I just watched the Des Moines Register Republican candidate debate, and learned little or nothing, other than that Alan Keyes is running for president again (guess I vaguely knew that, though the Register‘s decision to put him up on the debate stage, even as it excludes Dennis Kucinich from tomorrow’s Democratic debate, is just perverse).
I did find it a bit interesting that the first couple of questions, which focused on fiscal policy, elicited an immediate pledge from Giuliani to repeal corporate taxes, and two separate remarks by Thompson fretting about limitations on defense spending. That’s in case anyone was wondering if the candidates are still appealing to a relatively small sliver of the electorate. It was also illuminating to learn that after all sorts of gloomy talk about the fiscal crisis, only one candidate could bring himself to talk about asking Americans to sacrifice anything at all (and that was Thompson, who of course wants Americans to give up some Social Security and Medicare benefits).
All in all though, this debate was a snore-athon, and I don’t just say that because I’m a Democrat. Looking over at National Review’s The Corner, the boredom level was palpable, despite a general feeling that NR’s newly anointed favorite, Mitt Romney, was the winner. There was also a lot of carping about the debate’s sole moderator, Register editor Carolyn Washburn, who struggled to control the contestants and sounded annoyed much of the time. Best of all was this comment from Kathryn Jean Lopez:

What I don’t get is this is IOWA. Wouldn’t the editor of the DMR be a total political junkie? Wouldn’t she live for this? She looks and sounds bored out of her mind.

Welcome to today’s corporate media, K-Lo: Washburn is a Gannett careerist who was appointed to the Register editorship in September 2005, not an Iowan.

As the participation of actual voters in the 2008 presidential contest grows nigh, polls are rolling out at an ever-increasing pace (here, here, and here, just yesterday).
Put ’em all in a bag, shake ’em up, roll ’em back out, and the Big Picture becomes pretty clear:
On the Democratic side, Iowa remains skin-tight among the Big Three of Clinton, Obama and Edwards, and now NH and SC are tightening up as well. Whoever wins Iowa will almost certainly become the instant front-runner in the other two contests. And with no really clear front-runner anymore, “exceeding expectations” in IA may not be much of a factor. It’s all about win, place or show, and show is unlikely to cut it. Moreover, unless something really strange happens, the non-Big-Three candidates will all struggle to survive Iowa.
On the Republican side, there are now four candidates with a plausible route to the nomination: Huckabee, Giuliani, Romney and McCain. Huck’s got a growing lead in IA and national momentum; Romney’s got a sizable lead in NH and unlimited money; Rudy’s got February 5 plus the possibility that Huckabee and Romney will fatally wound each other; and McCain’s got enduring support in NH and, well, a growing sense that nobody else is broadly acceptable.
It’s going to be a wild ride beginning on January 3.

Republicans held on to both House seats in yesterday’s special elections to replace deceased GOP congressmen in Ohio and Virginia. Although Democrats hoped for an upset pick-up in Ohio 5, both seats are located in Republican stronghold districts. Democrat Robin Weirauch lost Ohio 5 to Republican Bob Latta by 56.8 to 42.9 percent, about the same percentage she received in her ’06 run for the seat. However, Dems can take some quailified comfort from the results, as Stuart Rothenberg explains:

Democrats…forced Republicans to spend heavily to defend a solidly Republican district. Part of the Democrats’ 2008 House strategy obviously is to force the NRCC to play in as many districts as possible, bleeding the under-financed GOP dry and, possibly, sneaking off with a few extra seats next fall.
The NRCC was able to hold the Ohio district, in part, by outspending the DCCC. It will not be able to do that very often next year. But before you give the DCCC a trophy for forcing the NRCC to spend money on the race, remember that the Democrats just tossed away $250,000 in Ohio 5 and have nothing to show for it.

The NRCC spent about $400,000 to hold the seat according to The Toledo Blade wrap-up. As DCCC Chairman Chris Van Hollen put it,

Spending 20 percent of their cash on hand to retain one of the most Republican districts in the country — priceless.

