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A Second Chance for Obama

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Republicans’ midterm triumph obviously is a demoralizing blow to President Obama, but it’s also a second chance. Unlike the scores of Democratic lawmakers who lost their seats, he has an opportunity to win back voters in the volatile center whose oscillations are keeping both parties on a short political leash.

How? By reclaiming the “postpartisan” reformer mantle that appealed so powerfully to these voters during his 2008 presidential campaign, and by crafting a more compelling plan to unleash U.S. economic dynamism.

Lest we forget, Obama ran as an outsider who promised to confront the dysfunctional political culture of Washington. While he’s redeemed other key campaign pledges, like ending torture, winding down the Iraq war, and passing comprehensive health care reform, he’s done little to change the way Washington works.

While independents overwhelmingly (by 15 points) backed Republicans, exit polls suggest they didn’t vote for the Tea Party’s radically libertarian philosophy, or for more political gridlock. In fact, they are defined in large part by their hostility to polarization and strident partisanship in Washington, and by their preference for performance over ideology.

Obama can begin to reestablish his standing with these voters by proposing structural fixes to our broken political system. And he can put the anti-government party on the spot by challenging Republicans to join him in reforming, rather than disabling, government.

Don’t mistake this for the familiar argument that Obama should “return to the center.” His challenge is not to reposition himself ideologically, it’s to break an ideological and partisan deadlock that’s paralyzing our government.  For example, Obama could press for the federal clean elections law championed by Sen. Dick Durban that would finance Congressional campaigns with small donations matched by public contributions.  He could try to work out a deal with Republicans to limit filibusters, which may now become a weapon in the hands of Senate Democrats (after all, he still has the veto). Or he could propose a lifetime ban on lobbying by ex-Members of Congress and their staffs.

And yes, fixing a broken political system entails working harder to find common ground with Republicans and restoring a civil tone in Washington, as Obama promised today in his post-election press conference today.  With Republicans firmly in control of the House of Representatives, he doesn’t have any choice but to search for consensus and compromise – not unless he wants to put his presidency on hold for the next two years.

The flip side, of course, is that House Republicans can no longer claim powerlessness as an excuse for indulging in a politics of pure obstructionism.  It’s doubtful they’ll be able to get away with serving up the usual ideological platitudes about limited government and fiscal probity. Now they’ll either have to share responsibility for governing with Obama, or come up with their own ideas for solving the nation’s urgent problems.

That could get ugly, at least at first. Fresh off their big victory, Republicans seem to be brimming with Tea Party hubris. Speaker-in-waiting John Boehner vowed this morning to make repealing “Obamacare” a top priority when the next Congress convenes in January.  It’s tempting to say “bring it on,” because this would be a monumental mistake, an ideological overreach akin to Newt Gingrich’s attempts to shut down the federal government after the 1994 midterm. It would embroil the country again in another deeply divisive cage-match over health care reform, even as independents are yelling “focus on the economy” at the top of their lungs.

By developing a new blueprint to spur economic innovation and entrepreneurship, Obama can seize the political initiative, force Republicans to react to him, and quite possibly highlight significant fissures in GOP ranks. On deficit reduction, tax cuts, education, and immigration reform, Obama faces a similar challenge: bring the debate down from the GOP’s ideological nebulae to the concrete policy choices facing the country.  He needs to keep pressure on the anti-government party to govern.

In the coming duel with House Republicans, Obama holds many high cards. He commands the bully pulpit, and with it, the opportunity to set the political agenda. He can use the veto to temper and force changes in GOP initiatives, as Bill Clinton did in vetoing welfare reform twice before getting a more progressive version. And if they won’t even come out to play, Obama can run against a “do-nothing” Congress just as Harry Truman did in 1948.

As many former presidents could attest, political life is full of second acts. President Obama’s is just beginning.

The Politics of Compromise

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Barack Obama, and Democrats in general, remain dogged by the question of whether they compromised too much and got too little in return.

The critique is familiar: There was no point in reaching out to Republicans; Obama should have come out swinging and browbeat moderates into more sweeping health care reform and a bigger stimulus — exciting the base. Now, the base is depressed, and the resulting enthusiasm gap is likely to spell defeat for Democrats. But this is shortsighted.

Continue reading at Politico

Photo credit: Chris-Harvard Berge

Economy is the Problem, Not Obama

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The punditocracy apparently cannot resist the tendency to personalize political trends and developments.  It has turned the midterm election into a political melodrama starring Barack Obama as the redeemer-President who inspired such soaring hopes in 2008, yet unaccountably failed to transform America in his first two years.

The saga of Obama agonistes may be more interesting, but public angst about the economy is what is really driving today’s election.

Sure, the president’s approval ratings are down (though not as low as Ronald Reagan’s or Bill Clinton’s at the same juncture). The public believes that the administration’s policies have failed to revive the economy, even while plunging the nation deeper in debt and, in the case of health care, expanding government’s reach.

But if unemployment were, at say, seven percent and trending downward, voters probably would see things in a more optimistic light. What’s oppressing the electorate is not the specter of big government, it’s the hangover from the 2007-2009 economic crisis, the worst to hit America since the Great Depression.

It’s not just lingering unemployment (9.6 percent). Americans lost roughly $11 trillion in net worth in those years, including about $4 trillion in home equity.  Though stock prices rebounded somewhat, foreclosures continue apace and sales of new homes are at a 50-year low. Hammered by this “negative wealth effect,” U.S. households are shedding debt instead of spending, which depresses economic demand.

Our big banks still carry hundreds of billions of troubled loans on their books, and small businesses still have difficulty getting loans. U.S. businesses are keeping payrolls lean to cut costs, while sitting on nearly $2 trillion in retained earnings.

