As an emerging demographic group in the United States, and as a growing percentage of the electorate, the political concerns of Latinos – and trends in their voting behavior – need to be well understood and acknowledged by policymakers and elected officials. Historically, Latinos tend to strongly support Democratic candidates, believing that Democrats are more concerned with the issues that are important to this key constituency. Latinos differ from the general population on many major issues, and there is divergence among Latinos - between the native-born and foreign-born - especially pertaining to immigration. Understanding the Latino vote in the 2010 election is crucial, as this constituency is a must-win for the presidential election in 2012.
As I have been saying for a while, you can make a case based on whatever data you want to choose right now that either the Republicans will crush us this election, or that there is more reason for optimism by us Democrats. The numbers any given day are all over the place. However, the polls coming out over the last 48 hours or so are giving Democratic optimists more numbers to buttress their case.
There are public polls out all over the country. In House and Governor races they are, not surprisingly, a bit all over the place. Those races tend to feel closer to home to voters, and local issues and dynamics matter more. So do really good (or bad) individual ads and mail pieces. There are also fewer public polls in House races, and a lot fewer reliable polls. So while the numbers in House and Gov races do of course generally follow the national trends- in case you hadn't noticed, a lot more Democratic seats are in jeopardy than Republicans- big national trends are harder to spot and slower to develop. The numbers in these races seem to be moving the right way in a lot of places- Brown is back up in CA, Sink is back up in FL, Patrick Murphy has pulled ahead in PA, Kagen in WI is back into a dead heat- but they remain all over the map, and it's harder to spot an overall trend.
The place where national patterns tend to be easiest to see in off year elections is Senate races: big national races where lots of national interest groups play heavily, and where there are always new polls coming out to look at. It is also important to note that in Senate races for the last several cycles, the party with the most momentum going into the final two weeks won the overwhelming majority of the closely contested Senate races. National patterns really stand out in the Senate races. That is why I am encouraged by what I am seeing in the last few days of polling. Democratic candidates in a bunch of different races around the country seem to be gaining ground, in most cases even though they are being dramatically outspent. Check out this pattern:
WI. Russ Feingold has been down for a while, 8-10 down, and the two latest polls I've seen show him in a dead heat.
AK. The little known and way underfunded Democratic nominee, Scott McAdams, has been stuck in 3rd place behind his two better known and funded Republican rivals, but he has climbed 7.5 points in the latest polling.
PA. Joe Sestak is in a statistical dead heat in two polls out the last 24 hours. In one of those polls he is ahead by 1 point, the other by 3. He had been trailing Toomey by 6 points or more in most polling done over the last several weeks.
KY. Rand Paul had built a lead of 6-10 points in most of the polling coming out recently, but Conway has come back to a statistical dead heat.
MO. Robin Carnahan had slipped to 8-10 down in most recent polls. 2 new polls out the last couple days show her at 5 and 6 points down.
NC. Badly outspent, Elaine Marshall has had to wait until the end to run TV ads, and had been trailing in the teens. With her up on TV, even though still being badly outspent, she is back within 8.
CT. Richard Blumenthal has been taking scores of millions of dollars worth of body slam style attack ads from the queen of body slamming herself, Linda McMahon, and McMahon had pulled even in their race, but recent polling shows Blumenthal re-establishing a small but statistically significant 5-6 point lead.
I can't put this in the same category, because the public polls are contradictory, but after trailing by double digits most of the race, Lee Fisher has pulled within 6 or 9 in his race with Bush's former trade and budget czar. There's another (less reliable in my view because they oversample Republicans) that shows the race going in the opposite direction, so in this race the surge is more uncertain, but given that Gov. Strickland and other statewide Democrats seem to be moving up I think it is likely that Lee is moving positively as well.
