As I read around the list of Senators and House members that teabaggers and their allies want to primary, I find myself raising eyebrows at nearly every one besides Snowe. Kay Bailey Hutchison? Orrin Hatch? These people aren't hard-right?
Then I realize that policy is only one measurement, and maybe not the most important one, to these folks (and the same is true on the left, to some extent). If Sen. Bob Bennett went on FOX and Limbaugh and breathed a little fire now and then, I'd bet my Reagan bobblehead he would have survived. Orrin Hatch's sin isn't being hard-right, it's collaborating with Democrats and his long-noted friendship with Ted Kennedy. Here's Atrios:
One point I haven't seen made anywhere is that the teabaggers have made any Republican cooperation with Democrats impossible. The teabagger policy agenda is mostly incoherent, but what really pisses them off is any perception of cooperation with that man in the White House or his allies. It's why Orrin Hatch is probably going to get teabagged in 2012. It isn't because he isn't conservative enough, it's because he occasionally does (or at least did) work with Dems on things and he was Ted Kennedy's buddy.
It will be interesting to see whether the media equivalent of moving the way McCain did over the past two years will save some incumbents' rears, and be a measuring stick for those up-and-coming, too.
I was going to call this post Revolt of the Screwed, but decided that I didn't want to get readers who were looking for porn sites. However, that is a good summary of what happened in the election: the middle class voters most hurt by this terrible recession turned against the Democrats with a vengeance. They were looking for someone to blame for their economic woes. The good news is that their first pick was Wall Street. The bad news for Democrats is that they associated Obama with Wall Street. The two most important and dramatic statistics coming out of the exit polling were (1) the 40% of voters who felt worse off economically in the last couple of years went Republican by 29% after going for Obama in 2008 by 42%; and (2) the 35% of voters who said Wall Street was more to blame than anyone else for the bad economy broke 56-42 for the Republicans. That first number is the biggest swing by far in any demographic group I have ever seen after looking at exit poll numbers for the past 25 years. I have seen swings in the 30s before, maybe even into the low 40s in some small segment of the electorate once or twice, but I have never seen anything close to a 71% swing before.
I wrote early in 2009 that voters were going to be in a very bad mood in November of 2010, and that this would be a blame election, where economically stressed swing voters would be wanting to take their misery out on someone. I was certainly right about that, but here's the ironic thing: I suggested that since I thought it was unlikely we could get them to blame the economy on Bush since we were in charge now, that our best hope was to get them to blame it on Wall Street. They did, that 35% who laid the blame on Wall Street's door were primarily the middle class swing voter bloc in this election, but they associated us Democrats and Obama with Wall Street more than Republicans. The TARP bailout and Obama and Geithner's vigorous defense of it, the kid glove treatment of the big banks at the hands of Geithner, the AIG and big bank bonuses that closely followed, the failure to prosecute or break up the Too Big To Fail banks: it all came together in those angry middle class voters' minds as Obama being associated with the same Wall Street actors people were blaming for their economic problems. The fact that once the financial reform bill that had some important wins for the middle class was passed, Democrats barely ever talked about it again didn't help.
So now that this election from hell is over, the question is how do Obama and the Democrats come back in 2012. There's a lot of talk about moving to the center, but what does that even mean? When Washingtonians talk about the center, they tend to mean cutting Social Security and doing trade deals, but what do the economically stressed swing voters who turned against Democrats mean by the center? Well, these voters have very strong feelings about certain issues, and they don't tend to track with what pundits in DC talk about much. Check out these numbers from a Stan Greenberg poll done for the Campaign for America's Future. Stan did a careful analysis of which voters were the key swing voters, and what he found is striking:
Swing voters supported a message about challenging China on trade, ending subsidies to corporations that send jobs overseas, and stopping NAFTA-like trade deals over a message about increasing exports, passing more trade agreements, and getting government out of the way by 59-28
Swing voters supported a message about ending tax cuts for those making over $250,0000 a year, adding a bank tax to curb speculative trading, cutting wasteful military spending and ending subsidies to oil companies over a message about cutting 100 billion dollars from domestic programs, raising the Social Security retirement age, and turning Medicare into a voucher program by 51-37
Swing voters supported a statement about politicians keeping their hands off Social Security and Medicare over a statement about raising the retirement age by 62-36
89% of swing voters supported a statement about full disclosure of campaign donations and limiting the power of lobbyists
90% of swing voters supported a statement about cracking down on outsourcing and creating jobs by fixing schools, sewers, and roads in disrepair
Even when framed in direct opposition to a statement about stopping increasing government spending and tax increases, swing voters said they were more worried that we will fail to make the investments we need to create jobs and strengthen the economy by 54-44
The voters who were the swing voters in this electorate, the ones who supported Republicans this time but generally supported Obama and Democrats the last time, are the economically hurting middle class- the ones most worried about their jobs, most stressed about their mortgages being underwater or close to it, and most squeezed by stagnant wages. They blame Wall Street for the financial crisis, they strongly dislike outsourcing and "NAFTA-like" trade deals, they favor higher taxes on the wealthy and speculative trading, they don't want Social Security or Medicare benefits cut or the retirement age raised, they think infrastructure jobs ought to be created by the government, and they hate corporate special interest lobbying and money. These voters are the populists who Lee Atwater focused on in 1988, and the middle class populists we ought to be focused on now. The reason they are swing voters is that they think both parties- and yes, government itself- have let them down. They don't like partisan bickering because they want politicians to focus on their needs instead of trying to keep their own jobs, but they have no patience for bi-partisan deals that once again screw them on these economic issues.