The federal government, meanwhile, seems to have exhausted the usual countercyclical remedies. With the national debt swelling rapidly, there’s little appetite in Washington for another dollop of stimulative spending (and will be even less if Republicans take over the House). The Federal Reserve says it’s ready for another round of “quantitative easing” – aka, printing money – but interest rates are already near zero.

The truth is, an economic downturn triggered by a financial crisis is much deeper and prolonged than an ordinary recession. No wonder voters are in a sour mood. They are lashing out at the party in power because the real culprits – the Republicans who were asleep at the switch as the housing and financial bubbles formed – aren’t around anymore to catch the blame. That’s not fair, but politics seldom is.

And while conventional wisdom pillories Obama for pushing health care or financial regulatory reform rather than spending every waking hour focusing obsessively on jobs, it’s not clear that would have made much of a difference.

The supposedly awesome powers of the presidency don’t include any magic levers for creating private sector jobs or dramatically speeding up recovery.  In 1982, unemployment was even higher – 10.4 percent – on Election Day. Rather than promise instant relief, Reagan said the pain was necessary to wring inflation out of the economy and lay a stronger foundation for future growth.  He urged Americans to “stay the course” and ride out the downturn.  Republicans lost 26 House seats that year, but the economy eventually sprang back to life and propelled Reagan to a thumping reelection.

So Obama is right to stay calm, rather than running around the country trying to do something that doesn’t come naturally to him – emoting and feeling peoples’ pain. Instead, he should be crafting a new and more compelling economic narrative focused on unleashing American entrepreneurship and innovation.  Forget Paul Krugman; Obama’s challenge is not to press for more stimulus or whine about economic inequality or posture as an anti-business populist, it’s to propose structural changes that will assure a broader, more robust economic recovery. These include an infrastructure bank, a new clean energy roadmap, pro-growth regulatory and tax reform (including corporate taxes), and a credible plan to restore fiscal stability once the economy regains strength.

Such a plan also is the best way to assure Democrats’ political recovery from the drubbing they will take today.

Election Day is Here: What To Watch For Tonight

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

So Election Day 2010 has finally arrived, after what may have seemed to progressives like the longest midterm election cycle ever, dominated as it was (certainly in media coverage) by raging Tea Partiers determined to take America back to the prelapsarian paradise that was ruined by the New Deal.

Election Day itself isn’t quite what it used to be, thanks to the steady rise of early voting, especially in the West.  Michael McDonald of George Washington University estimates that nearly 29 percent of all ballots will have been cast early (in person or by mail), with particularly high rates in all-mail-ballot Washington and Oregon, but also in Colorado, Arizona and California.

Election Night won’t necessarily end tonight, either, since both Washington and Alaska—both of which have potentially crucial Senate races—allow mail ballots postmarked by today to be received and counted later—sometimes much later.  An additional issue is Lisa Murkowski’s viable write-in candidacy for the Senate in Alaska, since write-in votes are usually counted much later, and challenges to individual ballots are certain if it matters.

Since turnout is invariably important in midterm elections, it’s worth noting that the weather today is unusually good in most of the country, with the exception of heavy rain predicted in the lower Mississippi River Valley and parts of the Gulf Coast of Florida.

I’ve written a pretty elaborate Election Night Guide for The New Republic, which you can find here.  It begins with the restive period before polls close, and concludes with what late-night insomniacs can expect to see and hear.  But here’s a brief overview:

  • Ignore just about everything you hear during the day that purports to tell you what is happening.  The days of leaked “early exits” that were exchanged (and often distorted) ended with the new security measures enacted in 2008.  Now media outlets won’t get data from the exit poll consortium (which will cover statewide races only in 26 states) until 5:00 EDT, and won’t make any calls based on this data until the relevant polls are closed.  You may also hear or read anecdotal assessments of turnout, usually from local media or state election officials; they often turn out to be wrong.  Finally, given the Tea Party Movement’s paranoia about “voter fraud” (which has not, in reality, been a significant problem since the 1960s), there will undoubtedly be reports during the day of alleged pro-Democratic chicanery in heavily minority areas.  Conservative media will fan the flames, in part to counter or cloak the often very-real incidents of voter intimidation or polling-place chaos engineered by local GOP operatives in these same locales.  Be forewarned.
  • At roughly 5:30-5:45 EDT, turn on your television and watch as the networks begin carefully releasing exit poll “findings” that don’t related to specific contests; they are sometimes quite revealing, and the official network analysts often drop broad hints in reporting them.  One obvious number to pay attention to is the president’s job approval/disapproval ratio; if it’s negative by more than a few points, that’s not good news for Democrats.  Another key set of numbers involve the demographic breakdown of the electorate.  Democrats hope that the percentage of voters over age 50 does not exceed 60 percent, and non-Hispanic whites aren’t over 80 percent. If partisan-ideological self-identification numbers are released, note carefully whether independent “leaners” are assigned to each party.  If the percentage of conservatives significantly exceeds the percentage of moderates, that, too, is a bad sign for Democrats.
  • The first poll closings are at 6:00 EDT in the Eastern Time Zone portions of Indiana and Kentucky, where there’s a pretty good assortment of bellwether House races.  Even if there seems to be a clear trend (e.g., Baron Hill is winning, or Ben Chandler is losing), be aware that regional trends don’t always hold sway elsewhere.  The first inkling we will have about a highly competitive Senate race is at 7:30 EDT, when West Virginia closes its polls.
  • If you decide to watch the whole show on the tube, keep in mind that the networks are going to spend a lot of airtime reporting the results of non-competitive races (some of which, like the Senate races in Kentucky and Delaware, involve colorful personalities on which they probably have a lot of footage in the can), and letting their highly paid pundits and “guest commentators” have their say. This will be particularly true at 8:00 EDT, when nineteen states close their polls.  If you want to keep up with what’s happening in real time, go online, and consult a cheat-sheet of key races (if you don’t like mine, which I mentioned above, there are many others available, including Nate Silver’s very precise hour-by-hour analysis of House races).  Avoiding the tube will also enable you to postpone listening to massive quantities of spin until tomorrow.
  • Given the natural horse-race obsessions of the chattering classes, there will be a major emphasis in coverage on who “won” or “lost,” and in that connection, context is everything.  The conventional wisdom is that Republicans will narrowly win the House while Democrats narrowly hold the Senate.  But expectations are being distorted by the unusually broad range of final generic congressional ballot findings by major polling outlets, which has enabled spinmeisters in both parties to make a case that Republican gains will be larger or smaller than originally anticipated.  Keep in mind as well that raw Republican gains must be assessed in light of the large majorities Democrats currently hold in Congress (known as the “over-exposure” phenomenon); the near-universal history of the party controlling the White House losing seats in the first midterm after a new administration takes office (the only recent exception being the post-9/11 midterm of 2002); and the normal midterm turnout patterns that create an older and whiter electorate.  There will be plenty of time for analysis later, so take claims made tonight with a large grain of salt.