The only two competitive Senate races that seem to be moving in the wrong direction are CA and WA, where both Boxer and Murray had seemed to establish small but solid leads and are now back in a dead heat. Since Republican conservatives don't like strong progressive women, their secretive PACs and 501(c)s are spending like maniacs in those two races, so that is clearly part of the problem, but I'm not sure what else is going on out west that is so different from the rest of the country. Outside of these two races, the overall trend in Senate races, though, is definitely and clearly toward our side.
The other new polling I am seeing which heartens me is a new poll of Hispanic voters which shows dramatically higher interest in voting now than just a few days ago. Combined with some recent polling on blacks' increasing interest in voting, and it looks like at least part of the Democratic base is beginning to be energized to participate in this election. A recent poll by Stan Greenberg of what he calls the Rising American Electorate (which he defines as African-Americans, Hispanics, unmarried women, and youth) shows a steadily rising interest in voting, although there is still a ton of work needed to be done to get them out to vote.
This election is still very much up in the air. Some trends in the right direction over a few days of polls do not disguise the challenge we have in winning one tough contested race after another, especially given the way we are being outspent by big business special interests. But there is reason to think we are moving in the right direction, so all you activists and fundraisers and doorknockers and phone callers out there: keep fighting.
(I've written about Project Vote's poll released last month, as well as front-paging their diaries about it. If we had a functioning hegemonic war-fighting machine on our side, we would have been talking about it all over the place. Instead, there was virtual media silence. But, belatedly, there appears to be some indication that their message is getting some echoes. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Yesterday the Post reported that their own new survey finds—as Project Vote’s poll did—that there is strong support for government programs that provide a social safety net and protect ordinary people from the predations of the market. “Although Republicans, and many Democrats, have tried to demonize Washington,” write Jon Cohen and Dan Balz, “they must contend with the fact that most major government programs remain enormously popular…”
According to the Post/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard University poll, large majorities among the public say that Medicare (96 percent), Social Security (95 percent), food stamps (82 percent), federal aid to public schools (91 percent), unemployment benefits (91 percent) and environmental protection (89 percent) are important government programs. For the functions served by these government programs, large majorities also say they want to see more federal government involvement, not less. For example, 64 percent of respondents said they want to see more federal government involvement in reducing poverty; 61 percent want more government involvement in protecting the environment; and 52 percent want more government involvement in ensuring access to health care. And as our own survey found, presented with a choice, more people want government to spend more now to create jobs and improve the economy (50 percent) than do those who want government to avoid increasing the federal deficit (46 percent).
So I get polls and focus group reports and all manner of public opinion analysis and strategy documents crossing my desk every day, and have for the two decades I have been involved in national politics. I am not given to hyperbole, but this memo from Stan Greenberg ranks right near the top of being one of the most important that I have ever seen, because it definitively lays out a strategy for Democrats, even at this late date, to make these elections far more competitive. I strongly encourage all of you to read it if you haven't already, and to pass it along to every candidate you are talking to, giving to, and working with. If we can get enough candidates to buy into this strategy, it can change the dynamics of the 2010 election cycle.
For months, I- along with many of my colleagues in progressive politics, especially the folks at MoveOn.org- have had the theory that key to our being competitive in this year's elections given the weak economy is that we need to lead with a message about being willing to take on the powerful special interests that run DC, and then move to a fighting-for-the-middle-class economic message. The swing voters in this election feel like neither party gets it, and they want to someone to fight for them instead of the powers that be that rule Washington. Greenberg tested this message strategy, along with several other messages Democrats have been using, against the strongest Republican messages out there, and the results surprised even me: this idea of leading with taking on special interests and then going straight into fighting for the middle class moves the dial 9 points in the right direction. Given how late it is in the cycle, and how cynical and unhappy voters are, that is incredible. None of the other Democratic messages came even close to that movement, and one of them (a Third Way-style message echoed by too many Democrats over the last few months about going forward rather than backward) even cost us points.
I think this message has the potential to make Democrats much more competitive in what has been the toughest political environment for the Democrats at least since 1994.
