Ah, primary season. It’s the wonderful time of year when party activists get to sit down in the intimate setting of a boisterous rally and hear their candidates’ strongest values and desires–you know, the ones they forget immediately after winning the nomination. In a country with wide cultural and social differences, some strategizing on issue positions is necessary in order to win elections. But how much shifting can you get away with and still avoid the devastating label of “flip-flopper”?
This question is addressed by a recent APSR article published by Margit Tavits of Mizzou. In her article, Tavits uses a cross-national dataset of 20 democracies–including the U.S.–to test whether shifting position yields political dividends or losses (in terms of vote totals), and under what conditions. For the purposes of her study, she divides issue positions into two categories: economic or “pragmatic” issues (such as tax policy, regulation, and economic planning), and social or “principled” issues (such as traditional morality, social justice, equality, and environmentalism). A full list of the issues can be found in the original article.
Tavits finds that, on average, shifts on pragmatic issues benefit politicians politically, whereas shifts on social issues are harmful. Since it seems like there is potential for a lot of overlap between issues designated as either “pragmatic” or “principled,” the waters are muddied somewhat. But attempting to moderate or reverse one’s positions on strong, clearly principled issues like abortion, gay marriage, or religion’s place in public life appears to be one ticket to a lost election. If you’re on the record supporting liberal social policies and you’re worried about the South and Midwest, it’s probably a better bet to remain passionate on the stump, while not exactly leading with those issues.
The same could go for moderates in those ideological primary battles. Giuliani gets it on abortion. So does Clinton on the War. If Tavits knows what she’s talking about, we can only hope that the Republicans nominate Mitt Romney.

Drew Westen, current “it guy” of political attitude research, has a provocative HuffPo post about the limits — and untapped potential — of opinion polls. After conceding that current polling techniques can produce useful results, Westen argues:

But polls and focus groups can mislead as often as they inform. They can misinform the public if voters are unaware of the extent to which what you get out of them depends on what you put into them. If you ask people if they are “pro-life” or “pro-choice,” you miss all the nuances that lead two-thirds of voters to believe that we should find some “middle ground” on abortion — if you happen to ask that question. They also mislead voters in an election when the media repeatedly report national numbers, because we don’t elect our presidents in direct elections. If they can’t afford to sample enough voters in a state-by-state or region-by-region basis that can approximate likely Electoral College results, the media shouldn’t report anything, even on a slow news day, because doing so creates false impressions of how candidates would fare in the election (not in a fictitious national referendum) that create bandwagon effects and bias voters’ judgments about electability in early primary states.

It’s not just the missed nuances, Westen believes; it’s also the overreaching:

Polls and focus groups can also mislead — and cost elections — when campaigns don’t understand their limits. They led Al Gore’s campaign in 2000 to avoid talking about the earth we leave our children (notice that I didn’t say “the environment”), even though that was his most enduring passion, because his consultants couldn’t find their way from “the environment” (a term that is, in fact, emotionally and electorally deadening) to the voter. They used the polls, like Democratic pollster-strategists have used them in so many elections, to tell the candidate what issues to talk about, instead of using them the way Luntz used voters’ responses, namely to help candidates refine the words and imagery to talk about what really matters to them. Gore showed how easily he could have turned his passion about the earth into similar feelings among the electorate in “An Inconvenient Truth,” with images of glaciers falling and emotionally powerful words that conveyed — and activated in the rest of us — his passion, as he movingly told his listeners, with an intonation in his voice that transmitted just how important the issue really is, “This is our only home.”

Westen goes on to argue that the “the gut level emotional responses” in voting decisions “are generated outside our awareness.” He discusses how experiments using subliminal flash images of candidates change responses to poll questions and concludes that using such polling techniques would have helped Gore to understand the benefits of making more use of Bill Clinton in the 2000 campaign.
Westen opposes using subliminal images in political campaign ads as manipulative and unethical. But he makes a strong case that applying such technologies in opinion polls can help candidates unveil voters’ deepest feelings about issues and candidates. Pollsters and poll-watchers alike will find his article of considerable interest.

The Republican presidential candidates are all on the Web. Fine. Most of them have even taken the first, halting steps into the brave new world of social media. They have MySpace pages, load video up to YouTube, and control their Facebook profiles. That’s delightful — probably even good for democracy. But as of yet, you haven’t seen one of them (who isn’t named Ron Paul) embrace the change that the Internet has wrought.
Joe Trippi believes that is going to hurt them badly in the general election.
In a video recorded by a blogger for TechPresident (which does a terrific job chronicling the ways in which technology is transforming presidential politics) the current Edwards strategist and former Dean guru sounds off in a segment that strikes me as particularly unguarded, and interesting.