Happy (or as the case may be, unhappy) election watching.  This campaign cost a total of $4 billion, so let’s hope tonight is at least as entertaining as the alternative cable offerings.

The Strange Logic of Samuelson’s High-Speed Rail Critique

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Give Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson credit – he’s a strong believer in recycling. Last year, he loudly derided the “mirage” of high-speed rail as “the triumph of fantasy over fact.” Yesterday, he denounced the “absurdity” of fast trains as “a triumph of politically expedient fiction over logic and evidence.” OK, he’s gotten a bit wordier, but you can see that once his mind is made up, it’s fixed in stone.

The same kind of thinking comes from nearly all critics of high-speed rail who bunker at the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and other right-leaning groups – they have a curiously static view of transportation. To them, investing in future high-speed rail is an extravagant and illogical expenditure of public money because the lack of prior investment in high-speed rail has done little to change our travel patterns.

By that logic, America should never have built a transcontinental railroad. Consider that only a handful of wagon trains made it to California in 1862. Had Samuelson been writing then, he probably would have criticized President Lincoln’s proposal to spend taxpayer money on a steam railroad to San Francisco as a plan that “would subsidize a tiny group of travelers and do little else” – to borrow a phrase from yesterday’s column.

What’s missing from Samuelson’s worldview is that major advances in transportation drive economic growth. They have throughout human history. The joining of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads in 1869 ushered in what economic historian Walt Rostow called the “takeoff period” of American industry.

Likewise, President Dwight Eisenhower did not justify interstate highways on the basis of established transportation patterns. U.S. railroads – not roads – carried the bulk of interstate freight, military personnel, and civilians during World War II. Instead, he warned that our national security in the Cold War 1950s depended on our ability to establish fast new highways to transport supplies throughout the country.

So when Samuelson denounces high-speed rail by citing today’s Amtrak ridership levels, he’s forgetting that rail traffic is far below what it would be if our passenger trains were remotely up to world standards. When we begin opening 200-mph railroads, a new level of traffic will appear very rapidly. It’s been dormant, waiting for a chance to move.

It is impossible to predict how much dormant traffic is waiting for a truly modernized rail system. Economic models don’t tell us, and Samuelson fails to even pose the question amid his attacks on high-speed rail as government “pork barrel.”

What’s remarkable (though not surprising, if one reads Cato’s Randal O’Toole and other rail critics) is Samuelson’s utter blindness to the fact that highways and airports require massive government “pork” to build and maintain. They don’t pay for themselves through fuel or ticket taxes, as their backers like to assert.

A Texas Department of Transportation study found that a new section of highway in Houston would generate only 16 percent of its total lifecycle cost from gas taxes. Texas DOT estimated a gas tax of $2.22 per gallon – nearly six times the present state and federal tax of 38.4 cents – reflected the actual cost of building and maintaining the highway.

Constructing 800 miles of high-speed rail in California is liable to cost more than $40 billion. Constructing and operating all 13 corridors proposed by the Obama administration could easily approach $200 billion. But these dramatic headline figures need context. The current transportation act allots $300 billion to highways – not for new construction since the interstate system is completed, but just for maintenance and rebuilding.

Huge costs loom as America’s highways reach the end of their productive life. Replacing the Tappan Zee Bridge in New York State is estimated to cost $17 billion. That figure is guaranteed to rise.

If interstate thoroughfares and vital bridges paid their way, private investors would be clamoring to commit funds to refinance them. They aren’t.

All modes of transporting people require subsidies. Amtrak’s direct subsidies of about $1.5 billion a year are transparent and highly publicized. Subsidies for cars and airlines are hidden in trust fund appropriations, user tax breaks, and local and state programs paid for by all taxpayers, including those who rarely drive and never fly.

In portraying himself as a hard-nosed realist free of the “fashionable make-believe” of rail advocates, Samuelson would do well to explain how he’d fix congestion, advance mobility, lessen pollution, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil by jettisoning an infrastructure program that directly addresses these issues.

photo credit: arbyreed

Revolt of the Radical Center, Act III

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Political handicappers are so intent on trying to quantify Democratic losses in the midterm elections that they are missing the bigger picture: America’s radical center seems to be in a permanent state of revolt.

Democrats are going to get thrashed tomorrow, just as Republicans incurred huge losses in 2006 and 2008.  The 2010 midterm will likely be the third successive election in which voters – or, more precisely, independent voters – rejected the ruling party. Grasping the significance of this meta-trend is more important that toting up the partisan body count.

Volatility across the broad center of the U.S. electorate has made this the age of the fleeting governing majority. Bill Clinton and the Democrats had one briefly from 1992-1994. Then George W. Bush and the Republicans held undivided power for six years before losing it in 2006.