Stan and I are both veterans of that 1994 disaster, when President Clinton's normally sure-footed political instincts were short circuited by his desire to brag about all the cool things he felt that he had accomplished. The problem was that no one felt the impact of all those legislative achievements yet, Democratic base voters didn't turn out, and working-class swing voters turned against us with a vengeance. I have been fearing this same scenario for over 18 months now. However, this dynamic can still be turned around, because we have a message that works. It has the potential to both reinvigorate discouraged Democratic base voters and appeal to white working class swing voters, the ones not all that impressed by tea partiers' extreme platform. And it sure works better than this bland forward vs backward frame establishment Democrats have been using. There are no guarantees: no matter what, this will be a hell of a tough election. But Stan's data shows clearly this strategy has the potential to change the frame and give us a shot.
There is momentum building on this. As I wrote yesterday, Obama is starting to get it, and is moving more toward this frame all the time, and individual candidates are also using this frame in ads and speeches more and more. MoveOn's Other 98% campaign, the Target boycott, and the ads they are beginning to run going after corporate spending in elections are all creating a sense of momentum. A groundswell is building. We just have to keep it building and hope it is not too late.
It's after Labor Day in an even-numbered year, and that means two industries related to politics are running at full steam ahead: the campaign business and the prognostication industry.
Prognostication, though is a pretty dangerous business (assuming you actually care about being accurate, which is not true of many Beltway pundits). Because fundraising, polling, media, online strategies, and everything else on politics now happens full-time every season of every year, those of us in the political business sometimes forget the overwhelmingly obvious point that for most voters, the last two months before an election is the main time they actually focus in a serious way on politics. Polling, being an inexact science, bounces all over the place, as demonstrated by Gallup showing a 10-point edge for Republicans on the generic ballot test last week and a tied race this week. Most of the advertising and mail and field efforts have yet to be seen in the competitive districts and states.
There are also a ton of things we don't know. As Bob Creamer points out in his optimistic post today, John McCain was ahead of Barack Obama at this same moment in the 2008 race. No one can ever know how things will break the last few days of a campaign, and there have been plenty of surprises in modern American political history. The vast majority of predictions about an election 55 days away are destined to be wrong, so take every single one of the self-assured prognosticators with a large tablet of salt.
Here's the other thing to throw into the mix about the upcoming elections: as challenging as those elections are for Democrats, and they are, there is still a pretty clear strategy for giving ourselves a strong chance to do better than expected. There are two blocs of voters that are absolutely key to Democrats being able to avoid the worst scenarios for them in this election: the demographic groups that Obama not only carried by wide margins in 208 but that also turned out in record numbers (blacks, Hispanics, unmarried women, young people), and the white working-class swing voters who have been trending against Obama because they are in a foul mood about the economy. These two broad demographic groups have a lot of differences in terms of their life experience and views on the issues, but they have one thing in common: they understand that broad powerful corporations have helped wreck our economy, and that they have too much power over our government.
Bob Creamer's piece highlights the fact that voters are incredibly angry with Wall Street (10% positive, 53% negative), corporate America (12% positive, 42% negative), and the health insurance industry (12% positive, 56% negative. And MoveOn.org's polling shows that 56% of voters rate it very important (with another 23% saying somewhat important) that a candidate commits to reducing the influence of corporations on elections, while 62% say it is more likely they will vote for a candidate that commits to limiting the influence of large corporations over how government runs, and 83% say corporate lobbyists have too much influence over Congress.
It's not just raw numbers either. Focus groups of both swing voters and base voters show the extraordinary emotional punch of these issues. I have seen focus groups this cycle where the anger was palpable, with participants pounding their fists on tables and almost getting off their seats. Focus group leaders have described sessions to me where they could not come up with a word or phrase too tough on Wall Street.: they would suggest government oversight, and participants would say "no, they need to be regulated", and then others would say "no, broken up" and others would say "fired" and others would say "no, thrown in jail." Literally every time someone ratcheted up the rhetoric, the participants in these groups went along enthusiastically.
