion that Rudy may have some issues with female voters. Giuliani’s gender gap (among Republicans) in the LA Times/Bloomberg poll, however, is dwarfed by that of Mike Huckabee, who draws support from 11 percent of men and only 4 percent of women. On the flip side, Mitt Romney draws 14 percent of women and only 7 percent of men.
Speaking of Mark Penn, here’s a sneak preview of my review of Penn’s recent book, Microtrends, that will soon appear in The Washington Monthly.

In the first significant policy-oriented thrust by Fred Thompson’s meandering campaign for president, Fred has released an immigration proposal that appears likely to touch off a new immigrant-bashing competition among the various GOP contestants.
The proposal focuses on enforcement of immigration laws rather than prevention of new influxes of illegals. By embracing an “attrition” strategy of reducing current levels of undocumented workers, it supposedly avoids the draconian alternative of mass deportations, without accepting any sort of path to citizenship. More importantly in terms of the presidential race, the proposal includes withdrawal of federal grants to “sanctuary cities” like Rudy’s New York and Mitt’s Boston.
Fred’s own Senate record on immigration issues is one of indifference and occasional pro-immigrant heresy, so his sudden effort to emerge as Tom Tancredo’s saner cousin will draw a lot of fire. But it will also likely bring out the worst in a Republican Party that has begun to see immigration as the new right-wing wedge issue of the twenty-first century.

Terrence McNally has posted an illuminating interview with Drew Westen, author of this year’s influential political strategy book “Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.” McNally’s intro to the Alternet interview notes Kenyan journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo’s incisive summary of Westen’s book:

Westen has studied elections over the years, and found an inconvenient truth: People almost always vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings, not the one who presents the best arguments

Of course Westen also summarizes his book in several exchanges throughout the interview and provides some alternative responses for Democratic candidates. See also TDS’s posts on Westen’s book here and here.

If you have any reason to care about web traffic, you might want to check out a New York Times piece (via Matt Yglesias) that explains why it’s always hard to answer the question: “Who reads your blog?”
Aside from the basic problem of sorting out hits, unique visits, and pageviews, and determining their relevance, there are a host of technological and even philosophical issues that have prevented the emergence of any “gold standard” for internet site traffic measurement. And the variety of measurement tools complicates the picture immensely.
Back when I was writing NewDonkey.com, I neglected to look at site traffic reports for a couple of months, and when I did, nearly had a heart attack, due to what appeared to be a calamitous drop in traffic for no apparent reason. Turns out we had shifted from one measurement tool to another, and I never did quite figure out whether the old, good numbers were more reliable than the new, not-so-good numbers.
I’ve been tempted to conclude that web traffic stats are like poll numbers: the important thing to watch is the trend-lines within measurement tools using the same methodology. But there are a host of problems that make that approach unreliable as well, viz., the use of RSS feeds, which in some incarnations boost actual traffic while reducing measurable traffic. And as the Times piece, by Louise Story, explains, you also have to pay attention to technological issues on the consumer end, particularly large server software that makes individual usage impossible to measure, and “cookie deletion” by individuals that thwarts tracking.
Story suggests, accurately, that this problem is probably inhibiting the growth of internet-based advertising, which relies on accurate understanding of target audiences. But it also affects a vast number of internet-based political voices, whose reach is hard to assess. Sometimes you have to measure impact by quality as well as quantity, and by how well you reach the destination through the traffic you encounter.

A couple of interesting morning reads focus on the Democratic presidential field. The Washington Post, as part of its occasional “Gurus” series, has a feature by Chris Cillizza on Edwards consultant Joe Trippi, with a rather provocative title: “The Dean-ing of Edwards.” The main point of the piece is that Trippi’s influence is attributable to a kindred-spirits relationship he enjoys with Elizabeth Edwards.
And over at the Wall Street Journal, an article billed as being about the hope dark horses draw from the retail politics of Iowa turns out to focus almost exclusively on Joe Biden, though it does mention that Chris Dodd recently moved his family to the state.
Oddly, enough, the piece doesn’t mention one of Biden’s hidden advantages: he campaigned in Iowa in 1988, before his candidacy folded due to a plagiarism flap. Too bad for him he didn’t retain two of his 1988 Iowa supporters: former governor Tom Vilsack and his wife, Christie, who are key cogs in Hillary Clinton’s Iowa campaign this year.

In their Rockridge Institute multi-part post “The Logic of the Health Care Debate,” George Lakoff, Eric Haas, Glenn W. Smith and Scott Parkinson dissect the rationales, assumptions and arguments behind the debate over health care reform. It’s very much a Lakoffian exercise, contrasting the psycholinguistics behind “progressive, conservative, and neoliberal” verbiage on health care. Democratic campaigns should find the insights helpful in addressing Republican spin on one of the top-ranking concerns of voters. For example, from the section on “The Conservative Mode of Thought”