“That’s never happened before in back-to-back administrations,” notes pollster Scott Rasmussen. The likely return to divided government signals, as Sarah Palin might put it, public “refudiation” of both political parties.

It’s no accident that this trend coincides with the “great sorting out,” the tendency of both parties to gravitate toward their respective ideological poles. This has left a large, discontented body of voters that increasingly feels disenfranchised by the two-party system. More Americans (37 percent) now identify as independents than as Democrats or Republicans.

Of course, independents are a diverse lot. The Pew Research Center, for example, breaks them down into categories (“shadow Republicans” and “doubting Democrats”) that suggest that a significant portion of them have residual partisan leanings. They’ve also grown more conservative since 2006, perhaps owing to GOP defections, and more skeptical of government’s ability to solve big problems.

Compared to core conservatives and liberals, however, independents are generally pragmatic and moderate in outlook, and almost by definition are alienated from the hyper-partisan, zero-sum game of politics as played in Washington.  Above all, says Andy Kohut of the Pew Center, they put performance before ideology. They will vote against incumbents not out of a basic philosophical affinity with the Republicans, but because they believe Democratic policies have failed to spur jobs and economic growth.

In 2006, independents gave Democrats a 17-point margin, and control of Congress. Obama carried independents by 8 points in 2008, enough to give him the biggest majority won by a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson. Their defection from the progressive coalition over the past two years is the main reason  Democrats are facing a beat-down tomorrow.

The silver lining for progressives in the midterm is that these swing voters could swing back their way over the next two years.  According to a recent National Journal poll, independents still harbor reasonably warm feelings about President Obama. The key to winning them back is not to be more liberal or more moderate, it’s to govern effectively from the pragmatic center. That means building bipartisan support for tackling the nation’s most urgent problems: stalled job growth, eroding competitiveness, a massive overhang of debt, not to mention a careful winding down our overseas military engagements.

But if Obama and House Republicans can’t find a way to make forward progress on these fronts, the radical center will only become more disenchanted with the two-party duopoly. In that case, watch for a serious push to weld non-aligned and moderate voters into a “third force” in U.S. politics.

Photo credit: Chris

The New Era of Leapfrog Politics

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Imagine you are taking a shower. The water is too cold, so you turn it a little to the hot side. But hot turns out to be too hot, so you turn it a little to the cold side. But then cold turns out to be too cold.  So you turn it back a little to the hot side, only for it to be too hot again. But no matter how you adjust, you can’t seem to find that nice comfortable middle temperature.

That seems to be about the dilemma a majority American people face with regard to their representatives in Congress. According to a new analysis of voters and their members of Congress, an estimated 90 percent of voters are less extreme than their elected representatives. Or put another way, only one in ten voters are more extreme then the folks representing them in Washington, DC.

But the problem is these 90 percent voters don’t have centrist candidates to choose from. Instead, they go from electing representatives who are too conservative for them, to electing representatives who are too liberal for them, to too conservative for them, every now and then trying to adjust, but always quite unsucessfully.

The authors of this analysis, Dartmouth political scientists Joseph Bafumi and Michael C. Herron, call this process “leapfrog representation” – since the median voter keeps getting leapfrogged when seats change parties. And what’s more compelling is that according to their analysis, even the median voter within each party is more moderate than the representatives.  (If you want to know more about how they got these results, you can read a more detailed article I wrote about the study, or for the technically inclined, the authors’ academic version.)

One of the other neat things about this study was that the researchers were able to show that voters who also contribute to campaigns tend to be more extreme than those who don’t. Though they don’t have the data to prove this for sure, it does suggest that money may be doing some of the work of driving extremism. If you assume that money is important (a pretty safe assumption), it makes sense that candidates who appeal to extremes can raise more money, which helps them greatly at the early stages of a campaign when money is probably most important.

All of this, of course, makes for pretty depressing reading. It suggests that we are in a period of “leapfrog politics,” in which the moderate, middle-of-the-road voters who make up the majority of the electorate are going to keep switching from too liberal to too conservative, never quite able to find that happy medium ground (like the poor shower-taker switching from too hot to too cold).  But it is a helpful way of understanding what’s going on, and a quite powerful analysis.

Photo credit: Davide Repucci

Marketplace: How well will high speed rails work?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

On October 28, Mark Reutter spoke with Sarah Gardner of Marketplace Public Radio about obstacles facing the administration’s high-speed rail projects:

[audio:https://www.progressivefix.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/marketplace_morning_report0650_20101028_641.mp3]

If you want to read more from Mark Reutter on high-speed rail:

The Voters Aint as Stupid’s as Yous Thinks: Why Democrats Will Hold the House

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

All the screaming (and some stomping) is coming to an end. Pundit upon pundit has beaten the drum of defeat for the Democratic Party.  John Boehner can measure the drapes, the Tea Party’s here to stay, blah blah blah.

Don’t go sulking just yet, and you heard it here first: Democrats will hold the House.  Let’s take a step back and look at the facts and races that tell the hidden story of this election.

1. Ideas Matter

To state the obvious, the Republicans haven’t offered a single concrete idea, asking voters to forget years of ill-gotten tax cuts and an ill-advised war.  Do they really believe voters are ready to turn over trust to them again so quickly? They have played it safe and will take the anger vote and hope it gives them a majority. The public isn’t buying it—the Republican brand stands at just 23 percent approval

Many swing voters focus on the election over the weekend and realize that Democrats told the country what they would do two years ago and then did it—healthcare, stimulus, and financial regulation reform.

Some of these ideas might be more long-ball (e.g., healthcare) but Democrats will get more credit than you’d think for ideas and leadership.  That’s why I’m betting that late-deciding voters will either break slightly to the Democrats or just stay home.