Read more…

Senators Jim Webb and Lindsay Graham got into a fierce dust-up on Meet the Press a few weeks ago. If you had to score the thing, you would give Webb the edge, because he was right and his credibility came through. But neither Senator was particularly well-served by the acrimonious exchange. You could almost hear viewers hoping for a more enlightening discussion switching channels from coast to coast.
This sort of thing happens on interview/debate programs fairly often. Politicians spend big bucks hiring consultants to upgrade their media skills. But you have to wonder if they do much good, when you see so many elected officials losing cool under fire.
There are precious few contemporary role models for displaying genuine grace and dignity when they are getting grilled by press or critics. But there is a wonderful DVD, “King: Man of Peace in a Time of War,” which shows how it is done. In one segment, Dr. King is interviewed by Mike Douglas and Tony Martin. Despite the Mike Douglas Show’s softball format at the time, both men ask King some tough questions about his then controversial opposition to the Vietnam War. King answers calmly and deliberately with substantive answers, all the while displaying a friendly, open spirit towards his questioners. There is no bristling or anger, nary a trace of off-putting sarcasm or snark. At the end of the interview, King’s winning maturity leaves viewers and questioners alike somewhat awestruck.
MLK was rightly celebrated for his ability to turn on the heat in his speeches. But he also understood the power of cool. Few leaders have King’s remarkable gifts. But that doesn’t mean today’s public figures can’t learn from him. The DVD costs just $12.99 at Amazon — highly recommended for all Democratic candidates.

Democratic speechwriters and candidates have an article to plunder at The Nation, where Tom Engelhardt posts a Harper’s index-style collection of factoids shining a bright light on the out-of-control costs of the Iraq quagmire. A little taste:

Number of attacks from June 2006 through May 2007 on U.S. supply convoys guarded by private-security contractors: 869, a near tripling from the previous twelve months.
Estimated monthly cost of the Iraq (and Afghan) Wars: $12 billion–$10 billion for Iraq–a third higher than in 2006, according to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service.
Estimated number of bullets fired by U.S. troops for every insurgent killed in Iraq (or Afghanistan): 250,000, according to John Pike, director of the Washington military-research group GlobalSecurity.org. This comes out to 1.8 billion rounds of small-arms ammunition yearly. With U.S. munitions factories unable to meet the demand, 313 million rounds of such munitions were purchased from Israel last year for $10 million more than if produced domestically.
Estimated cost of deploying an American soldier to Iraq for one year: $390,000, according to the Congressional Research Service.

And this jaw-dropper:

Percentage of dollars annually appropriated by the U.S. government and spent on Iraq-related activities: More than 10%, or one dollar out of every 10, according to the CBO’s Sunshine.

Pretty much the same thing as a 10 percent surtax, and to fight an unprovoked, undeclared, unwinnable war opposed by large margins of both the American and Iraqi people.

David Sirota’s HuffPo article “Dems Beware: An Economic Populist Is Rising In the GOP” about the possible elevation of Mike Huckabee to the first tier of the GOP field merits a read from Dem oppo researchers. Whether or not Huckabee gets any more traction beyond his 2nd place finish in the Iowa straw poll, his particular brand of “populist” rhetoric with no policies behind it may catch on with Republicans, on the theory that you can indeed fool some of the people some of the time.
Sirota points out that Huckabee did sign legislation raising the minimum wage and limiting public smoking in Arkansas, both unpopular with the corporate crowd. Huckabee, arguably the cleverest purveyor of one-liners among all the presidential candidates has mastered the folksy delivery that works well with his bogus populist pitch. Sirota quotes some lines from Huckabee speeches Ralph Nader could agree with, but cautions:

I think a lot of Huckabee’s rhetoric is just that: Rhetoric. I say that because while he shows courage in actually talking about these issues that many other Republicans (and some Democrats) refuse to talk about, he supported many typical regressive Republican policies in Arkansas and on the campaign trail today he reverts back to failed right-wing ideologies when he talks about “solutions,” offering up proposals that would actually make things far worse. As just one of many examples, notice that the Atlantic reports that his Iowa operation is being fueled by a group whose single goal is replacing the mildly progressive income tax with one flat national sales tax – a proposal that Huckabee supports even though experts (including top Reagan administration economic officials) admit would result in a massive tax increase on the middle-class and a massive tax cut for those CEO rip-off artists Huckabee rails against.

In his “Huckabee Who?” post at the AFL-CIO Now Blog, Seth Michaels agrees with Sirota about Huckabee’s track record:

Huckabee’s record as governor of Arkansas is far from a good fit for working families, even though he signed legislation to raise the state’s minimum wage and authorize ARKids First, a program that offers health benefits for low-income children…In fact as a presidential candidate, his primary domestic agenda item is a national sales tax that would hit poor and middle-income families the hardest, and he’s spoken favorably about privatized Social Security accounts.