I have been watching polls and focus groups for almost 30 years now, and I have tended toward populism as a political strategy but have never seen the level of anger at Wall Street and big corporations and elitists and the establishment as I have in the last two years. Democrats are running into that buzzsaw because they are in charge of the government right now, but they can get on the right side of that by showing voters whose side they are on.
My advice to all my Democratic friends is to not get panicked by the headwinds or the bouncing poll numbers. There's a lot of time left. What Democratic candidates need to do is focus on turning out base voters, and showing both base and swing voters that they will fight their hearts out against the corporate special interests and for more jobs and a healthy economy. It's tough out there, but there is a path forward that works.
The sheer amount of perseverance shown by New Orleans residents in the face of disasters – first Hurricane Katrina, then the great economic recession, and now the Gulf of Mexico’s Deep Water Horizon oil spill – demonstrates how unique and precious this city is to the greater United States. No other US city has known such repeated devastation, or has demonstrated such noble resistance to defeat, such an immense capacity to endure. Although the city and its residents have not been broken by the continued assaults, many are still picking up the pieces.
In the midst of recovery, NOLA residents are hopeful but scars from the hurricane are still visible, according to a new survey by Kaiser Family Foundation, “New Orleans Five Years After the Storm.” Read more in the August Public Opinion Monthly.
National Organization for Marriage is all a-Twitter (pun intended) about two polls (here and here) that they say shows nowhere near a majority of Americans support the freedom to marry. They point to one poll from FOX News showing 37% of Americans support the freedom to marry, and another from the Chicago Tribune of Chicago-area residents showing 42% support the freedom to marry.
A coupla things:
1. It's FOX News. I wouldn't even trust FOX to truthfully tell me if it was raining outside or not. Contrast this with the recent poll from CNN/Opinion Research recently showing a majority of Americans believe gays and lesbians should have the constitutional right to marry, or the respected Field Poll showing last month that a majority of Californians supports allowing same-sex couples to marry.
2. The broader point is the wording of the question. Notice that FOX's question is not "do you support gay marriage or not", or anything like it. It's:
Do you believe gays and lesbians should be: SCALE: 1. Allowed to get legally married, 2. Allowed a legal partnership similar to but not called marriage, or 3. Should there be no legal recognition given to gay and lesbian relationships? 4. (Don't know)
I'm no polling expert, but that is a much different question in terms of giving many people the way out they are looking for to demonstrate that they support equality, but "just don't call it marriage". You've probably encountered many of those people who, if pushed, support full marriage equality, but if given a way to show they support rights and all of that, just under a different name, they'll do so. In fact, the Field Poll, in the same survey with the result of a majority of Californians supporting same-sex marriage, words the question a similar way and gets similar results:
In a statewide survey completed earlier this month, The Field Poll updated its trend measurements of how California viewed the issue of same-sex marriage. The results show that by a 51% to 42% margin, the overall California electorate supports allowing same-sex couples to marry and having regular marriage laws apply to them.
However, when voters are offered three alternatives - allowing same-sex couples to marry, allowing civil unions but not same-sex marriage or granting no legal recognition to same-sex relationships - slightly less than half of voters (44%) favor the marriage alternative. In this setting, a significant portion (34%) of California voters opt for allowing civil unions but not marriage for same-sex couples. Just 19% believe that there should be no legal recognition of gay couples.
And that's also why I question the Tribune poll, which asks individuals if they support civil unions- if that question is asked first in the polling, that may skew the results of how many support full marriage equality- particularly given the latest buzz and how civil unions have, for some people, become forgotten. So it's not surprising to me that FOX gets this result. I'm not saying FOX is necessarily doing this, but it's a clever (and probably common) tactic in polling to word questions and responses to avoid certain aggregate responses you may not want. Polling that has the more simple up-or-down question has demonstrated that majorities of people both in California and in the country as a whole support the freedom to marry, and when NOM finds unbiased polling surveys with identical wording without questions on lesser forms of equality that show different results, then we'll have something to talk about.