The only way President Obama and other Democrats will win in 2012 is by focusing on improving the economic lives of these stressed out voters, and by doing it now. That means first and foremost dealing with the foreclosure crisis and underwater mortgages, and having DOJ actually start prosecuting these bankers who have so clearly violated the law. It means re-orienting government contracts to ones that really will buy American goods and pay a decent wage doing it. It means aggressively using executive orders to spur new manufacturing jobs. And it means eagerly picking some fights with Republicans over these middle class issues.
The election numbers could not be clearer: the voters we need to focus on are the folks who feel the weight of this damaged economy on every muscle of their tired shoulders. And those are the people our policies ought to be focused anyway, so it is a twofer: it's the right thing to do and the best way to win the election.
There's all the usual post-election palaver that happens after a Democratic loss: Republican and right wing triumphalism, the pro-corporate wing of the Democratic party and conventional wisdom pundits arguing that Democrats should "turn to the center" (by which they mean the Washington center- cutting Social Security, doing more trade deals, not antagonizing Wall Street- as opposed to what the center is for voters), and progressives arguing that Obama should stand strong on Democratic values and not cave to the Republican agenda. There's also a classic dynamic where some Democrats are urgently calling on people not to attack each other or the President, to try to keep the party from looking like it is in disarray, and others wanting to really engage in that old centrist versus left debate and critique.
I have been thinking hard about all this in part because it's the obvious thing everyone is thinking and talking about and in part because I am doing a lot of panels and media interviews right now- the latest one yesterday at Harvard where I did left-right panel with Bill Kristol on analyzing the elections. Interestingly, while Kristol and I naturally disagreed on the substance and political dynamics on many key issues- Afghanistan, tax cuts for the rich, health care among the big ones that came up- we agreed on the essential point that Obama can only survive by reconnecting with both the Democratic base and working class swing voters by being more populist on jobs, banking issues, and Social Security/Medicare (Republicans get honest while speaking academically in the weeks immediately after the elections- like Lee Atwater, also speaking at Harvard after the 1988 election, Kristol agreed that the swing vote in national elections is a working class populist vote).
At the end of the day, though, I keep coming back to one thing. Political positioning is significant, and I continue to believe populist rhetoric and substance on issues helps. Energizing the base and doing more to turn out Democratic base voters in 2012 will be important. But ultimately there will be only one way for Obama and the Democrats to come back in 2012, and that is for the economy to be substantially better. The thing Washington insiders always seem to glide over is the level of economic pain that is out there. The real unemployment rate is far higher than the official numbers because they don't include part time and temporary workers still looking for full time jobs as well as those who are too discouraged to look for work. Incomes have been flat while a lot of every day costs for things like groceries, gas and utilities, health care, and college tuition are a lot higher than they were a few years ago. Pensions and savings wiped out by the stock market collapse still haven't recovered for most people. And the housing crisis- 25% or more of homeowners are in real trouble, and housing prices are staying down- looms like a massive New York skyscraper towering over everything else.