2. Campaigns matter

 

It might seem like every Democrat in the country is down 50 percent in the polls. The truth is that most all of these races will come down to one-to-four percent and that in the end, the actual hard work of grassroots fighting for the last vote is very much in favor of Democrats.

When I was at the DCCC in 1994, I was all too aware that Democrats lost 52 House seats by a grand total of 18,000 votes (not the overall vote but the difference in seats lost).  Those votes are turned by a campaign ground game, and the Republicans don’t have a good one, thanks to the incredibly poor leadership of Michael Steele at the RNC.  The DNC is pouring its all into GOTV efforts of this final stretch.  When you look at the latest polls and see 10-to-12 percent undecided vote, it is most likely those voters will never show up at this point.

3. Seat by Seat

The “Pundit Consensus” is a 55-seat gain by Republicans, which would give them a 16-seat majority in the House.  But if we examine those races on a case-by-case basis, the details indicate Republicans only stand to gain 35 seats, or four shy of a majority.

The top list of Democratic holds that all show up as losses currently.

Let’s start with 55 seats and work our way backwards:

New York

Three candidates on top of the ticket running 20-30 percent ahead of flawed Republican Senate candidates.  Are we going to see vote splitting at the 25 percent level? That just doesn’t add up.  The Republican Party in New York is in complete disarray and that will affect turnout in the closing days.

Take away at least the following pickups:

Owens  -3rd party candidate getting between 5-15 percent of the vote

Murphy

Hall

Pickup now stands at 52.

Pennsylvania

Democratic well-oiled turnout machine will be prepared to do battle and hold:

Murphy

Kanjorski

Carney

Pickups now stand at 49.

New Hampshire

It’s doubtful that voters will return Charlie Bass to Congress, and marginal plus to have Paul Hodes on top of the ticket in this seat, who will bring that 1-to-2 percent extra vote out for Annie Kuster.

Pickups now stand at 48.

Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina

Marshall –  he has been written off before, likely to hold with the tightening of the Governors race doing nothing but help.

Kissel won his seat by imploring serious grassroots organizing, and that still holds true for him this year. He ticked off many with his no votes on health care, but they are coming home to help him.

Nye is a strong candidate that votes his district and attracts strong crossover support.

Perriello  — a strong case for getting credit for doing what’s right and standing up for your votes.  Obama is coming to rally for him tonight.

Pickups now stand at 44.

Texas

Rodriguez—the demographics strongly favor a win by Ciro.

Pickups now stand at 43.

The Dakotas

Pomerory—unemployment is only at 4 percent in North Dakota, and Pomerory has a strong record of constituent service—the independent minded democrat holds on again.

Hurseth-Sandlin has voted her state and is running against a republican with flaws.

Pickups now stand at 41.

Idaho

Minnick – the Democrat-endorsed by the Tea Party, voted his district…he will hold on.

Pickups now stand at 40.

Illinois

Phil Hare, conservative district that continues to vote 55-60 percent for the democrat candidate for the House, spending is even and outside groups are almost spending more to badger the Republican.

Pickups now stand at 39.

Nevada

Dina Titus, another Dem who will get credit for standing up for her votes and showing leadership—and she does not have the negatives of Harry Reid. In the end she will hold this swing seat.

Pickups now stand at 38.

Colorado

John Salazar is strong candidate against weak Republican who received 37 percent of the vote last time he ran.

Pickups now stand at 37.

Those are the seats that the Democrats won’t lose. Now for the few they’ll actually flip:

Minnesota

Michele Bachman—she has the money and the media attention, but her actions and personality don’t fit the Midwest common sense approach of Minnesota…first upset of the night.   Tarryl Clark with the big upset.

Pickups now stand at 36.

Florida

Joe Garcia has run a strong campaign against a very weak flawed-almost off the ballot- republican.  Second somewhat surprise of Tuesday.

Pickups now stand at 35.

I could include other possible upsets (WA-8, CA, FL etc)

From leading on ideas, being prepared for the fight and the other side not offering any new ideas, lacking a true grassroots campaign and the voter being a lot smarter then pundits and the chatting inside the beltway give them credit for, the Democrats hold the House with a five-to-nine seat majority. You heard it here first.

Four Days to Go and a Million and One Questions

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Four days from Election Day, this exceptionally turbulent cycle is drifting to a close with a lot of uncertainty about specific races, but a growing consensus about the most likely overall outcome.  Republicans are probably going to take control of the House, but not by as large a margin as Democrats currently hold, and Democrats are probably going to hang onto control of the Senate by the skin of their teeth.  Republicans will definitely make notable gains in governorships, offset by some Democratic takeovers.

The size of the current Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress will make the “net gain” totals for the GOP look especially large, but the actual two-party vote in House contests will be close; Republicans continue to benefit from an advantage built into the last round of redistricting.  The Senate results will be somewhat distorted by the favorable landscape for Democrats this year, with a disproportionate number of Republican seats up for re-election and a large number of Republican vacancies.  It’s hard to remember this, but throughout much of 2009, Democrats thought they had a decent chance to actually gain Senate seats in 2010.

Looking at the House more specifically, the most prominent rating services are roughly congruent.  The Cook Political Report shows exactly 100 competitive races (tossups and “leans”), with 92 of them in districts currently held by Democrats, which shows how heavily the landscape is tilting this year.  In addition, Cook rates seven Democratic seats (all of them open) as “likely R,” or noncompetitive.

Of the 100 competitive races, Cook rates 27 as Lean D, 23 as Lean R, and 50 as tossups.  This would suggest absolutely minimum gains of about 30 seats for the GOP, with 50 more likely, and 70-80 not outside the realm of realistic possibility.