Chris Redfern, chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, adds “The GOP had to scramble to win a special election that should have been a cake walk.”
But Rothenberg cautions against reading too much into the special elections:

Given that GOP special election nominees held reliably Republican seats, all the results prove is that Democrats will have a hard time winning solidly Republican districts next year. That suggests that Democrats aren’t likely to gain another 30 or 40 seats in 2008, hardly an earth-shattering conclusion.

Ohio 5 has been held by the GOP since the 1930’s. The DCCC spent $0 in the VA 1st district race, which Bush won with 60 percent of the vote in ’04. The Republicans held the VA seat by a 61-37 percent margin.

My last post suggested that Mike Huckabee’s surge is national support is a testament to the power of Iowa, showing that even perceptions of Iowa success have a significant impact on voters elsewhere, in advance of the Caucuses.
At TNR’s The Plank, Jason Zengerle agrees with my Iowa Pre-Bounce hypothesis, but wonders if Huckabee’s high expectations will diminish his actual Iowa Bounce, assuming he wins by a smaller margin than appears likely today. It’s a good if very hypothetical question, though I personally suspect a “Huckabee Wins Iowa” headline, complete with coverage of how he slew the Romney Money Machine, would be more important than the margin of victory.
But via Chris Bowers, there’s an alternative explanation of the National Huckabee Surge I missed, and while its utilization and efficacy is hard to measure, it’s definitely worth noting: Huckabee has access to Randy Brinson’s vast email list.
Brinson, the Alabamian who founded Redeem the Vote, is probably the most under-appreciated power broker in the Christian Right, though Amy Sullivan wrote a profile of Brinson last year, when he was flirting with bipartisanship, probably as a reminder to the GOP about the perils of taking conservative evangelicals for granted. As Sullivan noted, Brinson played a big role in turning out the evangelical vote for Bush in 2004, and now he’s firmly in Huckabee’s camp, along with his email list, which reportedly has an astounding 71 million names.
It’s not clear exactly how much Huckabee has used this list, but it’s certainly a good way for him to spread the glad tidings of his Iowa surge.

Two big new national polls, by CNN, and by CBS/New York Times, show Mike Huckabee now challenging Rudy Giuliani for the national GOP lead.
Think about that for a minute. Huckabee has run no broadcast ads outside Iowa, and precious few even there. He’s barely campaigned outside Iowa. So aside from his televised debate appearances, and whatever random direct mail a GOP voter may have received, his national support levels pretty much have to be based on news coverage of his campaign in Iowa.
There’s a quadrennial debate in political circles about the size and nature of the “Iowa Bounce,” the later benefit a candidate receives for winning or exceeding expectations in Iowa. But what we seem to be witnessing here is an Iowa “Pre-Bounce,” based on perceptions that a candidate’s doing well in Iowa. Stands to reason that the actual, post-Caucus “Bounce” should be even bigger, eh?
And that, my friends, should be as disturbing to the campaign of Rudy “I Can Ignore Iowa” Giuliani as Huckabee’s sudden second-place national standing.

The horse race polls are now becoming more relevant as tools for prediction as we close in on the primaries. But they are less useful to candidates, campaigns and reporters as a tool for knowing what exactly is bugging voters. For that we turn to issue polls, and the latest Gallup Poll, conducted 11/30-12/2, is particularly instructive in that regard.
Asked to identify the issues “most important in determining their vote for president in next year’s election,” the Gallup survey respondents gave answers, in their own words — not Gallup’s suggested terminology. As Joseph Carroll reports in his Gallup summary:

Thirty-six percent of Americans say Iraq, with the economy (16%), healthcare (15%), and illegal immigration (10%) mentioned next most often. Between 3% and 6% of Americans mention homeland security or military defense, taxes, the honesty and integrity of the candidate, abortion, domestic issues, Social Security reform, and international affairs….Iraq has diminished somewhat as the top issue over the course of the year, while there has been a slight increase in the reported importance of immigration.

