Category: Uncategorized

The Obama “Theory of Change”, the 50-50 Nation, and the “It’s-the-economy-stupid” Dodge

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

On the eve of the Iowa caucus in late 2007, Mark Schmitt, editor of The American Prospect, wrote an influential essay titled, “The ‘Theory of Change’ Primary”.  The thesis of the piece was that Barack Obama’s frequent paeans to bipartisanship were not to be understood as the naivety of a political Pollyanna who would be rudely awakened upon taking the reins of power.  Rather, Schmitt argued, appeals to bipartisanship were a tactic that President Obama would use to make Republicans an offer they couldn’t refuse: join with your colleagues across the aisle to enact the progressive policies the country demands, or reject bipartisanship and bear the wrath of voters in 2010.

Obama’s theory of change—as interpreted by Schmitt—has not worked out so well.  Half the country supports repealing the healthcare reform bill, half say Democrats are too liberal, and half think that “the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses”. While the lackluster economy clearly played a major role in ushering in the sweeping gains made by the GOP on Tuesday, progressives need to recognize that Democratic losses were not simply due to bad luck.  Progressives overreached, which may or may not have been worth yesterday’s shellacking but which certainly calls for a change in strategy over the next two years.  By taking seriously the theory-of-change strategy and recognizing that the 50-50 Nation continues to govern national politics, progressives can come back in 2012.

There are limits to blaming the economy for Democratic losses.  Most strikingly, the exit polls last night revealed that Republicans won a majority of the national House vote even among the one in three voters who said something other than the economy was the most important issue facing the country.  No, the theory-of-change strategy failed because the priorities Democrats pursued and the specific solutions they offered were not popular enough that Republicans felt any pressure to go along.

Nowhere was this truer than for health care reform, where controversies over government intervention into medical decisions, deficits, Medicare cuts, illegal immigration, and abortion gradually eroded the fragile support for reform among moderates.  Democrats, oversimplifying polling that showed support for “health care reform”, convinced themselves that the time, budgetary resources, and energy spent on pushing through their particular vision of reform would trump the anemic jobs picture in the midterm elections.  (And simmer down, public option advocates—there is absolutely no evidence that the purer original reform proposals would have produced a better outcome politically.)

Abandoning the “it’s-the-economy-stupid dodge” will be crucial for progressives moving forward, because in the most important respect the Administration finds itself right where it was in January of 2009.  The country is mired in an economic downturn, with few positive signs on the horizon.  Progressives can passively wait and see and allow the 2012 election to depend on what happens to the economy between now and then.  Alternatively, by taking seriously the theory-of-change strategy, the President and Congressional Democrats can improve their chances of success next time and minimize the damage should the economy remain lousy.

Taking the theory-of-change strategy seriously means discarding the naively hopeful view that the 2008 election was a mandate for progressivism.  As I wrote the night of that election, that view profoundly ignored the evidence from 2008 and political history since the Clinton years.  The 50-50 Nation lives, and the Administration will have to stake out positions that are both popular and on which Republican-led gridlock will be met with disapproval from moderate voters.  Such positions will often be met with howls of protest from the left, but if Democrats are smart, they will look to President Clinton’s success after 1994 as a model for how to get another bite at the apple in two years.

For instance, the easiest way to continue providing some stimulus to the economy is going to be via tax cuts.  Rather than continuing to push for the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for upper-income taxpayers, Democrats should instead advocate for ex-budget director Peter Orszag’s proposed two-year extension of tax cuts for everyone.  Such a stance would be both pro-stimulus and anti-deficit.  Both positions are important, for while the economy is the overwhelming priority of voters, the broad question of the size, scope, and effectiveness of government is second, and this is where Democrats’ weakness really lies.