Similarly, Stu Rothenberg has 107 seats—98 Democratic and 9 Republican—“in play;” his more complicated rating system has 18 rated “Democrat favored,” 12 “Lean Democrat,” 6 “Tossup Tilt Democrat,” 18 “Pure Tossup,” 24 “Tossup Tilt Republican,” 10 “Lean Republican,” and 19 “Republican Favored.”  This would suggest Republican gains in the neighborhood of 50-60 seats.

Nate Silver’s projections for FiveThirtyEight are done in terms of probabilities, and he currently predicts a Republican net gain of 53 seats.   For purposes of comparison, Republicans gained 54 net seats in 1994.

Because Silver’s system is so precise, his projections offer a good context for looking at the composition of the most likely Democratic incumbent losers.   Of the 46 incumbent Democrats that Nate shows having a better-than-even chance of losing, 21 are members of the Blue Dog Coalition (another five open Democratic seats likely to flip are currently represented by retiring Blue Dogs, so the Coalition will definitely take a hit).

Moving on to the Senate, depending on the source, there are somewhere between seven and 11 races considered highly competitive at this point.  IL, WA, CO, WV and NV are considered the true tossups; all are currently Democratic seats.  Alaska has suddenly joined the unpredictable races, with a turbulent three-way contest involving Republican Joe Miller (who’s been dropping in the polls lately), incumbent write-in candidate Lisa Murkowski, and Democrat Scott McAdams.   Some analysts consider PA a tossup, thanks to polls showing Joe Sestak gaining on Pat Toomey.  And some polls show Russ Feingold making a late surge against Ron Johnson in WI, though others show Johnson comfortably ahead.  Republicans haven’t given up on California candidate Carly Fiorina, though Barbara Boxer seems to have solidified a narrow lead.  There’s even some speculation that a late shift in votes from Democrat Kendrick Meek to independent Charlie Crist could put Florida back in play.

Barring some upset (e.g., California), Republicans would have to sweep the tossup states and avoid any nasty surprises (e.g., Alaska, WI, PA) to pick up the ten seats needed to gain control of the Senate.  The more likely outcome is between seven and nine pickups; the higher number would almost certainly spur talk about the possibility of luring Ben Nelson or Joe Lieberman to join the GOP Caucus and put Republicans over the top.

Among governorships, the big trend is towards reversion of red and blue states towards their natural majority party, mainly thanks to retirements; WY, KS, OK and TN are certain to replace Democratic governors with Republicans, while CT, CA, HI and MN are moving in the opposite direction.  Republicans are also benefitting from a trend against the party of unpopular incumbents in more competitive states, notably MI, PA and WI (though the latter two races remain competitive).   A pro-Democratic countertrend in two southern states, GA and SC, looks likely to fall short, though GA is close enough that an upset (or more likely, a forced runoff) is possible.

The real barnburners are in FL, where Democrat Alex Sink and Republican Rick Scott appear to be in a dead heat; OH, where incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland is making a late move against Republican John Kasich; RI, where independent former-Senator Lincoln Chafee is now favored in a three-way race;  OR, where former Gov. John Kitzhaber and Republican Chris Dudley are virtually tied in most polls; ME, another unstable three-way race where Republican Paul LePage appears to have an advantage; VT, where Democrat Peter Shumlin and Republican Brian Dubie are deadlocked; IL, where incumbent Democrat Pat Quinn has recently closed the margin held by Republican Bill Brady.   Some would add WI, where some polls have Democrat Tom Barrett gaining late on Republican Scott Walker; and most improbably, Colorado, where a couple of polls have shown third-party immigrant-basher Tom Tancredo moving up rapidly against Democrat John Hickenlooper thanks to a collapse in support for GOP nominee Dan Maes.

Overall, Nate Silver projects Republicans picking up twelve governorships and Democrats picking up seven.

The big imponderable for Tuesday is, of course, turnout, and political junkies will be looking closely at the final generic ballot polls that will come out over the weekend and Monday for clues of late trends.  In a variety of big states (notably Colorado, California, Washington and Oregon), heavy-to-near-universal early voting is a factor.  And for those hoping for an early election night, it’s worth remembering that the state most likely to determine control of the Senate, Washington, allows votes postmarked by election day to count, which sometimes means close races are not resolved for weeks.  And if the Alaska Senate race is close and matters, get ready for extended confusion and perhaps litigation over write-in votes.

A Dear Jon (Stewart) Letter

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Dear Jon:

I’m looking forward to attending your rally this Saturday, but like many, I’m not sure whether you are intending to simply produce a Daily Show-esque send-up of the whole rally-on-the-Mall concept, or whether this is the moment when you give the genuine rallying cry of “moderate!”

I know a lot of your fans are hoping you don’t undermine your hip satire with the mawkishness of actually caring.  But I, for one, sincerely hope that you are actually serious here, and that you have every intention of giving voice to “the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat,” as you call them.

We need you Jon. You may be our last best hope.

As you know and well understand, political debate in this country is actually nothing at all like debate. The two parties and their loyal acolytes keep yelling right past each other. They effectively inhabit two separate unbridgeable worlds, drifting further and further apart.

The activist bases of both parties have been spending the last 30 or so years trying create a black-and-white world where you are either with us or against us. Increasingly, they hold the key to elected offices, especially on the Republican side, by being the source of campaign resources and energy. Meanwhile, a media culture drawn to sharp conflicts always zooms in on angry yelling over possible consensus for a simple reason: the schoolyard knife fight makes better TV than the debating society, and every attention-seeking pundit and politico now knows this.

And yes, this has excited and energized the most extreme elements on both sides, who by dint of personality are attracted to moral clarity these Manichean struggles offer. But it has turned off those who are prefer compromise and open-mindedness, who don’t see the world in such stark terms, who, as you put it: “who feel that the loudest voices shouldn’t be the only ones that get heard.”  Fewer and fewer Americans choose to identify themselves with either of the two major parties, and the plurality of Americans now think that neither party has “a clear plan for solving the country’s problems.”

