The Sunday before election day is a good time to see how the top political beat reporters for major newspapers see the election shaping up, and after all of the cautionary notes have been sounded, the consensus among the big three is to expect good news for Democrats.
Ron Brownstein gets the nod for best Sunday pre-election wrap-up in the major rags with a pair of L.A. Times articles “Voters in center may get their say” and “Democrats straining for knockout punch.” In the first piece Brownstein explores the theme that Democrats are pulling ahead because they more aggressively fought for swing voters in the political center, while the GOP has been preoccupied with shoring up its base. Perhaps the nut quote comes from former NRCC Chairman Thomas Davis III (R-VA):

…[the message] is going to be that swing voters still count, and sometimes the more you cater to your base, the more you turn off swing voters

Some Democratic poll analysts think this could be an understatement. “I think their whole model is going to lay shattered in pieces,” says Democratic strategist Stan Greenberg.
Brownstein cites some impressive poll data showing Dems with a double-digit lead among independents:

a compilation of more than 41,000 automated survey interviews conducted last week in competitive congressional districts from coast to coast, the nonpartisan Majority Watch project found that independents preferred Democratic candidates over Republicans by 52% to 39%.

In his second article, Brownstein zeros in on the see-saw Missouri senate race, which may decide whether Democrats win a majority in the U.S. Senate and which he believes has evolved into the marquee contest for Tuesday:

The 15-round struggle between Talent and McCaskill has been the heavyweight title fight of 2006. Each has proved skilled, resourceful and resilient, able to land a punch and take one. The winner will have earned his or her ticket to Washington and the opportunity to tilt the balance of power in the U.S. Senate.

Dan Balz and David Broder provide a by-the-numbers tour of races across the nation in their WaPo wrap-up “Democrats, on the Offensive, Could Gain Both Houses,” and note an even larger lead for Dems among independents (18 percent) in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. The New York Times leads with “G.O.P. Glum as It Struggles to Hold Congress” by Adam Nagourney and Robin Toner, focusing on the voter turnout battle and races getting late cash infusions from the parties. Three days out, things are looking extremely good.

by Scott Winship
As part of our new pre-election issue, we commissioned a piece by RT Strategies’s Thomas Riehle, a long-time Democrat and respected pollster. While his piece was primarily about the kinds of new voters who will be added to the Democratic coalition after the elections, many readers objected to Riehle’s characterization of the netroots in a tangential point toward the end of the piece. For critiques, see the discussion section at the end of the piece.
The editors and I want to emphasize that The Democratic Strategist does not endorse the positions taken by its contributors — it is a forum for diverse perspectives throughout the Democratic community. In addition, we are adamantly committed to empiricism to the greatest extent possible. That said, it is impossible to write a meaningful commentary without going beyond the data in any way. It will always be necessary to extrapolate, speculate, and make inferences.
As managing editor, I retrospectively realize that I should have asked Riehle to elaborate on his argument about the strategies advocated by the netroots and by “old-timers” prior to publication. The question now is, given my oversight, what is the appropriate course of action. Were Riehle’s argument indefensible, the answer would be — as a number of commenters have called for — a retraction.
I have chosen a different approach. Thomas Riehle strongly believes — as do we– that his claim is defensible. Taking advantage of the magazine’s web-based medium, Riehle has provided a good-faith response to his critics in the discussion section to his piece, which will be appended to his piece in a note for future readers. In it, he reiterates and extends the credit he gave the netroots in his piece for their early advocacy of expanding the playing field. At the same time, he defends the limited assertion he made that it was “old-timers” who were the first unwavering advocates that the Party widen the ’06 election to take advantage of a late electoral wave. The editors and I, while not necessarily agreeing with him, believe that Riehle’s comments clarify that his point is not one that is simply patently false. Of course, we are also committed to airing all of the views we receive on his argument, as the tough-but-reasonable criticisms in the discussion section attest to.
To the extent that I could have avoided or mitigated this controversy by asking Riehle to elaborate his point before we published the piece, I personally apologize to our readers and to Riehle. The magazine believes the approach we have chosen is the most appropriate one. I expect that many readers will air their disagreement in comments to this post and to Riehle’s, and that is all to the best, as I know Riehle would agree.
One final thought from me, removing my official managing editor hat and donning my independent blogger cap. It is disheartening when people representing one side or another in Democratic debates — and both the Establishment and the netroots include guilty parties — impute ill motives to their opponents, who they generally do not personally know. The view that Thomas Riehle is on another planet when it comes to understanding the netroots — whether I agree with it or not — is defensible. Absent supporting evidence, the view that he is trying to steal credit from the netroots on behalf of the Establishment is not. This sort of accusation of bad faith happens on both sides, but our efforts to come together as a Party are not served by such claims.
Thoughts?