Traditional Democratic ideas around Keynesian solutions for jumpstarting the economy, which we tried some of but not nearly enough, are politically dead with the incoming Congress. That means there is only one thing that will help revive this economy right now, and give working class homeowners some tangible benefits: getting these underwater mortgages written down so that people can stay in their homes. It is the only thing that will stabilize the housing market, and the only major lift to the economic well being of middle class voters. It will mean the big banks taking a big hit financially, but not many folks will shed a lot of tears about that. And here's the deal: Treasury, Federal Housing Administration, other regulators, and the Justice Department can make this happen without Congress doing a thing (which they won't). It would mean a big shift in administration policy, but I have come to believe it is the one thing that they can clearly do to give a major boost to the economic fortunes of the stressed out middle class. And if they do it, I hope they do it fullout, not by muddling through.
The political urgency of this is shown by the two most important statistics that explain the fate of Democrats on Tuesday are these:
-In 2008, Obama won the votes of people who said their personal economic situation had gotten worse by a 43% margin. In 2010, Democrats lost those voters by 29%. By the way, the number who said things were worse for them? 40%. That is an incredibly big swing in such a massive slice of the electorate, one on a scale that I don't remember in 25 years of looking at exit polls.
-People were asked by exit pollsters who they most blamed for the bad economy. Obama was only third on that list with 24%, while Bush was actually higher with 29%. Pretty much everyone who said Obama voted Republican, and everyone who said Bush voted Democratic. But the number one culprit on the list, the one that working class swing votes landed on, was Wall Street, at 35%. Guess who that swing group blaming Wall Street? Yup, the Republicans won 56% of their votes. Pretty ironic: these voters get right who was most to blame for our economic problems, but they don't feel like Obama has done enough about setting things right.
Better positioning, turning out base voters, having a unified party effort: it's all great. But Barack Obama will not win in 2012 unless he brings back the voters who turned against him in the two statistics above (which obviously were mainly overlapping voters). He won't win without reviving the economy at least to some extent, and that won't happen with another stimulus: it will have to happen by going to the heart of the problem, which is the housing market. This debate we are about to have on the foreclosure issue because of the problems the big banks created is actually an opportunity for Democrats to seize the initiative. They can take dramatic and effective action without having to do anything with the new Congress. It is the best thing they can do for themselves politically and economically. Let's hope they are bold and aggressive in fighting for the middle class on this issue.
Former New York Republican Gov. George E. Pataki has decided not to mount an election challenge against Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand this fall.
Instead, he said in an interview Tuesday that he would create a new national organization aimed at building support to repeal the recently enacted health-care overhaul.
[...]
Mr. Pataki, 64 years old, said he believed his plan to form the organization, called Revere America, would be the ideal way to play a role on the national political stage.
"When you look at what is happening in Washington, it's just a disaster for our future," said Mr. Pataki, who served three terms as New York's chief executive from 1995 through 2006. "It's just more government spending, more government borrowing, government control over our health-care system."
The group's first project will be a national petition drive aimed at gathering one million signatures from those who want to repeal the health-care legislation. Mr. Pataki said Revere America planned to kick off the petition drive in Boston on Sunday, the 235th anniversary of Paul Revere's famous midnight ride during the American Revolution.
The group aims to raise $17.5 million during the next year, a Pataki aide said.
Bet #1: Republicans across the country run on repeal, repeal, repeal, political feasibility be damned. Just like the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004, which Bush and the White House knew had nowhere near the 2/3 votes in both houses for a Constitutional amendment, it's good for hardcore base turnout.
Bet #2: Pataki endorses Romneycare Romney in the 2012 primary.
Fifteen months ago, I speculated about the possibility of a strong third-party resurgence in 2012. Not a victory, mind you, but a strong performance of 10% or more.
Now, in early 2010, my prediction of a strong third-party performance in 2012 still stands, even if the specifics of my theory back in 2008 have become a bit obsolete by the tea-partiers. There are a number of factors pointing to third-party strength in 2012 (or, at the latest, 2016). Read all about it in the extended entry.
There is fertile ground for third-parties in the coming Presidential elections:
If you held a contest to pick the worst thing a politician could be called at this moment, my nominee would be Wall Street Liberal.
That phrase, which seems so bizarre to those of us on the liberal side of the aisle, is unfortunately on target in a couple of different ways: first, in terms of how regular voters are perceiving Obama, and second, on how many Democratic leaders actually think.
The great tragedy of the economic policies pursued by Obama since his election is that many, many voters perceive them both as big spending liberalism and pro-Wall Street at the same time. To a lot of voters, the bailouts of the big banks and the economic stimulus package are seen as all the same thing: because they happened so close together and both cost ungodly amounts of money, the two are tied together in the perception of these voters. And this much is fair to say: Obama has simultaneously promoted (a) a bigger government role in the economy with the stimulus, health care reform, and cap and trade with (b) bailouts for the big banks without trying to break them up or push them harder on many important things. This combination has made it all too easy for working-class voters to see him as a Wall Street liberal.