The problem for political moderates is that there are so few leaders to turn to for inspiration.

But Jon, you know all this. It’s the basis for your satire. It’s why millions of viewers, especially those supposed disaffected young people who vote at significantly lower rates than their forebears, watch your show. You are the one who they trust.

I suspect that you are slightly uncomfortable with this power. You are, after all, a comedian at heart, the funny man who sits on the sidelines and says: you silly politicians, how you contradict and contort yourselves and say ridiculous things. Let us find the laughter in tragedy and thusly ease our sorrow over the sad fact that while we endlessly debate Christine O’Donnell’s latest gaffe, China is building a new city every sixteen seconds.

But sitting on the sidelines must also be frustrating. How can you curate the modern tragedy of American politics, day after day, and not think: why, the more I call attention to the idiocy, the more it metastasizes?

You have at your disposal the goodwill of millions of Americans. If you throw yourself into the political fray (as you may be about to, if this rally is indeed serious), you have the potential to make a major and I think quite positive impact on American political discourse. You are poised to be the leader of new moderate movement, one that rests on the premise of civil discourse, openness to reason, and an eagerness to actually solve problems.

I say, go for it. Make the most full-throated, heart-felt, call-to-reasonableness you can. Set up the moderate majority, or whatever you want to call it. Use your show and your brand to mobilize the millions of citizens who would pledge to support candidates who will adhere a platform of civility and open-mindedness and a spirit of pragmatic problem-solving – and who might even make it cool once more to solve problems instead of simply firing up the base. Be an explicit force for counter-polarization.

I know it’s a big task. But look around you. Glenn Beck and his merry band of truth-benders at Fox News are mobilizing the armies of cranky crazies to the right, and the loudest voices on the left are those complaining that Obama is a sell-out.  This country faces major, generational challenges of transitioning to a 21st-century economy and solving a looming deficit and entitlement crisis. We’re not going to solve them by shouting slogans past each other.

Iran Buckles Under Sanctions Pressure

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Obama administration won an important foreign policy victory yesterday as Iran skulked back to the negotiating table.  In other words, the latest rounds of sanctions imposed by the UN, United States, and European Union have worked.

To be clear, sanctions’ aim was never to “bring Iran to its knees,” as Supreme Leader Khamenei claimed in 2008.  Further, it’s easy to doubt their effectiveness when we we hear accounts that Tehran is skirting sanctions with fake bank accounts and false flags on ships’ registries. This narrative essentially implies that because Iran is evading sanctions, then they must not be working.

It’s exactly the opposite: Sanctions are imposed to make life difficult for Tehran, and stories about evasion are actually clear indications of their effectiveness.  Every second an Iranian official has had to spend time figuring out a way around a sanction is time he should be doing his regular job.

Sanctions have coincided with a significant economic reforms inside Iran, aimed at ending over $100b in government subsidies on everything from bread to energy.  Opaque attempts at economic reform appear to have been painful for average Iranians.  And while I am not enough of Iran expert to steadfastly link sanctions, a weakening domestic macro-economic situation, and Iran’s inclination to head back to the negotiating table, I’m happy to point out the not-so-odd coincidence.

Before we get too excited, it should be obvious that the outcome of new negotiations is far from certain.  Iran will likely play its tired game of engaging diplomatically while attempting to refuse meaningful compromise.  That’s why it’s crucial that the Obama administration, European Union, and UN not reward Iran just for talking.  To keep Iran from getting the bomb, the international community has to keep its boot on Tehran’s neck until the day it agrees to unfettered access to all of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

photo credit: Daniella Zalcman

High-Speed Rail Funding Back on Track

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Hats off to the Obama administration. The $2.4 billion in high-speed-rail grants announced yesterday by the U.S. Department of Transportation not only helps fix deficiencies in the original round of rail awards back in January, but shows welcome political moxie.

By allocating the bulk of its FY 2010 investment to California and Florida, the administration has thrown its support behind true “bullet train” service, or trains running on dedicated rights of way at more than 150 mph. It now appears possible that high-speed segments could be open in California’s Central Valley and between Tampa and Orlando, Fla., by 2016.

That’s a big change from the first round of grants last January, which we argued was flawed by a scattershot approach of approving projects that only marginally increased passenger train speeds on upgraded freight track. What was needed, we believed, was funding focused on “do-able” 150-mph-plus links that would serve as templates for an emerging state-of-the-art passenger train initiative.

For the most part, the administration has done just that. To be sure, it has not come up with a way to finance HSR over the long haul and it still faces multiple challenges in Congress, especially if Republicans take over one or both chambers. But what’s striking about yesterday’s awards is the administration’s firmer grasp of how to get HSR segments up and running in the face of local obstacles.

Consider California, which received the biggest grant yesterday, $902 million. The DOT award requires the state to primarily focus on rail development in the Central Valley between Merced and Bakersfield, where land acquisition costs are low and trains could reach their full speed, rather than build costly urban segments through greater Los Angeles and between San Francisco and San Jose that have stoked Nimby opposition.

That’s a shrewd way to get a workable segment built and in revenue service to make the case that HSR is an attractive choice of transportation for Californians. Kicking off construction in the Central Valley also gives a political boost to Rep. Jim Costa (D-Calif.), a strong HSR backer who is in a tough race with Andy Vidak, a Republican with Tea Party backing.

Likewise, the administration took a decisive step toward fully funding the Tampa-Orlando HSR line (which we’ve repeatedly supported) by awarding $800 million to the project yesterday. Florida now has $2.05 billion in the kitty to complete the $2.6 billion project, including the $1.25 billion it received in January.