by Ruy Teixeira
cross-posted at the Washington Monthly’s Showdown ’06 blog
When I last checked in about the state of the race–about ten days ago–things looked pretty good for the Democrats. Now they look even better.
Take the generic congressional contest, for example. In the nine polls finished since 10/20 that are listed on PollingReport.com, the Democrats’ average lead is 14 points. That’s huge by historical standards. Democrats haven’t seen these kind of leads this late in an off-year election campaign, since the elections of 1974 and 1982, when they gained 43 and 26 seats respectively.
Of course, the generic congressional contest does not tell you directly about how the myriad individual races will turn out (we’ll get to the race by race data in a moment) so some caution is advised in assessing just what this gaudy lead is likely to mean for the Democrats on election day. But here’s some food for thought. Three political scientists, Joseph Bafumi, Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien, have recently released a paper that forecasts the level of seat shifts from the generic congressional vote question, using model-based computer simulations of the 435 individual House contests.
The gruesome methodological details may be found in the paper, but the bottom line is that their simulations predict a 32 seat pickup for the Democrats. As we shall see when we get to the race by race data, this is not such a crazy prediction.
But before we get to the race by race data, let me flag a couple of more things from the national-level data. One is the probable role of independents in this election. As I remarked in my initial post on this blog:

The Democrats are also running even larger leads among independents in the generic Congressional ballot–typically 6-7 points higher than their overall lead…..
With that in mind, consider the following. As far back as I can get data (1982), the Democrats have never had a lead among independents larger than 4 points in an actual election, a level they managed to achieve in both 1986 and 1990. Indeed, since 1990, they’ve lost independents in every congressional election: by 14 points in 1994; by 4 points in 1998; and by 2 points in 2002. So, even leaving questions of relative partisan turnout aside (and I suspect the Democrats will do better, not worse, in this respect in 2006), the implications of a strong Democratic lead among independents in this year’s election, if it holds, are huge.

National polls continue to confirm a very wide lead for Democrats among independent voters. For example, the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll showed the Democrats running an amazing 28 point lead among independents, a finding that was discussed at length in the Post story on the poll. As I have continually stressed–and the mainstream press is now starting to pick up on–the Roveian fire-up-the-base-and-screw-the-middle strategy only works mathematically if losses in the political center can be minimized. Now they can’t and the GOP is likely to pay the price–and very probably not just in this election.
Let me also draw your attention to a very interesting study released by the Pew Research Center that, among other things, compares a wide range of demographic groups’ current voting intentions to their voting intentions at this point in the 2002 campaign. If you read one poll in detail this election cycle, let it be this one. The Pew data show huge swings toward the Democrats among many important voter groups including seniors, middle income voters, non-college educated voters, whites, rural residents, married moms, white Catholics–the list goes on and on. In effect, these shifts have turned yesterday’s swing voters into Democratic groups and many of yesterday’s Republican groups into swing voters.
Turning to the race by race data, polls show an ever-widening number of House seats in play. And, according to data from the Pew Research Center study and from a series of polls from Democracy Corps, Democrats are favored overall by voters in these districts. The latest Democracy Corps analsyis–“Iraq Weakens Republican Hold” is particularly noteworthy, since it shows Democrats making especially good progress in “third tier” competitive GOP seats, where GOP incumbents had the best chances of holding onto their seats. The reason, as the memo’s title implies: Iraq. As more and more voters insist on seeing a change in this area, the fault lines are going deeper and deeper into GOP territory.
The scale of the possible seat shift can be assessed by looking at a number of different sites. A project of RT Strategies and Constituent Dynamics called “Majority Watch” has been polling 60 competitive House districts–55 of which are currently held by Republicans–and currently characterizes 24 of these districts as strong Democratic, 18 as leaning Democratic and 2 ties. Splitting the 2 ties, that indicates a possible Democratic gain of 38 seats (43 wins minus the five seats they already hold in the competitive 60 seats).
Over at Pollster.com, Mark Blumenthal and Charles Franklin look over all the available public polling on House races and assign 222 seats to the Democrats with 25 tossups. Let’s say the Democrats and Republicans split the tossups (though in a wave election like this one, it’s more plausible that these races would break toward the Democrats). That would bring the Democratic total to 234 seats–a gain of 31 seats over where they now stand.
The political scientists’ forecasting model prediction of 32 seats doesn’t see so far-fetched in light of these data. It’s also worth noting that Charlie Cook now predicts Democratic gains of 20-35 seats (with a hedge toward a higher number than 35). Using the midpoint of his range, that would put the Democrat gain at around 28 seats–again, not far off the 32 mark.
Turning to the Senate, the latest Pollster.com 5-poll averages show the Democrats up by 5 in their only truly competive seat (NJ) and leading by 5,6,10 and 11 points, respectively in MT, RI, OH and PA. Then Webb has popped into a 3 point in VA–reversing a deficit to Allen that he had running for a number of weeks. After that, McCaskill-Talent is now dead-even in MO and Ford is down a point to Corker in TN. Therefore, it is possible that the real nail-biter in this election could be MO, if VA does come through for the Dems and Corker manages to hold on against Ford in TN.
So, things look good–very good–for the Democrats. What could turn this situation around for the GOP? At this point, it appears that the GOP is putting its faith overwhelmingly in one factor: turnout. Rev up their 72 hour turnout program they argue and–presto!–many of those Democratic margins will disappear on election day and the Democratic wave won’t amount to much more than a splash.
I am highly skeptical. As I and others have been arguing for awhile, the GOP turnout machine is overrated and is simply not capable of turning defeat into victory in the manner alleged by GOP operatives and apparently believed by many in the press and even some Democrats. In this regard, I strongly recommend reading Mark Mellman’s very nice deconstruction of the GOP turnout myth in today’s edition of The Hill. Read the whole thing, but here’s some of what he has to say:

How much difference can turnout really make? Consider the punishing arithmetic. Take a House race that this year would otherwise be 52-48 Democratic. What would turnout efforts have to achieve to overturn the putative victory?
Use white evangelical Protestants as an example. They comprised 23 percent of the national electorate in both 2000 and 2004, so let’s say they are the same proportion of our imaginary Congressional District. Say the 72-hour program was spectacularly — increasing their turnout by 20 percent while every other segment of the electorate held constant. In that case, evangelicals would constitute 26.4 percent of the electorate.
Assume for the sake of argument they continued to give the GOP the same 78 percent of their votes they gave to George Bush in 2004. Such heroic efforts would still result in a Democratic victory. And if white evangelical Protestants only offered 68 percent of their votes to Republicans, all that work would result in less than a 1-point shift in the vote. And that calculation makes the very unlikely assumption that one side enjoys great success while the other does nothing.
How likely is a 20 percent increase in turnout based on a GOTV effort? The best serious academic estimate is that all the GOTV work in the presidential campaign of 2004 increased turnout not by 20 percent, but by about 3 percent….
Can’t micro-targeting help them achieve spectacular successes? Anyone who has ever modeled data knows there is much more salesmanship than science in Republican claims about these efforts. Our firm and others on the Democratic side have been using these models for half a dozen years or more and we know they can make our efforts much more efficient; expand our GOTV and persuasion universes; and provide message guidance. So when races are otherwise marginal, the lift models provide can make all the difference between winning and losing. But no model is going to turn what would otherwise be a 5-point loss into a victory.
But didn’t the GOP prove its efforts were much more effective than the Democrats’ in 2004? No. Check the data. In Ohio’s base Democratic precincts turnout was 8.2 points higher than it had been in 2000. In base Republican precincts, turnout increased by a slightly lesser 6.1 points. Winning a state is not the same as doing a better job on turnout.
As important as turnout and GOTV efforts can be, the GOP needs to find something more to hold back this wave.

Well said. Readers would be well-advised to keep Mellman’s analysis in mind as they read the press coverage leading up the election and get ready for what should be a very exciting and interesting election night.

Democratic campaign strategists searching the blogs for tips on how to respond to the GOP’s Swift Boat 2 scam will find plenty of good ideas — if they look in the right places. Here are three for openers:
Start with this short and sweet response from Ohio’s Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown, quoted here in an Associated Press wrap-up:

The people who should apologize are George Bush and Mike DeWine for sending our troops into battle without body armor and without examining the cooked intelligence.