In the conservative mode of thought, securing health insurance is a matter of individual responsibility. In this view, health care is a commodity that should be bought and sold through insurance policies in the market. If someone wants a commodity, they should work hard to afford it. In a free market economy — given that America is a land of opportunity — they will be able to do so. Anyone without health insurance for himself or his family just isn’t working hard enough and doesn’t deserve it. It’s just like plasma TVs; if you want one, work hard to afford one. Otherwise, you won’t get it, because you haven’t worked hard enough, and you don’t deserve it.
From the principle of individual responsibility, it follows that employers should never be forced to provide health insurance for their employees. They might choose freely to do so in order to attract talent, but that should be their free choice.
Within the conservative mode of thought, the market is both natural and moral. Natural in that people instinctively seek their own profit and moral in that those who are most disciplined will be most likely to prosper. Market outcomes are therefore always moral and most practical, since the market optimizes the fair and efficient distribution of goods and services. Government interference compromises both the efficiency and morality of market processes.
In conservative thought, health insurance should be a money-making business; it will be most fair and efficient that way. Conservative thought also supports private medical accounts on two similar grounds. First, they are moral because they make the individual responsible. Second, they are practical in that the money can be invested in the market, thereby creating more profits for more people.
What about the denial of care or coverage? In conservative thought this is inevitable and necessary. Your lack of coverage is your own fault. You have not been self-disciplined. You have failed in your individual responsibility to earn it. It’s not the fault of the market or insurance companies. Insurance companies provide a service at a profit, and when they cannot provide that service at a profit, they should not do so. Moreover, those who are uncovered have an incentive to work harder and earn coverage. People do not have the moral right to have someone else pay for their health care coverage; indeed it would be immoral to do so, since that promotes dependency.
Promoting dependency — whether by patients, doctors, or plan administrators — is the root of the conservative fear of health care for all Americans. Conservatives label this as “socialized medicine” or “government health care,” and they argue that health care for all Americans will undermine our self-discipline and make us weak. This is, above all, a moral issue for conservatives, which is why economic efficiency arguments alone will not carry the day with them. For example, we already know that U.S. Medicare and Canada’s single-payer health care system are more efficiently managed than U.S. private, profit-maximizing insurance companies.3 There is also compelling evidence that savings on the profit and administrative costs of the current private insurance companies could pay for health care for all Americans, if it were run as a single payer system.4 From the conservative perspective, these plans are still viewed from top to bottom as unearned entitlements — automatic care for patients, guaranteed income for doctors, and lifetime jobs for government administrators — and so promote dependency and are immoral.
Finally, once health care is understood as a commodity, then the logic of the market sets the value of human life and limb. Therefore, there should be a limit — a cap — on the value that can be claimed in a lawsuit when medical error causes disability or death.
This conservative logic fits perfectly the practice of health insurance companies and makes sense of the following quotes from conservative leaders.

The authors then quote Nixon, Guiliani, Romney and the National Review to prove their point. In their equally-eloquent section on “The Neoliberal Mode of Thought,” they discuss the “Surrender-in-Advance Trap” that they feel some Democrats have blundered into, noting:

With an exaggerated emphasis on system-based solutions, neoliberal thought may lead one to surrender in advance the moral view that drives an initiative in the first place. Those who pragmatically focus on appeasing what they assume will be unavoidable political opposition to their proposals also run the risk of moral surrender…They deeply believe that progressive moral principles can be served through neoliberal methods and forms of argument. We want to stress, however, that the consequence is dire whatever the motivation. The failure to articulate a clear progressive morality in favor of more technocratic solutions to profit-maximizing markets puts the progressive cause at a disadvantage on health care and other policy issues as well. It doesn’t matter whether one is simply trying to avoid conservative and insurance company opposition or whether one truly believes in one’s heart that the market will cure us. The progressive moral basis for providing health care for all — empathy and responsibility, protection and empowerment — is not stated. As a result, Americans don’t get to hear the progressive moral basis for extending health care to all Americans, and they don’t get to decide whether they agree with that moral premise. Americans only hear the conservative moral view. That moves them in a conservative direction, not only on this issue, but on all issues.

Lakoff et al see the neoliberal approach as a poor substitute for comprehensive reform, and one which has deadly consequences:

System tinkering — eliminating pre-existing condition exclusions, adding mandatory coverage for this or that ailment, subsidizing (substandard) health care for the poor — will make a difference for many, but not for all. It will leave many more people with the kind of dissatisfaction that those with present health insurance have rightly been complaining about. Tinkering like that is more concerned with saving a system that has already failed than it is with the health of a society, indeed, with saving lives.

The authors’ argument is moral at the root, but they do offer an important strategic consideration:

The best way to proceed is to keep what we care the most about at the center of the discussion of health care security. What we care the most about is the actual health and well-being of flesh-and-blood people. Keeping this care in our hearts does not mean that temporary compromises will not be necessary. It means only that we don’t begin with compromise.

Lakoff and his co-authors have made a compelling argument for a bold strategy for comprehensive health care reform, and they have a lot more to say about the terms of the debate than can be recounted here. Democratic candidates would do well to give due consideration to their challenge on the road to November ’08.

Check out this column from St. Pete Times political editor Adam C. Smith, and tell me if you buy it. Its subject is the alleged advantage Republicans are going to get, now and apparently forever, due to the Democratic presidential candidate boycott of next year’s Florida primary. (Republicans are merely going to strip Florida of half its delegates).
Sure sounds dubious to me. We are supposed to believe that Floridians have instantly acquired the self-referential obsession with their role in the nominating process that voters in Iowa and New Hampshire have developed over many moons. Given Florida’s size and perpetual general-election relevance, it’s hard to believe its citizens think a well-attended primary is important to either the state’s economy or its political standing. But when I was in the state recently, it’s true you heard a lot about this from Democrats as well as Republicans.
In any event, I’m glad I read Smith’s piece, if only to marvel at this quote from state GOP chair Jim Greer: “Our party, because of what the Democrats have done, has an opportunity that it has never had before to step forward and say every vote will count…”
Yeah, that would be a first.