issue: Politics

Election Watch: The End of the Beginning

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

So it’s finally, incontrovertibly over.

Rick Santorum’s withdrawal from the presidential race on Tuesday saved Mitt Romney and his friends many millions of dollars and additional heartburn from charges that he’s not a “true conservative,” and gave his campaign much more time to plan the convention and the general election. Even though Romney had the nomination all but locked, and might have knocked Santorum out of the race on April 24 with a big win in Pennsylvania, Santorum had a lot of incentive to stay in the race until May, when a bunch of primaries in states with large evangelical populations were to vote. One theory holds that the cold water the RNC poured on an effort by Rick’s allies in Texas to change that state’s delegate allocation from a proportional to a winner-take-all system was the clincher, since that was the only scenario under which Santorum might have denied Romney a majority of delegates.

Continue reading “Election Watch: The End of the Beginning” →

Will Marshall on the Marlins’ Misguided Decision

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI President Will Marshall examines whether the Marlins caved to political pressure in Politico’s Arena:

“Baseball managers are entitled to the same Constitutional rights as anyone else. Period, full stop.”

“In fact, we ought to call an end to the all-too-common ritual of public humiliation, confession and absolution that follows whenever some celebrity says something stupid or offensive. It’s the closest thing our supposedly free society has to a totalitarian show trial.”

“To profess admiration for a tyrant like Castro – or a tyrant’s groupie like Hugo Chavez – is certainly obnoxious. But so is the idea that protecting people against “hurtful” speech, insults or foolish ideas should take precedence over free speech.”

Read the full op-ed here

Election Watch: A Conservative Romney Emerges

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Tuesday’s primaries in Wisconsin, Maryland and D.C. were a clean sweep for Mitt Romney, who also won 86 of the 95 pledged delegates at stake in the three states.

According to everybody’s estimates (other than those of the Santorum campaign), Romney is now well over half-way to the goal of the 1144 delegates needed to win the GOP nomination.  An especially credible estimate made by Ryan Lizza, Josh Putnam and Andrew Prokop for The New Yorker even before Tuesday’s votes were counted showed Romney as certain to get very close to the magic number at the end of the contested primaries, needing only a tiny sliver of the unpledged delegates to get over the top. At worst, Mitt’s in the situation Barack Obama faced late in the 2008 Democratic contest, when the only scenario that could have prevented his nomination was an unlikely and almost unanimous revolt among unpledged super-delegates. But any such comparison suggests that Rick Santorum could have Hillary Clinton’s staying power and ability to win heavily in late primaries, and that’s more than a stretch.

From a more practical perspective, the question going into the April 2 primaries was whether Santorum could somehow survive until May, when a string of southern and midwestern primaries could provide him with the sort of demographic landscape in which he has done well so far. But even if that happens, the June calendar represents a Romney firewall of delegate-rich primaries in New Jersey, California and Utah that now look likely to officially put the front-runner over the top–that is, even if Santorum fights on to the bitter end.

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Republican Candidates Ignore the Housing Crisis

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI President Will Marshall and PPI Senior Fellow Jason Gold critique the Republican candidates failure to address the country’s lingering housing crisis at the Las Vegas Sun:

If the Republican presidential candidates have any ideas for solving America’s housing crisis, they aren’t sharing them with the voters. Since leaving behind February primaries in Nevada, Florida and Arizona, the GOP’s final four have virtually dropped the subject.

That’s puzzling, because housing remains a top concern for U.S. voters. Some 12 million homeowners remain underwater and 4 million are delinquent on their loans or in foreclosure. The ongoing drop in home prices is the single biggest drag on economic recovery. As catastrophic as it is to lose a job, the percentage of Americans who are unemployed is actually exceeded by the percentage of Americans who have either lost significant wealth from their homes or are drowning in “negative equity.”

Yet the primary debate has fixated on such evidently more urgent issues as contraception, Obamacare, gas prices, Obamacare, porn, and, of course, Obamacare (which doesn’t actually take effect until 2014). Why have the Republicans clammed up on housing?

Read the entire article

Suppress the Vote!