Leftcoaster Steve Soto has an eloquent litany of sharp retorts in his post “Look In The Mirror For Apologies Mr. Bush.” For instance:

As long as the White House is demanding apologies, let’s all get in the spirit. Mr. Bush, you should apologize for making a joke about not finding WMDs, as thousands die in Iraq for your lies. But why stop there?
Mr. Bush, apologize for letting Osama Bin Laden escape at Tora Bora in December 2001, and for encouraging the Pakistanis to back away from Al Qaeda and the Taliban in September in Waziristan.
Mr. Bush, apologize to our troops for sending them into harm’s way through a campaign of lies and public disinformation, and then joking about it as the soldiers died for your mendacity.
Mr. Bush, apologize to our troops for using them in a war that had nothing to do with those who attacked us on 9/11, and for knowing you were lying about this at the time.
…Mr. Bush, apologize to the troops for their inadequate veterans’ benefits, why their families have to go on food stamps, why their families have to send them flak jackets, and why you don’t attend the funerals of those killed in action.

And do check Simon Rosenberg’s perceptive take at the New Democratic Network’s NDN Blog. The whole thing is very good, but we’ll just offer a sample here:

Within several hours of John Kerry’s slip of the tongue, the President of the United States, the leader of the free world, found time to rush to the mikes to somehow, perhaps, to change the subject from how badly they’ve botched just about everything.
As James Carville said “Kerry may have blown a joke. Bush has blown a war.”
I’m not really worried about the Kerry remark. Yes the right-wing spin machine will grab and toss it hard into the debate. Yes the news organizations will oblige, and pick it up for a day or so. But at the end of the day, the uncommon good sense of the common people will prevail. For they have already decided that this election will not be about nothing, but will be about the future of our country.

It rocks on, so read it all.

There are no polls that specifically address which party is ahead in all races in the 50 state legislatures. But it seems reasonable to assume that Democratic candidates for state legislature will benefit if there is a big blue wave in congressional elections. The balance of power in the state legs may be closer now than it has ever been, as Kirk Johnson explains in “Democrats Are Seen to Gain in Statehouse Races” in today’s New York Times:

Republicans control both chambers in 20 states, Democrats in 19. One state, Nebraska, has a nonpartisan legislature, while the parties split control in the remaining 10 states…What makes the races even more suspenseful is that the parties have not been so even in decades, if ever. Of the 7,382 statehouse legislative seats across the country, Democrats hold 21 more than the Republicans, a margin of less than half a percent.
In 17 of the 46 states that will elect some or all of their state senators, a shift of only three seats would alter party control in the senate, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In 12 state houses, a shift of five or fewer seats would tip the balance.

Prospects for Democratic candidates are very good, with one caveat. The Republicans are outspending them in state legislative races 2-1. Those who want to see more women in government have a singular opportunity to make a difference by making a contribution to Democratic campaigns, since Democratic women in the state legislatures outnumber Republican women nearly 2-1. If the blue wave rolls over the state houses, more women will advance to leadership positions — and later to congress.

A new Associated Press/America Online poll indicates that 43 percent of likely voters “check the Internet for political updates about campaigns and candidates.” According to Will Lester’s AP report on the poll:

The most popular destinations are the news sites, such as those run by newspapers, networks and newsmagazines, with nine of 10 in the online political audience saying they go there. Just over one-third go to candidate’s sites and almost half check out political sites.

According to Lester, the poll also found that the political web-surfers tended to be more male (40 percent of males vs. 30 percent of females); younger (40 percent of those under age 50, vs. less than 20 percent of those over 65); and more educated (over half of those with college degrees, vs. one-third of those with some college and one out of six with a h.s. education.)
Despite the growing influence of the internet as a source for political information, TV still gets the overwhelming share of political ad dollars, and likely has more influence with working class voters. A USA Today/Gallup poll conducted April 7-9 found that 45 percent of respondents watched TV news every day, and another 19 percent said they watched news program several times a week.