The best way to dislodge that impression from voters' minds happens to coincide with the right thing to do policy-wise: be far more aggressive in taking on the big banks. Continuing to push for a strong financial products consumer safety commission and the tax Obama just proposed on the big banks are good places to start, but they should be doing so much more:
A financial transaction tax should be imposed on every trade made by the brokers and traders on Wall Street. Europe is eager to put this in place, and many economists think this would be a good thing as it would not only raise a lot of money but would discourage reckless trading. Such a tax should be structured so that the more trades a company does, the more they are taxed, which could lead to some of the Wall Street behemoths being broken up.
The Department of Justice anti-trust division should be far more aggressive into looking into breaking up the big banks through anti-trust law.
Measures to reinstitute Glass-Steagall, or to use Bernie Sanders' simple fomula of breaking up companies over a certain threshold of financial concentration should be vigorously supported by this administration.
Speaking of the Department of Justice, they and the SEC and other regulatory agencies should be far more aggressive about prosecuting control fraud, which is fraud committed by the management of these banks through deceit. When the savings and loan scandals arrived in the 1980s, control fraud prosecutors landed over 1,000 savings and loans executives in jail. With the kind of financial shenanigans that caused this economic damage, the fact that the Administration has had virtually no prosecutors is a scandal.
There are ways for Obama to shed the Wall Street liberal label, and the above suggestions are just a few places to start. The problem, though, is that too many of Obama's advisors are just the kind of Wall Street liberals that deserve the title. Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and most of Obama's economic team, like Bob Rubin under whom they worked in the Clinton administration, are liberals in one way: they believe (to some extent) in Keynesian economics to stimulate the economy; they think poor people's programs like Head Start and food stamps should be expanded; they don't object to, expanding health insurance coverage, raisng the minimum wage, the Family and Medical Leave Act, equal pay for equal work, or affirmative action. But anything that really takes Wall Street or corporate interests head-on is verboten.
This political philosophy will doom Democrats if it is not challenged. Voters are angry with Wall Street, angry with insurance companies, outraged that wealthy special interests seem to have a stranglehold on our government. With unemployment stuck at 10%, voters are in a foul mood, and are looking to blame somebody. My view is that in November 2010 and November 2012, the choice voters will have is to blame the party in power, or to blame the true culprits of the economic maladies which have befallen us: Wall Street. I would rather have them blame Wall Street, and not associate Democrats with the financial moguls that work there.
Bloomberg has a new House generic ballot poll today, showing Republicans ahead by 4% (42%-38%). This closes the GOP to within 0.8% in the overall national House ballot. Further, they are now likely to take the lead in the national House ballot on December 15th, which is next Tuesday. It would be their first lead in the ballot average in about five years.
PPP also has a new poll (PDF) showing Republican candidates within striking distance of President Obama for 2012. Mike Huckabee, who said he is not likely to run, once again performs the best. However, even Sarah Palin is competitive:
2012 Presidential election national trial heats (November numbers in parenthesis)
Obama: 46 (49)
Huckabee: 45 (44)
Obama: 47 (48)
Romney: 42 (43)
Obama: 50 (51)
Palin: 44 (43)
Obama: 48
Pawlenty: 35
(Note: watch out for third-party candidates in 2012. One of my long-standing predictions is that the total third-party vote will exceed 10% in 2012.)
As a cautious institution, Congress does not pass unpopular laws very often. Even though individual provisions of the health care reform bill are quite popular, the bill itself is not. It will still pass in some form anyway, making this a truly rare moment.
At the absolute latest, Maine Senator Olympia Snowe will join the Senate Democratic caucus by Tuesday, June 12, 2012. She may not actually register as a Democrat, but she will start caucusing with Democrats by that date--or even earlier. Here is why:
Snowe is up for re-election in 2012.
The Maine primary is held on the second Tuesday in June. So, in 2012, this means June 12th.
Snowe is losing to a generic conservative primary challenger 59%-31%, among likely Republican voters.
Maine has a closed primary system, meaning that only registered Republicans can vote in Maine Republican primaries. Same day registration is allowed, but that won't change the outcome in such a lopsided campaign.
It is a rock-solid guarantee that conservatives will primary Snowe from the right in 2012. Not only is she pro-choice, but her lifetime Progressive Punch score on critical votes is identical to Arlen Specter's (27%). If they are not going to primary challenge Snowe, they are not going to primary challenge anyone. And we all know they will keep running primary challenges.
