|
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.
|