Democrats could also take a moderate position on foreclosures and the barrier to growth that underwater mortgages present.  Rather than bailing out distressed homeowners—which polls show commands only weak support, due to perceptions of irresponsibility on the part of homeowners who took out mortgages they could not afford—Democrats could propose incentives for lenders and loan servicers to refinance the mortgages of distressed borrowers.  For instance, Ben Bernanke has suggested allowing the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to insure “shared equity” mortgages, whereby lenders would offer lower interest rates in return for an agreed-upon stake in the home’s equity upon purchase or refinancing.  Democrats could also offer tax breaks or loans to make up the difference between the selling price of a home and a (bigger) mortgage payoff.  This would help homeowners seeking to move for better economic opportunities who are not in danger of foreclosure or delinquency.

Welfare reform is up for reauthorization, and President Obama is in a strong position to preemptively lay out proposals that promote individual responsibility but that also fund the block grant more generously in response to data showing that the program’s growth has not nearly kept pace with the rise in joblessness.  Furthermore, he could advocate responsible fatherhood provisions and other family-oriented policies, consistent with his past championing of such initiatives.

On immigration, Democrats should abandon their proposals advocating a general pathway to citizenship—a hopeless cause that will always be seen as rewarding law-breaking—and embrace the DREAM Act, coupled with tougher enforcement.  The DREAM Act gives undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as minors the chance to earn residency if they serve in the military or complete some college.  It addresses a fairly sympathetic group—the sons and daughters brought over the border by their parents, who never chose to break the law but who now face severe restrictions on their ability to get ahead through higher education because of their lack of documentation.

Finally, on deficit reduction, Democrats should use the housing crisis as an opportunity to begin a conversation around the distortions introduced into the economy by tax subsidies (such as the mortgage interest deduction’s complicity in the mortgage and financial crisis).  Larry Summers has suggested that a global cap could be placed on the amount of itemized deductions a taxpayer could take, which would be progressive while avoiding fights over this tax provision or that one.  The President can ask whether the federal government should really be subsidizing the purchase of second homes and vacation homes.

Democrats used the first two years of Obama’s first term to take advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make big changes in domestic policy.  Progressives may differ in their evaluation of whether the cost has been and will be worth it, but what is clear is that if 2012 is to turn out differently than 2010, they will have to scale back their ambitions in the next two years.

The National Security Dog That Didn’t Bark

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Picture the seventh grader who just brought home a report card full of Cs and Ds.  After getting chewed to pieces by his parents, he points to the lone bright spot:

“C’mon… It’s not all bad.. I did get a B+ in art!”

“Art? ART?!?!” the overbearing and despondent father retorts, “Tell me how you’re getting into college with a B+ in art!”

That’s where national security stands as a political issue after this election:  A bright spot that the electorate doesn’t much care about.  The message from this election on national security is therefore somewhat simple:  National security is not on most voters’ radar screen right now, and will stay out of sight until national security is threatened.

In the broad range of national security topics, only Afghanistan so much as registered as an issue this cycle, and barely so: a paltry 8 percent of respondents to a CNN exit poll indicated that the war was their chief concern. Of those, 57 percent voted Democratic, which hints at a (very) quiet confidence in the president’s handling of the war.

Even as it’s not at the top of the issues list, the electorate still supports the president on national security, according to a mid-September Democracy Corps poll.  Since there have been no major national security issues in the ensuing six weeks, we have to assume the president’s 53 percent approval rating (42 percent against) stands.  In a way, it’s a remarkable achievement for a president whose party has historically suffered in the polls when it comes to national security, something we call the “national security confidence gap” around here.

Despite the positive polls, the Democratic base (possibly in bed with spending hawks in the Tea Party) will likely turn its focus again to Afghanistan.  Following Obama’s kept-promise on Iraq, the left will still expect a draw-down begun by mid-2011 in order to come out in force for the re-elect.  The drawdown won’t begin in earnest until 2012, but a mid-2011 announcement will at least adhere to the letter of the president’s promise.  There’s some wiggle room for progress, but not much.

As for the new Congress, if their performance to date is any indication, Republicans will feel empowered in the wake of this election to pick a few fights. To date, they’ve gone out of their way to hit Obama politically on every attempted terrorist attack.  Those attacks have largely wasted their breath to this point, failing to shake public confidence.