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI’s executive director Lindsay Lewis, and PPI Fellow Jim Arkedis, explain how conservative super PACs will likely wage a voter suppression war in November over at the New York Times:

 

The grip of the super PAC on the Republican primary season has been well-documented. They are wrecking balls operating outside the candidates’ direct control, fueled by massive influxes of cash from a handful of wealthy patrons. The millions spent by the pro-Santorum Red, White and Blue Fund and the pro-Gingrich super PAC, Winning Our Future, have prolonged their respective candidates’ rivalry with the front-runner, Mitt Romney, whose own Restore Our Future has bludgeoned the competition from Iowa to Florida to Michigan.

And that’s just the start. In the general election, super PACs will evolve into full-blown shadow campaigns. This transition is already underway, with the super PACs supporting Republican candidates beginning to take on voter persuasion operations — like sending direct mail and making phone calls — that have traditionally been reserved for a campaign operation or party committee.

The phenomenon won’t be isolated on the right. President Obama recently embraced the outside groups that he had rejected, saying that he would not unilaterally disarm. The president has dispatched one of his most trusted aides to run Priorities USA, the White House’s super PAC of choice.

Read the full op-ed

Election Watch: The Beginning of the End?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Beginning of the End? On one level, Rick Santorum’s campaign got a desperately needed boost from his win in Louisiana’s primary last Saturday. But all the other signs about the campaign indicate a party ready to end the primary season.

Santorum got his ideal electorate in Louisiana, a low-turnout affair in which half the voters were self-identified “very conservative” voters, and half called themselves “strong supporters” of the Tea Party movement.  Two-thirds say they attend worship services weekly or more.

Just as importantly, Newt Gingrich, who was running very well in Louisiana polls not that long ago, saw his support-levels shrink along with his campaign budget.

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Home Economics: Obama Ups Game on Housing Crisis

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In the last six months, President Obama has rolled out a series of proposals to address America’s still ailing housing markets. Elevating housing on the White House priority list is a welcome if belated development—one PPI called for in a major conference on new housing solutions we cosponsored last fall.

To assess the administration’s new proposals, we should start by clearly defining the central problem that must be solved. Contrary to media accounts, it’s not foreclosures, abandoned homes or underwater borrowers. These are all symptoms of a deeper malady: declining home prices. So the question we should ask is whether the President’s new flurry of ideas will move the needle on prices.

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Election Watch: A Turning Point for Romney?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Mitt RomneyMitt Romney’s solid win in Illinois on Tuesday placed him in an arguably unstoppable position for the GOP presidential nomination. He could claim formal victory perhaps as early as next month, and certainly, barring major mistakes, by June.

Along with his sweep of delegates in Puerto Rico, and the majority of delegates he claimed the previous Tuesday even as Rick Santorum got the headlines, Romney’s prize of 43 (out of 54) delegates in Illinois gives him a grand total (according to CNN’s estimates) of 562 out of 1019 delegates awarded so far; Santorum is more than 300 delegates behind. The “magic number” to clinch the nomination formally is 1144. Louisiana holds its primary this Saturday, and Santorum is a slight favorite; a loss could boost Romney’s sense of “inevitability” considerably. But in any event Romney seems certain to enjoy a big April, with very likely wins in DC, Maryland, Rhode Island, New York and Connecticut, and at least even odds in Wisconsin. Santorum’s home state of Pennsylvania is also on the April calendar, but he’s hardly a cinch there, and the proportional allocation rules will limit his gains.

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A National Infrastructure Bank: A Road Guide to the Destination

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Download the entire memo.

President Obama has proposed a National Infrastructure Bank, a simple declarative sentence that left most listeners wondering what he meant. The confusion arises partly because the administration did not follow up the president’s remarks with a specific proposal, but also because the operations of such a bank have never been fully fleshed out. Felix Rohatyn and I have elsewhere laid out the broad outline of how such a bank would function,1 and that description serves as a good starting point for our expectations regarding the president’s proposal and what Bank-type proposals generally ought to do.

As many writers have noted, American infrastructure is depreciating rapidly – we are likely well below the replacement rate of investment in roads, mass transit, airports, ports, rail, and water assets. The logical implication is that we need to invest more. But more investment in and of itself will not move us towards having the right mix of infrastructure assets in place.