In 2012, all major Republican Presidential candidates will endorse Snowe's inevitable primary challenger. This is both because that challenger will comfortably lead Snowe in the primary, but also based on the pattern we just witnessed in NY-23. It didn't take long for all leading Republicans to fall into Hoffman's camp once he proved more viable, and more popular among the Republican base, than the moderate Scozzafava.
Republican Presidential candidates looking to appease the base will make sure that he entire Republican establishment lines up behind Snowe's primary challenger.
In the past, Harry Reid has approached Olympia Snowe about joining the Senate Democratic caucus. He confirmed this to me over the phone more than three years ago, right after the 2006 elections.
Without establishment support in her own party, trailing badly in the polls, and with an offer to join the Democratic caucus, Snowe will bolt the Republican Party and join the Democratic Senate caucus by June 12th, 2012, at the very latest.
So, sometime in the next 945 days, Senate Democrats will pick up another seat.
Might be a time to start preparing a primary challenger to Olympia Snowe of our own in 2012.
I have been involved in national politics in one way or another for about 25 years now, and have been part of literally thousands of national discussions on political targeting. For most of that time, the state of Texas sticks out as the great oddity, the exception to all other demographic trends that seem to hold true around the rest of the country. At the beginning, people in targeting meetings are always saying things like "If you look at the demographics in Texas, it ought to be winnable." By the end of every cycle, none of us at the national level is targeting the state and the state-wide Democratic candidate loses by 10-12 points.
It wasn't always this way. In the 1960s, a President from Texas led the way in getting civil rights legislation, Medicare and Medicaid, and many of the other progressive reforms of that decade. Even as the rest of the south was turning to the right and the Republican Party in those years, Texas elected crusading liberal Ralph Yarborough in 1964. A couple of decades later, Democrats - including legendary populist progressive Jim Hightower - swept to power in the 1980s, culminating with Ann Richards historic victory in the 1990 Governor's race.
But that was a while ago now. The Rove-DeLay machine has been remarkably effective over the last couple of decades. Democrats have not won a gubernatorial race since Richards' victory (and they haven't won a Presidential race since Carter in 1976). Republicans have controlled both Senate seats since Lloyd Bentsen stepped down in 1993. They have had the majority in both legislative chambers since 2003. And this has all happened as the number of Hispanics in Texas has steadily, inexorably risen year after year.
I explain why that's so important, and what I think the future of Democrats in Texas looks like, in the extended entry.
Today's look at the future of the electorate focuses not on cultural demographics, but rather on reapportionment of the Electoral College and U.S. House seats. Here are three possible outcomes for the post-2010 reapportionment, which will first be used in the 2012 elections for both President and U.S. House:
2010 Reapportionment
State
Guaranteed
Possible
Outside Chance
AZ
+1
+2
+2
CA
0
0
-1
FL
+1
+1
+1
GA
+1
+1
+1
IA
-1
-1
-1
IL
0
-1
-1
LA
-1
-1
-1
MA
-1
-1
-1
MI
-1
-1
-1
MN
0
-1
-1
MO
0
-1
-1
NC
0
0
+1
NJ
-1
-1
-1
NV
+1
+1
+1
NY
-1
-1
-1
OH
-1
-2
-2
OR
0
+1
+1
PA
-1
-1
-1
SC
0
+1
+1
TX
+3
+4
+4
UT
+1
+1
+1
Here are the different electoral changes for 2012, based on these models:
Guaranteed: Obama 361-177 McCain.
With Republicans winning Florida, Indiana, Nebraska-02, North Carolina, and Ohio (the "low hanging fruit"), it becomes Obama 287-251 Republican. The key states for Obama to hold would be Virginia (13), Colorado (9), Iowa (6), Minnesota (10), New Hampshire (4) and Pennsylvania (20). Republicans would need 18 electoral votes from that group in order to tie, and 19 to win outright.
Possible: Obama 359-179 McCain.
The same scenario as above, but the low-hanging Republican fruit makes it Obama 285-253 Republican. They would need 16 electoral votes from the key swing states to tie, and 17 to win.
Outside Chance: Obama 359-179 McCain
The same scenario as above, but after the low-hanging fruit Republicans would need 15 electoral votes to tie, and 16 to win.
In the extended entry, I look at the 2020 and 2030 reapportionments, which are more positive for Democrats.
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