The poll is based on a nationwide sample (m.o.e.= 3), so it is not the last word on issues for candidates with respect to individual state primaries. The early states holding primaries are not the best bellwethers in the way their demographics reflect national priorities (for the best bellwether states, see interactive graphic chart here). But I would not be shocked if voters in IA, NH, SC, NV, MI and FL ranked their issues of concern in a fairly close approximation. The poll may be even more relevant with respect to Super Tuesday (Feb. 5), when half of the delegates to the two party conventions are chosen.
Carroll’s report includes an interesting chart ranking concerns by region. Readers may be surprised that southerners are more likely to rank the war in Iraq as a the top issue than are respondents from the east and west, that midwesterners are much more concerned about health care, or that westerners are the least concerned about the economy.
As for Party differences, Carroll writes:

Iraq ranks as the top voting issue for Republicans, independents, and Democrats. However, Democrats (46%) are much more likely than independents (34%) or Republicans (29%) to mention Iraq. Democrats are more likely than the other party groups to mention healthcare. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to mention illegal immigration (17% to 3%), homeland security and terrorism (17% to 4%), and abortion (6% to less than 0.5%)….Independents most frequently mention Iraq, the economy, healthcare, and immigration.

What I like about this poll is letting the respondents use their own language to rank their issues of concern. Gallup did what appears to be a good job of grouping terms, For example, “honesty/integrity/credibility of candidate.” Their word choices should be of intense interest for speeches, position papers, websites, ads, interviews and other tools of campaign messaging. On the other hand, the chosen words may mean something quite different to individual voters, just as they do in multiple choice polls. It would be interesting to see Lakoff’s take on the respondents’ chosen terms.

Last month I did a post about the “Left’s Obama Problem,” noting that many progressive bloggers and activists were experiencing cognitive dissonance over perceptions of Obama’s generally sympatico policy proposals, as opposed to his habit of framing his message in a way that seemed to court Republicans and Centrists while dissing the Left itself.
The post earned me a lecture from Matt Stoller, who somehow perceived it as an attack on the Left, and who took umbrage at the idea that progressive ambivalence about Obama might have something to do with matters other than pure policy disagreements.
Since I strongly suspect that Stoller objected less to the message of my post than to the messenger (yours truly), I should report that his OpenLeft colleague, the estimable Chris Bowers, has posted a meditation on Obama today that makes all the points I was trying to make, much more eloquently, with more recent examples, and presumably, with much greater credibility. Check it out.

Via Steve Benen, today’s big thought experiment in the blogosphere comes from Ross Douthat’s observation (which crystallizes a very common feeling) that none of the Republican presidential candidates can win the nomination, since all of them have “near-disqualifying weaknesses.”
If anything, this phenomenon has intensified of late. Giuliani’s social-issues problems and marital record have been massively compounded by a sex-corruption scandal that is not going to go away. The disrespect establishment conservatives had for Mike Huckabee has turned into virulent hostility, and you best believe his own scandal, involving rapist/murderer Wayne DuMond, is going to get pushed into the faces of every GOP voter in IA and NH. The immigration issue keeps getting bigger in GOP circles, making John McCain not just an unacceptable nominee, but an arch-villain. And all the scuttlebutt about Fred Thompson’s lazy streak has been abundantly confirmed by his behavior on the campaign trail; he’s emphatically flunked his candidate audition.
I don’t buy Douthat’s assertion that Romney’s ideological background is as disqualifying a problem as those suffered by his rivals, but do think Romney’s poorly positioned himself for the long haul by building expectations for an early-state sweep. Ironically, the major GOP candidate with the fewest weaknesses could be the first knocked out if he loses both IA and NH.
In any event, the GOP candidate landscape is one that might well invite a strong sense of buyer’s remorse after someone inevitably moves into a strong overall lead. But there are two obstacles to that kind of development. The first, quite obviously, is the compressed primary schedule, which provides relatively few late opportunities for effective guerilla warfare against a prohibitive favorite. And the second is that historically, Republicans don’t seem prone to buyer’s remorse, even if second thoughts might have been completely justified.
In this respect, the two parties have been starkly different. On the Democratic side, the ultimate nominee has undergone a terrible losing streak late in the primary season on several occasions (most clearly in 1976, 1980 and 1984). In other years–1972, 1988, and 1992–the all-but-acknowledged nominee had some late struggles against one surviving rival. And even in 2004, John Edwards threw a scare into John Kerry after the latter had supposedly all but wrapped up the nomination. Indeed, 2000 was the one year in which the Democratic front-runner in a genuinely contested nomination fight just didn’t lose much of anywhere.
Among Republicans, the only serious late challenge occurred in 1976, when Ronald Reagan made it all the way to the Convention, but in the unique circumstance of an appointed president facing the maximum hero of the conservative movement (ironically, the only other modern–i.e., primary era–example of any sort of delayed GOP challenge was in 1980, when George H.W. Bush won a couple of late primaries against Reagan). But by and large, and even in cases of front-runners who looked increasingly weak as general-election candidates, such as Bush 41 in 1992 and Dole in 1996, once the deal went down, GOPers stayed in line. And that was in the old, stretched out primary calendar that made quick kills more difficult.
So what will happen if a candidate emerges from February 5 with a giant delegate lead and a lot of baggage? Given the history, and the fact that any late challenger would probably be similarly handicapped, it’s a recipe for a weak nominee and a discouraged party.