"We are all in it together" was the sentiment portrayed in last week's opinion polls on the extension of the unemployment benefits. The passing of the bill last week Tuesday was a decision supported by the majority of Americans across the board, regardless of income, race or political orientation.
• According to the CBS News poll, 52% of respondents said Congress should extend unemployment benefits for people currently out of work, even if it meant increasing the budget deficit.
• According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll 62 percent of respondents said Congress should approve another extension.
The polling business is far more of an art than a science, is easily manipulated, and is open to as many interpretations as there are people looking at the polls. I have never known a pollster who didn't walk in the door with a set of assumptions and biases in how to interpret the data. And everyone in the business knows that the way you phrase the questions, the way you sequence the questions, the way you draw the sample of who you are asking, and a bunch of other little tricks those of us in the political biz know can dramatically impact outcomes.
The other huge factor in the polling business is who the client is, and what the purpose of the poll is. If the poll is designed for internal analysis, you get one kind of results (and generally more honest data). If the poll is designed to be released to the public to prove a point (our candidate is winning, our issue is popular, our spin is best being the usual things clients use these kinds of polls for), you want to be really careful about accepting the analysis on its face, because that is where the little (and big) things that can be done to manipulate the findings really come into play.
I say this by way of introduction to my central discussion: the internal debate within the Democratic party for what the central narrative of our party ought to be. Over the short term, that fight centers on how to save us from getting crushed in the 2010 elections, but it is of course a very long term fight that has been going on in our party since the New Deal coalition came unraveled in the late 1960s.
As I said, everyone comes to this debate with certain biases, and I will admit mine upfront. Just in case you haven't read my stuff much, I am - by history, sentiment, ideology, and instinct - naturally drawn to progressive populism: fighting for the "little guy", standing up to wealthy corporate interests. My political role models in history are people like FDR, Truman, and Bobby Kennedy, people who figured out how to appeal to a multi-racial coalition and the idealism of the young while still winning over working class white folks. In the modern era, my favorite political leaders are people like Paul Wellstone, Sherrod Brown, Dave Obey, Tom Perriello, and Brian Schweitzer, candidates who have won in purple or even red states/districts not by becoming more like Republicans but by raising the populist progressive flag unapologetically.
Now, having admitting my biases, I will also say that progressive populism (like every other messaging frame) has some limits as a political strategy. There are some districts it doesn't work in. There have been elections where it hasn't been as salient, or runs into a moment where it is overwhelmed by a certain mood in the electorate or a particular candidate's magic touch (Reagan's Morning in America theme in 1984, combined with Reagan's charm and a surging economy, was a classic example, although Mondale's kind of populism wasn't exactly stirring). Certain candidates can't pull populism off credibly, and probably shouldn't try (John Kerry comes to mind).
I also firmly believe that an angry populism all by itself isn't convincing to a majority of voters, that you have to combine the justifiable anger at the abuses of corporate power with compelling positive policy ideas on how you will deliver jobs and other benefits to voters. I don't think a purely anti-business populism usually works, for example: I think candidates need to show how they support small business and manufacturers and companies that are really contributing jobs and useful products to our country and communities. Finally, I would say this: I would never recommend a purely pro-government kind of populism to candidates. Voters, for very good reasons, are deeply cynical that government is really on their side, and will really deliver for them. Progressives have to make clear that part of our mission is to clean up the corporate corruption of government, and that we understand that government in recent years (outside of old stand-bys like Social Security and Medicare and Head Start and the minimum wage) has not always done a good job in making most people's lives better. We also have to be clear that we do want to cut wasteful government spending, and that most of that wastefulness comes from corporate subsidies and sweetheart deals: contracting practices that overwhelmingly favor the contractors rather than the taxpayers, agribusiness subsidies that have no merit, sweetheart deals in health care reform that don't allow for negotiations with drug manufacturers or public sector competition with insurance companies, tax loopholes that have no rational basis for existing besides a really good lobbying operation.