At this point it may seem doubtful that Huckabee could derail Romney’s gilt-edged juggernaut. But Huckabee stands out in the GOP pack, and that’s just the sort of profile New Hampshire voters have often found appealing. Dems should not be caught unprepared by a GOP candidacy fueled by faux populism.

Jennifer Steinhauer’s New York Times report “States Try to Alter How Presidents Are Elected” illuminates an interesting dilemma for Democrats. Stehhauer writes about the GOP-led effort to change California election law to to apportion the state’s electoral votes by Congressional district, instead of the existing winner-take-all system of allocating state electoral votes. Dems quite correctly see this as a thinly-veiled plot to take some of their California electoral votes, which would surely happen, should the proposal be enacted.
When a recent effort to do pretty much the same thing in North Carolina came close to passing, however, many Dems were encouraged. Why? because Dems would almost certainly pick up a few districts and therefore a few electoral votes in the tarheel state, enough to have put Al Gore in the White House in 2000, if apportionment of electoral votes by district had been in place at that time. (Chris Bowers wrestles with the N.C. reform proposal in his Open Left post here). According to Steinhauer, DNC Chair Howard Dean, on learning of the GOP’s California gambit, persuaded the N.C. Democratic leaders to table the measure until next session.
What’s wrong with apportioning of electoral votes by district? Steinhauer explains it this way:

Had the electoral votes been allocated by Congressional district nationwide in 2000, President Bush’s electoral margin of victory would have been just over 7 percent, or eight times his take that year, according to FairVote.

While it would have been nice to pick up a few electoral votes in N.C., it would have weakened Dems’ arguments against the same reform in CA.
Republicans can’t be credible in appealing for the apportionment of electoral votes by district as a “reform.” Last year, the California Assembly passed a bill to award all of the state’s electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill.
The most promising way to get rid of the electoral college is the interstate compact approach, in which a group of states with a majority of electoral votes (270) each passes legislation committing all of their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote nationwide. According to the National Popular Vote Bill website,

The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee that the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in all 50 states will win the Presidency. In April 2007, Maryland became the first state to enact the bill. So far, the bill has passed 11 legislative chambers. In 2007, the bill passed the Arkansas House, California Senate, Colorado Senate, and North Carolina Senate as well as both houses in Hawaii, Illinois, and Maryland. In 2006, the bill passed the Colorado Senate and both houses in California.

The NPV website has a nifty map showing the progress of the reform on a broader scale. Rob Richie and Ryan O’Donnell of Fairvote further explain the approach in their TomPaine.com post here.
The NPV campaign does seem to be gathering momentum. This may be our best shot at preventing a replay of the 2000 debacle.

Beginning this week, TDS will be expanding its blogging corps to include three young thinkers and activists who will periodically provide fresh new content to The Daily Strategist. We are proud to welcome:
Austin Bonner: Austin has worked in communications on Capitol Hill and at a DC think tank, a congressional campaign, and, currently, a nonprofit that uses technology to connect low-income people around the world with the economic mainstream. She has also written for publications including the Austin American-Statesman, SPIN and TPMCafe.com. Austin is a graduate of the University of Texas and a proud Ann Richards Democrat.
Matt Compton: Matt Compton is an editor for the Democratic Leadership Council and Progressive Policy Institute. In 2006, he was appointed by Governor Mike Easley to serve on the North Carolina Progress Board. Compton worked for the North Carolina Democratic Party during the 2004 election as a member of the House Caucus campaign committee. He graduated with a degree in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Sam Drzymala: Sam is a recent graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, who currently works as an online organizer for a progressive nonprofit group. He is an avid student of politics and social science, as well as a dedicated campaigner and advocate. You are as likely to meet him canvassing for Democratic candidates as at a live blues or jazz show. In his free time, Sam enjoys reading only the nerdiest political science literature and playing kickball with his friends.
We’ll be adding additonal voices in the future, but all will continue to promote the TDS mission of Democratic unity and civil debate on the long-term issues affecting Democratic strategy.