But long-standing conservative bugaboos of Gitmo, missile defense, foreign assistance and potentially DADT loom large.  (I’ve heard rumors that DADT will definitely be addressed in the coming lame-duck period, however.)  Buck McKeon (R-FL) is the incoming HASC chairman and a big proponent of missile defense, so watch that in particular.

This opens an interesting gambit on Pentagon spending: Some sort of defense budget restraint is coming, and there’s probably at least bipartisan acknowledgment of that general principle, but I’d be shocked if this loose consensus included HASC Republicans.  News today suggests the military’s $50 billion intelligence budget will be stripped from the Pentagon’s topline and moved under the DNI’s control.  Is this just a sleight-of-hand that will substitute $50b more of weapons spending?

These fights will be a painful distraction for the administration, but should not dilute the White House’s core competency: keeping the country safe.  Various forces will continue to make progress in Afghanistan frustrating, but the White House should continue to tout its successful record of taking the fight to al Qaeda in Af/Pak, scoring important diplomatic victories against Iran, and defending Americans against terrorist attacks.  Continue to do this, and progressives will continue to make strides against the national security confidence gap.

Why Post-Election Soul-Searching Is Overrated

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The smoke has cleared; only the maimed and the dead remain on the battlefield. They are, for the most part, Democrats. The job of carting them off will take weeks; the post-mortems will take even longer. And yet progressives — we with our fetish for soul-searching — should reject a new, indulgent round of autocritique, or at least recognize that there is only so much to reflect on. The electorate’s rejection of Democrats is a lot of things, but a referendum on the quality of our ideas it isn’t.

How can that be? Isn’t a rebuke of this magnitude by definition a rejection of a party’s ideas? Well, it is if the ideas were carefully inspected and considered by an informed electorate. But sobriety has been hard to come by this election season. And what we tend to forget is that, before our discourse got sucked into the Fox-powered Tea Party vortex, our ideas were actually popular across the spectrum. Far from dogmatic and divisive, the policies that progressives have pushed in recent years have been sane, sensible fixes that have drawn support from left, right, and center.

Take cap-and-trade. Only the truly delusional still think that climate change and our voracious consumption of fossil-based fuels are nothing to worry about. Cap-and-trade was an innovative solution to the problem, harnessing the market — and eschewing command-and-control regulation — to bring about a reduction in carbon emissions.

Or take health care reform. Despite cries from left and right, the Obama administration got reform generally correct, setting us on a path to cutting costs and increasing access, all while leaving a system that Americans had grown accustomed to intact.

Or infrastructure. Economists of all stripes believe that we need more stimulus to spur economic activity. Every American who uses our roads, bridges, and water supply knows that our infrastructure is crumbling. In light of those needs, President Obama pushed through billions in infrastructure spending and just recently proposed a new $50 billion infrastructure bill.

All of these are good ideas that have achieved a certain degree of consensus, or at least support from moderates. An original version of cap-and-trade was co-sponsored by John McCain and was backed by moderate Republicans in the prelapsarian days before the Tea Party’s rousing. Health-care reform: As Jonathan Cohn noted, “Obama’s plan closely mirrors three proposals that have attracted the support of Republicans who reside within the party’s mainstream” — the most prominent of whom is Mitt Romney, whose health-care legislation in Massachusetts is a fairly close sibling of the national reform passed this year. As for infrastructure, money for more spending on the nation’s backbone was supported by Republican senators like Kit Bond and George Voinovich (both retiring – no coincidence) in an earlier jobs bill vote.

In all these cases, an urgent public problem was identified, and sensible, pragmatic solutions were proposed. But we no longer have politics that can accommodate the sensible and the pragmatic. The same John McCain who co-sponsored cap-and-trade now rails against it. Romney and Republicans who supported previous iterations of the Obama health plan have nothing but calumny for reform. Meanwhile, the only news of conservatives dealing with infrastructure is when they shrink from the challenge, like Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey backing away from a proposed, and badly needed, tunnel to New York.