On the other side of the populist argument are Democrats who argue that it is bad political strategy to be too aggressive in taking on corporate America. Since we're all admitting our biases here, I would urge the pollsters and groups who generally make this argument to admit their own: almost all of them get most of their client or contributor list from the ranks of corporate America. The leading pollster who has been making this argument for the last couple of decades is Mark Penn, who heads a firm that does far, far more work in corporate PR and lobbying than it does for candidates. The leading politicians making this argument have been the Blue Dog and New Democrat caucuses, whose members receive far more corporate money than the rest of the Democratic party. And the leading groups making these arguments are the DLC and Third Way, both of which have as a (probably the, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt) leading source of contributions big corporations and their executives.
The latest example is a poll recently released by Third Way. Before I get to criticizing it, let me stop for a minute and say that I thought it had some useful insights for Democrats. The idea of tying Republican policies in congress closer to Bush, for example, is certainly a solid idea (although I fear that it is harder said than done.) The idea that Democrats should speak to the future and be aspirational in their language is something that makes sense to me. I even like the fiscal discipline thing, though I would redirect it to where the real waste in the budget is (corporate sweetheart deals, see above).
Having said that, though, it was really clear that this poll's questions, and the interpretation in the memo they wrote about the poll, were designed to try and talk Democrats out of using populist rhetoric. Let me take you through a couple of examples:
Some opinions that have been overlooked by the media in the last couple of weeks:
• According to an AP/Gfk poll (PDF), 49% of Americans believe that police crackdowns on undocumented or illegal immigrants unfairly target Hispanics
•The same poll found that 79% of Americans believe that it is somewhat, very or extremely likely that police in Arizona will wind up stopping and questioning Hispanics who are U.S. citizens or legal immigrants as they try to enforce this law and 65% considers this a serious problem
Mark Penn has published a fairly interesting set of polling around the views of Americans on various constitutional questions (Poll slide show here).
In his write up at HuffPo, Penn writes the following bit of alarming interpretation on two questions in the poll:
In another contentious area, respondents rank protecting national security as slightly more important than protecting civil liberties by a margin of 44 to 39. And while 31 percent disagree, 56 percent of Americans can see circumstances in which the police should be allowed to violate civil liberties for national security -- giving support for the so-called ticking time bomb exception when extraordinary means might be sanctioned to secure needed information.
Wait, what? Now, torturing someone is a violation of their civil liberties, but there are a lot of civil liberties violations that are significantly less severe than torture, and this strikes me as (at minimum) an extremely sloppy polling question on which to base an inference like Penn makes.
As one of those who used Dkos/R2000 data on various occasions, resting a fair amount of my own analysis on the assumption that the data was real, I feel personally implicated as well as violated by the revelations that R2000 fabricated its data. That it did so is now beyond dispute, since R2000 owner Del Ali admitted as much openly in his own defense in an email to TPM. His defense is that he didn't fabricate it out of thin air, but "merely" manipulated it within the margin of error:
Yes we weight heavily and I will, using t[h]e margin of error adjust the top line and when adjusted under my discretion as both a pollster and social scientist, therefore all sub groups must be adjusted as well.
Although it is not crystal-clear what Ali is suggesting, one interpretation is that he feels he has the liberty "under my discretion as both a pollster and social scientist" to adjust his topline results anywhere within the margin of error. Thus, if his raw data had the Democrat at 46 percent and the Republican at 44 percent, and had a margin of error of +/- 4 percent, the Democrat's number could presumably be adjusted by Ali to be anywhere from 42 percent to 50 percent, or the Republican's anywhere from 40 percent to 48 percent.
As you can see, this would give Ali quite a bit of discretion: he could adjust his poll to show essentially anything that he wanted, from a decent-sized lead for the Democrat to a modest one for the Republican. Needless to say, this is not what they teach you in Polling 101....
Long story short, the line between a pollster who is fabricating data and one who mutilates real data beyond recognition is rather blurry, perhaps even intractably so. While I wouldn't want to hire either one of them, it might make quite a bit of difference from a legal standpoint.