The new grant has already softened criticism by Republican gubernatorial hopeful Rick Scott. In the last few days Scott has dialed down his rhetoric against the rail line as an example of federal overreach. With groundbreaking scheduled for early 2011 and the Obama administration hinting at more money from discretionary funds, it appears unlikely that Scott would sacrifice thousands of construction jobs by scrapping the project outright. The Democratic candidate, Alex Sink, is a strong supporter.

Two other projects awarded grants yesterday, while not strictly high speed, will improve rail service in critical corridors. DOT gave Connecticut $121 million to help double track the Amtrak line between New Haven and Springfield, Mass., and upgrade service to 110 mph.

As part of the agreement, Connecticut agreed to release $260 million in state funds to rebuild other infrastructure, which will eventually increase train service from six daily roundtrips to 25 or more. This would make the Springfield segment an integral part of the Northeast Corridor and eventual route of a proposed “inland” corridor between New York and Boston.

A flaw of past federal policy was its failure to flag rail lines abandoned by freight carriers as potential passenger routes. As a result, thousands of miles of secondary lines between major cities, considered duplicative by freight railroads, were torn up between 1970 and today.

A similar fate now threatens 135 miles of rail line between Kalamazoo and Dearborn, Mich., owned by Norfolk Southern (NS). The track, used for Amtrak’s Chicago-Detroit trains, was downgraded this summer, a preliminary step toward a petition for abandonment by NS.

Yesterday, DOT stepped in with a $150 million grant to fund Michigan’s purchase of the line. Since Amtrak already owns 97 miles adjacent to this section, the proposed purchase would result in public ownership of nearly 80 percent of the Chicago-Detroit corridor, laying the foundation for a high-speed passenger route.

Yesterday’s awards include the remaining funds in the $8 billion stimulus package as well as money allocated for FY 2010 by the Democratic Congress. Funding for HSR has yet to be agreed upon by Congress for FY 2011. Outside of discretionary funds within DOT, yesterday’s announcement represents the last definite federal distribution for high-speed rail.

For a full list of DOT grants, see https://www.fra.dot.gov/rpd/passenger/2243.shtml

Metro “Plot”: What A Crock

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

When officials stress that the public was never in danger, you should take them at their word.  Why? Because it’s very likely the DC “metro plot” was never real.  It was, in short, nothing more than an entrapment exercise.  Here’s an excerpt from the Washington Post:

Officials stressed that the public was never in danger. Still, Neil H. MacBride, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said it was “chilling that a man from Ashburn is accused of casing rail stations with the goal of killing as many Metro riders as possible through simultaneous bomb attacks.”

Here’s what likely happened: Someone (a friend, relative… whomever) had a vague conversation with Farooque Ahmed about attacking the DC metro system.  This person became concerned enough to alert law enforcement, who sent in an undercover agent, posing as an al Qaeda member, to meet and evaluate Ahmed.

The undercover agent and Ahmed then probably developed plans to case various metro stations. That’s because in order to prosecute him, the law enforcement would need demonstrable evidence that Ahmed took action to execute an attack plot.  It’s tough to get a conviction by testifying that Ahmed really, really wanted to do something, but never did anything beyond that.

If (a big if) this is what happened, it opens serious issues: Would Ahmed have surveyed the attack locations had he not come in contact with the undercover agent?  To put it another way — did law enforcement “create” a terrorist out of someone who was otherwise just talking a big game?  And, as evidenced by the District Attorney’s comments, is law enforcement content to reap the benefits of the positive press coverage?

Much of this is informed speculation on my part, but if the public was allegedly never in danger, why did we need to hear about it in the first place?

Photo credit: the futuristics

More Equal Than Others

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If Republicans do better than expected on November 2, there will be a lot of talk about voter anger and anxiety, Democratic misteps, the economy, the fiscal situation, health care reform, and so on and so forth. Some of this talk will be interesting and relevant

But any analysis of surprising Republican wins (if they happen) that doesn’t dwell at some length on this year’s massive deployment of “independent” money won’t be getting the story right.

A New York Times editorial yesterday nicely captured how two shadowy conservative groups suddenly painted a bullseye on sophomore Rep. Bruce Braley of Iowa:

Bruce Braley, a Democrat from northeastern Iowa, has been a popular two-term congressman and seemed likely to have an easy re-election until the huge cash mudslide of 2010. The Republican Party had largely left him alone, but then a secretive group called the American Future Fund began spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on distortion-heavy attack ads….The fund, based in Iowa, has spent at least $574,000 to run a series of anti-Braley ads. One that is particularly pernicious shows images of the ruined World Trade Center and then intones, “Incredibly, Bruce Braley supports building a mosque at ground zero.” Actually, Mr. Braley has never said that, stating only that the matter should be left to New Yorkers.

Another implies that Mr. Braley supports a middle-class tax increase because he voted to adjourn the House at a time when some Republicans had proposed cutting income taxes on everyone. In fact, Mr. Braley supports extending the Bush-era tax cuts for the middle class, while letting them expire for families making $250,000 or more to avoid adding $700 billion to the deficit.

Mr. Braley has also been the subject of $250,000 worth of attack ads by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which also has not disclosed its contributors.

The kind of money being tossed into this race by the American Future Fund and the Chamber is some serious jack for a place like northeastern Iowa. If Braley ultimately loses, you can attribute that to an incumbent’s complacency, or the Mood of the Midwest, or any number of other factors, but you can’t escape the reality that Braley would be coasting to re-election if two anonymous schmoes with big checkbooks hadn’t gotten up one fine morning and decided to take Braley out. They dialed up an upset in IA-1, and whether or not it happens on November 2, it’s sign of the new political world we must all get used to now that the U.S. Supreme Court has gone the extra mile in ensuring that unlimited use of anonymous corporate cash in campaigns is treated as thought it is central to the preservation of liberty. And that’s why in this supposed land of equality, some Americans, and even some political candidates, are more equal than others.

This article is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist

Photo credit: David Goehring