Over and over again, progressives have come up with solutions to our problems that can be embraced by the moderate middle. But in these last two years, we’ve seen that no matter how good and moderate the ideas are, it doesn’t seem to matter.

In this dilemma lies the priority for the pragmatic progressive in these next two years. The fact is our ideas are good. They are sound. Progressives of the Obama era have brought an innovative, reformist sensibility to government that prizes empiricism and problem-solving above all. Yet the party across the table has pulled back and shown little interest in engaging. They want us to keep coming to the table with more concessions — while hardly offering any concessions of their own. If we keep whittling down our ideas to meet their whims, our ideas will be hardly worth enacting at all.

We must, of course, never slow our indefatigable search for new ideas – it is what defines progressivism. But the paramount challenge, for these next two years at any rate, is finding a new politics. The calls for a new radical center are all well and good, but we need to remember that that’s where our ideas already are. It’s the right that has abandoned that center. The consensus ideas of yesterday have become the Marxist plots of their 2010 campaign. And sensible ideas have little chance of growing in political soil parched of sense. Will the part of the conservative movement that still cares about fiscal responsibility, fact-based argument, and good-faith dialogue resurface? Will they make their voices heard against the know-nothings and the ideologues who have taken over their party?

No doubt progressives should continue to be on the lookout for all who are sober and serious about solving our nation’s problems. Challenges must be issued and coalitions of the willing must be sought. But we shouldn’t allow the emergent faction of hysteria and irresponsibility to sway us from a core conviction: that when one already occupies the reasonable center, standing one’s ground is the reasonable thing to do.

How to Win Back the Independents

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In the next few days, we’re going to be hearing a lot about how the Democrats lost “independents,” who, after breaking for Democrats in both 2006 and 2008, broke hard this time for Republicans, and for the third straight cycle, voted against the party in power.

And while it’s clear that “independents”, who now make up 37 percent of the electorate (as compared to 34 percent for registered Democrats and 29 percent for registered Republicans) hold the balance of power in American politics, understanding how to win them or even who they are and what they want is less clear.

In short, the best way to win back “independents” is this: Obama and the Dems need a little bit of patience, a lot of attention to pragmatic problem-solving, and the ability to resist the temptation to hunker down and move to the left.

But before getting to details of the political prescriptions, any discussion about the mood independents needs to begin with the observation that “independents” is a much more varied category than almost all pundits make it out to be. Many independents are actually shadow partisans, and a good number even see themselves are too far left or right for the two parties.

According to Gallup, only 43 percent of independents indentify themselves as “moderate,” while 35 percent say they are “conservative “and 18 percent say they are “liberal”. By comparison, 39 percent of Democrats and 24 percent of Republicans identify themselves as “moderate.” In other words, independents are hardly more “moderate” than Democrats.

In a recent survey, Pew broke independents down into five categories: “Shadow Republicans” (26 percent of independents); “Disaffected Republicans” (16 percent); “Shadow Democrats” (21 percent); “Doubting Democrats” (20 percent); and “Disengaged” (17 percent).  As the names suggest, the shadow partisans vote somewhat predictably as partisans, while the Disaffected/Doubting class are slightly less reliably partisan, and the “Disengaged”, while most likely to be true independents, are also the least likely to vote – only 21 percent told Pew they were planning to vote this November.

So one way to think of independents is in terms of various degrees of independence. At the core are the true, true independents, who political scientists estimate to be about 10 percent of the electorate. These tend to be the most disaffected, disengaged voters, and lacking the ideological litmus tests of partisans, they also tend to be the most subject to the atmospherics and moods of how the country is doing and how even their own life is going rather than caring whether so-and-so voted the “right way” on some particular issue.

This probably goes a long way in explaining why they abandoned Democrats. Given the struggling economy, there is a desire to do something different, regardless of whether or not it makes sense  – what Shankar Vedantam recently described as “action bias.” But it also means that they could turn just as quickly against Republicans, as they have in the past.