The amazing thing here is that Ali actually thinks his confession is a defense!
But he's hardly alone in this sort of delusion. His company includes the New York Times, which has made a similarly damning confession, confirming its conscious and intentional decision to stop correctly identifying waterboarding as torture once the Bush Administration took it up. As the abstract of the Shorensen Center report "Torture at Times: Waterboarding in the Media" explained:
The current debate over waterboarding has spawned hundreds of newspaper articles in the last two years alone. However, waterboarding has been the subject of press attention for over a century. Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002-2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.
Just like Del Ali, the New York Times thought that confessing was their best defense, as Michael Calderone reported for Yahoo! News: [emphasis added]
The most disturbing poll I have seen in this election cycle (for that matter, the most disturbing since 1994) was an NPR poll from June 7-10. It was disturbing in part because it was done by Stan Greenberg- for my money as good as any Democratic pollster in the business- and not some Republican hack polling firm like Rasmussen. What it basically showed was that Democratic arguments, even relatively well framed one, have little credibility with the majority of the likely voters in the 2010 elections. Greenberg tried four different sets of competing Democratic and Republican arguments, and the Republican arguments won each time- by 10, 12, 12, and 13 points. Not a single one of the four was even competitive. In past years, similar lines of debate have tended to favor Democrats, but not this time.
Facing this kind of atmosphere, Democrats on the ballot this year have to make some tough strategic choices. Right now the definitive frame around which this election story is being built is one dominated by the conservative worldview: the problem is big government, which is over-reaching and ineffective.
Democrats (those on the ballot this year, and the party as a whole) have two possible options in the face of this bad framing and credibility issues.
I detail those options, and more, in the extended entry.
For all of the hammering of what is known as "Gay, Inc." in online spaces, (although I prefer the term "legacy" organizations) it is nice to have some examples of how things could work better. I found one great example in my inbox today.
One Colorado Education Fund, an arm of the LGBT equality group in the state, commissioned two polls- one of 4,600 LGBT Coloradans (including special efforts to reach people of color and transgender individuals) as well as 1,000 non-LGBT Coloradans on their perspectives regarding issues important to LGBT people. Colorado is a moderately pro-LGBT state at the legislative level, enacting housing, public accomodations, employment and hate crimes protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as allowing unmarried same-sex couples to adopt each other's children and make certain medical decisions for each other. State employees also can have their domestic partners on benefit plans. But the polling demonstrated that about a third of those polled were unaware such protections existed. And the state both enacted a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage as well as defeating a proposal to enact domestic partnership benefits. There is still a long way to go on that front.
The poll is a smart endeavor at accomplishing several things. One is obviously to communicate how pro-LGBT Coloradans are to lawmakers and the rest of the public. But to me, the most interesting part is how the numbers get at what LGBT Coloradans face and how they live. The numbers include percentage of those with health insurance, income levels, employment that all elicit some concern, and even figures like 83% of LGBT Coloradans have given money, goods or services to non-profits in the past year, and 31% of transgender people have served on a committee or board for a charitable group. I view this as a great way to communicate that LGBT Coloradans and families face the same struggles everyone else does, and give back the same way, too. In many places I've traveled, there is a perception that the gays are all well-off, living in fabulously decorated condos and never spend time giving back to their community. These numbers push back at that.
Equally important is how the numbers describe startling percentages of those who are not out of the closet at home or work, or have faced harassment on the street, in a public place, or in school- also an important way to communicate how Colorado is still not "live and let live". It goes back to what I keep repeating on the national level, how people can be fired just for who they love in 29 states, and how they appear in 38 states. This is that, except on a micro-level. Very important. You can check out full results of the poll here.
What I like almost as much as the polling idea is the town hall meetings across the state to open the floor up for ideas on how to build a better LGBT equality movement in the state- and in partnership with other progressive groups across the state. From my inbox:
Dear Adam,
YOU spoke. WE listened. Check out the results!