A batch of Mason-Dixon polls (done for MSNBC and the McLatchey papers) came out over the weekend, covering both parties’ presidential contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. And to some extent, these polls throw monkey wrenches into the rapidly emerging conventional wisdom that Obama’s surging past HRC in Iowa; Edwards is irrelevant; and Huckabee’s conquering all on the GOP side.
For one thing, Mason-Dixon shows HRC still up in Iowa. On the other hand, it shows Obama nearly catching up with Clinton in NH and in SC. Edwards is still hanging in there in Iowa; is still looking weak in NH; and for the first time ever, seems to be making a move towards respectibility in his native state of SC (at 18%, compared to 28% for Clinton and 25% for Obama).
The most interesting Mason-Dixon finding is a test of what would happen in NH if either Edwards or Obama drops out after IA. As you probably know, the CW is that if Obama can croak Edwards in IA, he can consolidate the anti-HRC vote and perhaps win decisively in NH and beyond. But this poll shows Edwards voters in NH going overwhelmingly to Clinton, even though Obama voters (if he were to drop out after IA) would go overwhelmingly to Edwards.
The bad news in these polls for Edwards is that for all the talk about his massive union support, he’s running a very poor third in Nevada, a state where a lot of folks thought he might post an early win if he survives IA.
On the Republican side, Mason-Dixon shows Huckabee with a big (12%) lead in Iowa, but still running fourth in NH. Giuliani has sunk to an astonishing 5% in IA (fifth place), a good indicator of how voters there treat you if you disrespect them. And five candidates are competitive in SC, the state where the whole deal could go down, or at least winnow the field to two prior to the February 5 mega-primary.

Candidates across the nation are no doubt taking note of the new Pew poll of Hispanics. The poll, conducted October 3 to November 9 (m.o.e. 2.7) was all good news for Dems. Some key findings:

Hispanics now say they favor Democrats over Republicans by a margin of 34 percent, compared to a margin of 21 percent in July 2006
Pew estimates that there will be 8.6 million Hispanic voters in ’08, up by a margin of more than a million since ’04
In four of the six ‘swing states’ Bush won in ’04 by a margin of less than 5 percent, Hispanics are in a position to be a key ‘swing vote’ in the electorates: NM (37%); FL (14%); NV (12%); and CO (12%)
44 percent of Latino rv’s say Dems have more concern for their issues, compared to 8 percent who say Republicans have more concern.
Younger Hispanics are slightly more likely to favor Democrats.
79 percent of Hispanic voters say immigration is a “very important” issue, up from 63 percent in June ’04.
Although Latinos are 15 percent of the U.S. population, they are 9 percent of the eligible national electorate, but they are expected to be only about 6.5 percent of the electorate in ’08.

The Clinton campaign should also be encouraged that she was favored by 59 percent of Hispanic voters, compared to 15 percent for Obama and 8 percent for Richardson. Clinton has experienced some loss of African American support to Obama in the weeks since the Pew poll, but it is unclear whether Hispanics are also beginning to trend toward favoring Obama and/or Richardson.