The big political news this morning–announced, appropriately, via an exclusive interview with Paul Gigot on the Wall Street Journal editorial page–is that Karl Rove is leaving the White House at the end of this month.
There’s already some speculation that Rove is leaving to get out of the spotlight of congressional (and perhaps criminal justice system) scrutiny of the Bush administration’s many crimes and misdemeanors–or, to follow a very different theory, to join the presidential campaign of Fred Thompson, due to announce next month. We’ll know soon enough about that proposition. But it’s as good a time as any to assess the legacy of this strange, frightening, and ultimately defeated man.
Tne first place to stop in understanding Rove’s legacy is the masterful profile of Rove published in The New Yorker by Nicholas Lemann in August of 2003 (indeed, the title of today’s Gigot piece, “The Mark of Rove,” alludes to a term used by Lemann to denote acts of political skullduggery not directly attributable to Rove, but bearing his “mark”).
Lemann’s main thesis is that Rove’s M.O. was perfected in a series of campaigns in Texas (and I could add, in Alabama) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which led to a Republican takeover of the state, top to bottom. From a strategic point of view, the “marks of Rove” were: (1) an abiding belief in ideological polarization, particularly on highly emotional issues, as the One True Way to win elections, not only by solidifying the conservative base but by forcing swing voters to pick sides on favorable terms; (2) a direct-mail specialist’s attention to electoral segmentation and what is now known as “micro-targeting;” (3) an insistence on the use of policy initiatives to attract, reward or punish specific constituencies; (4) an intense focus on the nexus between politics, policy and partisan funding sources; (5) a complete lack of inhibition about nasty, negative political tactics; and (6) a taste for secrecy and indirection.
It’s hard to identify any political or policy triumph or defeat during the Bush administration that is not essentially attributable to one of Rove’s characteristic traits. It’s true that Rove probably had little to do directly with the failed occupation of Iraq or the abandonment of New Orleans after Katrina. But on the other hand, rewarding Republican campaign contributors and activists with fat contracts and jobs in Iraq certainly bore some “mark of Rove,” as did the administration’s favoritism towards Republican-governed Mississippi and Alabama after Katrina.
In the end, all Rove’s designs ultimately backfired. Rovian polarization ultimately united the Democratic Party in intense opposition to Bush. Failed politically-driven policies, and the corruption borne of constituency- and funder-tending by the White House and Congress, ultimately drove independents into the arms of Democrats, And one of Rove’s prize swing-voter initiatives, immigration reform, blew up spectacularly, alienating the GOP’s conservative base and Latino voters as well.
It is sometimes forgotten that the peak era of Rove’s influence, the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004, produced a no-margin-for-error win and narrow Republican majorities in Congress, despite the unexpected windfall to Rovian politics provided by 9/11. It’s seemed like a long way down for Bush and the GOP since then, but in truth, Bush’s popularity was never high except in a few crucial moments.
As an American citizen, I am personally happy that this man will soon no longer be on the public payroll. But for political analysts, it will be important to deconstruct the various theories of the “boy genius,” which seemed so darkly brilliant not that long ago, to identify the fatal arrogance and folly that was there all along.

The much-anticipated face-off between DLC chairman Harold Ford, Jr. and DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas on Meet the Press happened this morning. And it wasn’t quite the slugfest most people expected. Ford nicely undercut the netroots-demonizing reputation of the DLC by repeatedly praising the importance of the netroots to recent Democratic successes, and pledging to attend next year’s Netroots Nation (nee YearlyKos) gathering. And Markos abandoned his usual DLC-is-dead line by treating Ford’s organization as representing a serious faction in the Democratic Party–and indeed, by agreeing to debate Ford in the first place. Both men made a lot of billing and cooing noises, and ended the session with a handshake.
Each of them did, on the other hand, try to land a low blow.
Ford ill-advisedly (if briefly) referenced allegedly anti-semitic diaries and/or comments at DailyKos, a red herring reflecting a misunderstanding of the site’s open operating method, and misrepresenting its main content. He should not have gone there.
And Markos sought to illustrate the DLC’s alleged Republic Lite nature by tying it to “DLC Chairman” John Breaux’s role as “the architect of the Bush tax cuts.” But (1) Breaux’s DLC chairmanship ended in 1993; (2) the DLC relentlessly and totally opposed Bush’s tax cuts (viz. here), and has argued for repeal of high-income tax cuts ever since; (3) Breaux was not the “architect” of the Bush plan, but simply a senator who unfortunately traded support for the final plan in exchange for concessions that increased the payoff to low-income Americans; and (4) the DLC’s comment on Breaux’s compromise product was to compare it to putting earrings on a warthog: “Sure, it looks better, but it’s still a warthog.” I don’t have any idea why Markos tried this particular tack, but it showed some very shoddy research.
There were a couple of classic “dialogue of the deaf” moments, as when Ford touted Jon Tester and Jim Webb as centrist Democrats who won in 2006, and an incredulous Markos–who has long viewed both candidates as living refutations of the DLC–spluttering a bit. (Tester did beat a primary opponent who was long identified with the DLC, but it was hardly a netroots/DLC referendum, and best I could tell, most DLC-types in VA supported Webb from the beginning).
Over at DailyKos, the general take, unsurprisingly, is that Markos destroyed Ford, mainly because of a short moment when Markos chided the Tennessean for criticizing Harry Reid on Fox News (not being a Fox News viewer, I can’t referee that one). And I’m sure DLCers will react just as positively to Ford’s performance.
In the end, most of the real arguments between Ford and Markos were scrambled in cross-talk, or were conducted in such “code” that most viewers probably had no idea what they were talking about. The residual impression was of two people arguing about who most desparately wants Democrats to win, and who is most open to the other’s point of view–and then that handshake.