Join One Colorado and our community partners for a series of townhall meetings throughout the state. We will present the findings from the recent Needs Assessment of LGBT Coloradans, engage in an open dialogue, and seek your input about the next steps for a fair and just Colorado.
Boulder - July 13: 7:00 PM - RSVP HERE
Fort Collins - July 19: 7:00 PM - RSVP HERE
Colorado Springs - July 20: 7:00 PM - RSVP HERE
Denver - July 21: 7:00 PM - RSVP HERE
Durango - July 27: 7:00 PM - RSVP HERE
Grand Junction - July 29: 7:00 PM - RSVP HERE
Invite your friends, family and neighbors. All are welcome to attend and help shape the future of a statewide LGBT equality movement!
Sincerely,
Brad Clark
Executive Director
Townhall Co-Hosts
Interfaith Alliance of Colorado, Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado, Progress Now, New Era Colorado Foundation, ACLU of Colorado, 9to5, National Association of Working Women - Colorado, Healthy Colorado Youth Alliance, Latina Initiative, The Kaleidoscope Project, Two Spirit Society, Gender Identity Center, Colorado AIDS Project, LGBT Community Center of Colorado, Denver PFLAG, PFLAG Boulder County, PFLAG Durango/Four Corners, PFLAG Fort Collins/Northern Colorado, Boulder Pride, Western Equality, Lambda Community Center, Denver Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, Babes Around Denver, Inside Out Youth Services of Colorado Springs, Pikes Peak Community Center, Out Front Colorado, Four Corners Gay & Lesbian Alliance for Diversity, Denver GLBT Commission, Sisters in Lesbian Kinship, Men's Supper Group of Fort Collins, Fortitude Men's Group, OGLBT, City of Fort Collins Recreation Department, CU-Boulder LGBT Resource Center, Imperial Court of the Rocky Mountains, GLSEN Colorado
I mention this because one of the most frequent criticisms of national "legacy" organizations in our movement is the lack of openness and accountability. I suggested the idea of once-a-year town hall meetings in cities across the country to HRC President Joe Solmonese in person last November, and it's something I still strongly suggest his and other groups take up. There will always be vociferous critics of positions groups like HRC take, but I find much of the criticism is simply not grounded in fact. A simple example is "HRC hasn't done anything", which is one I hear a lot, and debunked here and here. I got a ton of e-mails after each of those pieces from pretty apolitical LGBT friends who said they didn't realize HRC did more than just concerts and fundraisers- and from political colleagues who admitted the group was better than the vociferous criticism leveled, in some respects at least. On top of that, Joe himself told me in an interview he welcomes constructive criticism. You won't always find well-informed or reasonable viewpoints from some who attend town hall meetings, but you will find many. And among those who aren't, you might find that minds are more open after engaging them. What I see from our community is a cry for more dialogue and being able to question strategies, have questions answered, and simply engage with our leaders who go to the White House and Capitol Hill and represent us. I'd love to see more of that, not just from HRC, but from groups across the spectrum- and One Colorado is setting a good example.
The point here is that you won't always win over those who disagree on strategy, but you will open a dialogue, and you will dissect and eliminate some misperceptions. I'm glad One Colorado is moving toward that, and it's something like to see on the national level, too.
Low awareness of role of federal agencies and Tea Party fever With examples from widespread frustration about tax day and the census, we can get an idea as to the confusion that many Americans have regarding the role of the government agencies and actions and their benefits and roles. According to a survey by Ipsos, 65% of American adults think that the government does not do an adequate job of communicating its agencies services and benefits.
When asked about particular agencies, respondents were more aware of these Federal agencies, but still unsure of their role and services. From the list of six agencies that the survey tested, the Federal Trade Commission was viewed least favorably as well as Americans being most confused over its role. However, once voters were exposed to more information about the agencies, they increasingly realized the daily influence of the agencies and viewed them more positively. These findings may yield good advice for the government. In increasing awareness about the impact of federal agencies and the benefits that they give to American citizens, support and satisfaction may increase.
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