The lack of ideological attachment also suggests that while vague sloganeering against “big government” may make a good rallying cry, in all likelihood, few of these performance-based voters care all that passionately about the size of government.  Rather, they are latching onto the most available explanation for the current sorry state of affairs. In their gut, they sense something is not working, but don’t have well-formed theories about what, exactly, it is that is not working. And, of course, they’d be hard-pressed to lay out exactly what they’d cut. They are not ideological crusaders. They are just generally cranky.

Expanding to the weak partisans – the so-called “Disaffected Republicans” and “Doubting Dems” – widens the category to bring in both the Republicans who probably dropped from the GOP column in 2006 and 2008 and either voted Dem or stayed home, and the Dems who are presumably crossing over or staying home this time  (only 23 percent of the so-called “Doubting Democrats” told Pew that Obama’s policies have made economic conditions better, as compared to 50 percent for partisan or shadow Democrats).  The weak partisans are more cynical and more anti-politician than their shadow partisan counterparts, and are accordingly probably more susceptible to the “throw the bums out” mood than their shadow partisans, who maintain a more interest in candidate positions and ideology.

Obviously, there is a mood of unusual restlessness in this country. This election marks the first time in almost 60 years that THREE consecutive elections resulted in House pick-ups of 20 or more seats for one party or the other (Dems picked up 31 seats in 2006, and 21 in 2008). One has to go back to 1952, when Republicans picked up 22 seats, marking the then-fifth consecutive House election of 20+ seat swings.

It’s also worth noting that 74 percent of independents now support the idea of a third party, up from 56 percent in 2003, and almost two-thirds (64 percent) of independents think that, “both parties care more about special interests than average Americans.” (Of course, it’s not just independents who want a third party – it’s also 47 percent of registered Republicans and 45 percent of registered Democrats, and overall, 58 percent of Americans who feel the two-party system is not providing adequate representation.)

So how can Democrats win back and re-mobilize these perpetually disaffected and disengaged types who broke for the Democrats in 2006 and 2008, and then either turned Republican in 2010 or just stayed home?

Partially, they just have to be patient and mature, since two big things are likely to happen in the next two years that will benefit them:

  1. The economy is likely to improve, and Obama and the Dems should be able to take credit for this if they manage their communications strategy correctly, which will help with the performance-based calculus of these voters.
  2. Republicans are likely to over-reach politically and spend too much time blocking administration initiatives, and holding investigations that lead nowhere. This may play well with the base, but it is unlikely to impress the non-ideological independents who are more interested in whether something is being done to help them pay their mortgage or get a job. If Obama and the Dems can offer a problem-solving oriented contrast to the ideological rampage of angry Republicans, they will benefit from looking like the adults in the room, just as they did in the 2008 election.

Will this be enough by itself to win back the sliver of disaffected independents who hold the keys to the balance of power? Maybe so, but maybe not.

To the extent that Obama and the Democrats want to win back the lost independents, they need to do their best to show them that they are reasonable, interested in making government work, and capable of making government work.

There will be great pressure, no doubt, from those who want Obama to draw a clear distinction with Republicans by pushing a more clearly left agenda. While this may excite the 20 percent or so of the electorate who are true liberals, it will all but ensure the kind of partisan gridlock that makes disaffected independents disaffected in the first place, further turning them off from politics (and making base voters even more important, which would be stupid, since the Republican base is bigger).

These swing independents don’t care much about ideology. They don’t pay attention to it, and they don’t vote on it. They care whether things are getting better and whether the folks in Washington look like they are trying to make things work.

There are plenty of sensible, centrist initiatives on important issues like energy, education, taxes, and infrastructure that we at PPI will be exploring over the next several months. We believe these solutions are both good policies and good politics for the same reason – because they are moderate approaches that can work, and in the process show some enough of the disaffected, non-ideological independents that Democrats are the party who is actually serious about governing.

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.