This Friday morning I participated in a briefing with pollster Stan Greenberg and Campaign for America's Future co-director Robert Borosage, based on an election post-mortem poll done by Greenberg's firm, Greenberg Quinlin Rosner, which Greenberg has been doing every election since 1996. I wrote about this earlier in my diary, "Progressive polling post-mortem from Stan Greenberg & Robert Borosage". Now I want to take a narrower look, specifically at questions that deal with how people see the state of the country and the challenges ahead, and how well the Democrats could have or did reach them.
The first slide shows strong support for three narratives, about the country being in decline, "while countries like China have a vision to succeed," about "entrenched special interests that finance both parties' campaigns," and about politicians "pursuing their own party's agenda - ignoring the needs of regular citizens and the country." The first narrative is relatively rare as a message in the elite media, and is generally bad for conservatives, the second two are increasingly more common, and tend mask a fairly significant asymmetry between the two parties.
The second slide shows only slightly lower levels of support for three more narratives: that middle class families played by the rules, and got screwed, while Wall Street, big banks & CEOs destroyed the economy and got bailed, that America's prosperity was built on a growing middle class that's now in decline, while the government serves CEOs instead, and that "Politicians have spent the country into bankruptcy." The first two narratives are relatively rare in elite media, and damaging to conservative ideology, while the third is fairly omnipresent in elite media, and quite useful for conservative elites, even though they are responsible for the vast majority of the debt:
Collectively, these views represent a fairly substantial net potential advantage for liberals and Democrats, if they chose to mobilize and message based upon four of these six narratives. Inaction, however, allows two of them to be used against liberals and Democrats (post-partisanship & the debt), even if conservatives & Republicans are actually the ones responsible for the problems identified.
I'll admit it right now. My name is David and I hate elections. (HI, DAVID!) I hate choosing the evil of two lessers. I hate attack ads. I hate endless repetitive debates that exclude all the interesting questions. I hate painting one candidate as all bad and the other as infallible even when I have to squint to see a difference between them. I hate that there are only two candidates who have a chance at winning. I hate that most of what we hear is through advertisements funded by unbelievably wealthy people, and most of the non-advertising news consists of reports on the advertisements. I hate that election season lasts for a year or more. I hate that after all this, most people don't vote, not even for third-party candidates or write-ins or none-of-the-above. I hate how people who do vote prefer candidates who promise never to be influenced by public opinion. I hate the "mandate" for fascism that the televisions announce the next day, regardless of what happened. I hate the very premises on which our electoral system rests: corporations are people, money is speech, and computer programmers have never ever cheated on anything.
Finally results from the Arkansas primary are still not in but as of this morning the two top Democrats are nearly tied and, because neither reached 50 percent, face a June 8 runoff election. That's just 3 weeks away.
As of now, Blanche Lincoln has 44.4 percent and Bill Halter 42.6 percent. But all the momentum is with Halter.
Research 2000 has been polling this race all spring for Daily Kos. The last 4 polls look like this for Halter:
March 25: 31 percent
April 15: 33 percent
April 29: 35 percent
May 13: 37 percent.
In the same polls, Blanche Lincoln was always within 1.5 points of 44.5 which is almost exactly the percent she tallied last night. She's not likely to do any better in June for several reasons. Turnout for special elections is usually quite low which will favor the candidate with more excited voters. Halter's momentum shows he is overcoming lower name ID. Lincoln's favorable/unfavorable numbers are terrible. And finally, polling versus the Republican nominee shows Halter stronger than Lincoln which may also move Democrats to Halter.
You can donate to Halter here.
It will be an uphill fight in the general but 1) Lincoln had no chance in the general anyway and 2) the Democratic Senate caucus is more progressive without her (and Specter) in it. The conservaDems in that group will be increasingly isolated and have less ability to sway the group. And 3) Halter's primary momentum could help carry him to an upset in November.
This morning on NPR there was a story on fracking (hydraulic fracturing, in which water and chemicals are pumped into the ground at extremely high pressures to force natural gas to the surface), interviewing one Texan, Steve Harris, who believes the practice contaminated his drinking water. Fracking is completely exempted from federal regulation due to a loophole inserted in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
Steve Harris believes that pressure also ruined his well. He lives on 14 acres south of Dallas. Shortly after a driller fracked a nearby well, he and his neighbors noticed a change in water pressure.
"When you'd flush the toilet - in the back where the bowl is - water would shoot out the top of the bowl," says Harris.
When he took a shower, there was a foul odor, and the water left rashes on his grandson's skin. His horses stopped drinking from their trough, and there was an oily film on top of the water.
So if you're like me, you have been wondering just exactly what all this "tea party" stuff is about. There's going to be some sort of protest, that we know; but beyond that the whole thing seems a little...vague.
Alternatively, it's possible that you were unaware that "tea party" has recently become a word reborn in conservative political circles.
Well, whether you knew it or not, April 15th was indeed a day of protest, with citizens gathering for what were reported to be a series of grassroots events across the nation that was intended to invoke the spirit of the Boston Tea Party.
In an effort to find out exactly what is motivating these folks, and to find out what they are trying to accomplish, I took my handy recorder and captured a conversation with a "tea bag" protester.
We will review that conversation, and we will follow it up with a few thoughts about how this group of voters might impact electoral politics going forward.