Few considerations generate more concern in the final days of political campaigns than decisions made about buying TV ads. And if you thought ad-buys were largely determined by poll-margins in particular races, you would be wrong.
For example, the cost of ads is a major factor in ad-buys. In their WaPo article “As Elections Near, Dueling With Dollars,” reporters Jim VandeHei and Chris Cillizza, explain the calculations DCCC ad-buyer John Lapp has to make in allocating his $60 million budget:

In Washington’s 5th District, Lapp is running ads hitting freshman Rep. Cathy McMorris despite the strong Republican tilt of the district. That’s because ad time in the Spokane media market, which covers almost the entire district, is relatively inexpensive, allowing the DCCC to fund a week of ads for just over $300,000. It is a cheap bet, even for a long shot.
But Lapp is not running ads against Rep. Jean Schmidt (Ohio) who, despite woeful reelection numbers, benefits from the high price of television time in the Cincinnati market. This decision could save Schmidt’s job, strategists in both parties say.

That’s a shame. other considerations include the intensity of local issues and the opportunity to run an especially powerful message. Then there is the obligation the DCCC has to fund ads for candidates they encouraged to run, regardless of their poll numbers. Democratic ad-buy decisions are made even more difficult in a growing playing field. Says Lapp “Republicans are playing a game of whack-a-mole while we are expanding the number of races in play by the day.”
In such an environment, some bad ad-buy decisions are inevitable. Fortunately, rank-and-file Democrats can help keep them to a minimum by making contributions to the following links, so we don’t have to leave potential winners out on a limb:

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee

If there was ever a time for true blue Democrats to take action to make Congress more responsive, that would be today.

A new poll by the Center for Rural Strategies, conducted 10/22-24, reports big gains for Democrats among rural voters. According to the CRS press release:

The poll of rural voters in 41 contested congressional districts found that likely voters preferred Democratic candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives by a margin of 13 points, 52 percent to 39 percent. In mid-September, the same population of voters was evenly split between the two parties at 45 percent each.
In contested Senate races in states with significant rural populations, rural voters preferred Democrats by 4 points, 47 to 43 percent, reversing the 4-point lead Republican Senate candidates held among rural voters in mid-September. But those results fall within the poll’s margin of error.

Bill Greener, a Republican strategist and consultant on the poll, had this to say about the poll:

The numbers in this poll have to be disturbing to any Republican involved in the upcoming election…Republican success has relied on strong support from rural voters, and this survey indicates we don’t have that support today.

Another consultant to the poll, Democrat Anna Greenberg, cited a “perfect storm” of issues benefitting Democrats, including the Iraq war, economic problems in rural communities and a “muddling of moral values” resulting from the Foley scandal/cover-up.

Harold Ford has already won. Even if he loses the TN Senate race by a small margin, he has accomplished something important in demonstrating that African American Democrats can be highly competitive in state-wide races in the south. The critical lesson for Dems is that there is a lot to be gained from putting more resources into developing Black candidates in the south.
There are a lot of good articles about the Ford phenomenon out there, and one of the best is Salon‘s “How Would Jesus Vote?” by Michael Scherer, illuminating Ford’s brilliance in mining the vote of religious conservatives in the state that has “the most white evangelicals in the nation.” Also read the Wall St. Journal‘s “Republicans’ Hold On the South Gets Test in Tennessee” by Corey Dade and Nikhil Deogun, which explains Ford’s success in terms of the Volunteer State’s demographic transformation. Here’s just one interesting graph from the WSJ piece:

By one demographic factor, Mr. Ford should be far behind in the polls. Tennessee has one of the lowest African-American populations in the South — about 16%. Logically, that should put African-American candidates at a disadvantage for statewide office because they can’t count on a massive bloc of votes to give them a head start in a statewide election. But political scientists say the reverse may be true: In states with smaller black populations, whites don’t feel as threatened and the state isn’t as polarized. For instance, African-Americans make up a very high percentage of Mississippi and Alabama — 36.5% and 26%, respectively — and black voters tend to vote Democrat while white voters go for Republicans. The “blacker” the state, the larger President Bush’s margin of victory in 2004.

For more on the purple south emergence, check out Chris Kromm’s “Future of Congress to Be Decided in the South?” in Facing South. On a related issue, Ian Urbina reports on concerns about Black turnout in today’s New York Times — an important but much overlooked topic in midterm coverage thus far.

by Scott Winship
If they’re from Alexandria or Falls Church (outside DC) or Charlottesville (home of UVA), forward them this link: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/10/24/111047/27 and tell ’em to call their local elections board.
I’m more optimistic about chance to regain the Senate than Chris Bowers is — Webb is within the margin of error of most polls, and this race could be key to control of the Senate. It’s really important….