The current mix results from one of two selection processes. The first is devolution to the states (for example the cost-sharing grants delivered by the Highway Trust Fund), and the second is selection by Federal agencies (e.g., the Corps of Engineers). At worst, these processes lead to politically motivated outcomes, either because state governments favor some projects for wholly non-economic reasons, or because the Congress can muscle the selection process from the federal agencies. The most recent transportation authorization bill, passed in 2005, made the word “earmark” famous by incorporating a stunning $24 billion of them – the price of having a law passed. Insofar as we have given the task of project selection to the political process, it would be surprising if this kind of event didn’t happen, not that it sometimes does.

Politicized project selection is one of several problems associated with the current process. But it is one of the reasons why a National Infrastructure Bank is so important and so urgently needed: not just because a bank might be able to lever federal dollars, but because it can use the existing dollars more wisely and obtain a higher public return.

What follows, then, is a description of the role a National Infrastructure Bank could play, taken from the perspective of the specific problems in the current process it might solve. This perspective also allows us to evaluate the administration’s proposal.

In a nutshell, Rohatyn and I propose that we collapse all of the federal “modal” transportation programs into the Bank. Any entity – whether state, local, or federal – would have standing to come to the Bank with a proposal requiring federal assistance. The Bank would be able to negotiate the level and form of such assistance based on the particulars of each project proposal. It could offer cash participation or loan guarantees, underwriting or credit subsidies, or financing for a subordinated fund to assure creditors. Any project requiring federal resources above some dollar threshold (on a credit scoring basis) would have to be approved by the Bank. Additionally, we imagine that some part of the funding for existing modal programs would be converted into block grants sent directly to the states and large cities to be spent on projects too small for the Bank’s oversight. Such grants could also be used for those programs desired by the states that do not pass muster on terms proposed by the Bank.

This is more a vision of infrastructure policy than a blueprint for the immediate future. Admittedly, it will take years and a meticulous reorganization to produce this configuration. But the best way to measure our progress in infrastructure policy (and the merits of the administration’s proposal) is not to see how quickly we adopt the Bank’s specific features, but to see how the Bank addresses the underlying infrastructure policy flaws it is designed to fix.

Download the entire memo.

Union Voters and Democrats

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Top Democratic and union leaders play host this week to prospective 2012 Congressional candidates, highlighting labor’s status as a critical cog in progressive campaigns. Some observers believe that, in the aftermath of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s efforts to strip the state’s public unions of collective-bargaining rights, labor has found both renewed public sympathy and political momentum.

It’s not clear, however, that such attitudinal shifts will be enough to reverse the steady erosion of union membership, and the voting power that goes with it. That’s the fundamental reality progressives must reckon with as they ponder how to forge electoral majorities.

To offset labor’s declining share of the electorate, Democrats logically must do one of two things: do better among union households or do better among non-union households. As it happens, the key to both is the same – winning more moderate voters.

Read the entire memo

Will Marshall on Why Gingrich Should Quit Now

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Will MarshallWill Marshall explains why Gingrich should leave the race now in Politico’s Arena:

If Newt Gingrich quits the race now, he just may escape with his dignity intact. He can take pride in the fact that his chaotic campaign sparked several times, even if it never caught fire anywhere but South Carolina. Not bad for a guy whose been out of politics for more than a decade, and jumped into the race with no money, no organization and no clear plan to capture the GOP nomination.

The longer he stays in, the greater the risk that his campaign degenerates into an exercise in self-parody. Gingrich, the GOP’s certified Deep Thinker in the race, is now pushing the dumbest gimmick – $2.50 per gallon gas – since Herman Cain’s skeletal 9-9-9 plan.

Read the full article.

Election Watch: The Romney-Santorum Fight Continues

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

By my reckoning, Mitt Romney lost his fourth opportunity yesterday to all but end the GOP presidential nominating contest (previously once after New Hampshire, once after Nevada, and once after Michigan). Had he won in Alabama and Mississippi, as much of the commentariat predicted and several polls suggested might happen, he would have banished the “Mitt can’t win in the South” meme, killed off Gingrich’s southern-based campaign, and left Santorum gasping for oxygen. But it was not to be, and now Santorum may have the long-awaited one-on-one contest with Romney as, finally, the “conservative alternative to Mitt” that so many opinion-leaders and voters alike have been seeking for more than a year.

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Election Watch: The Republican Slog Continues

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Mitt RomneyYesterday’s Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, stretching across ten states from Vermont to Alaska, did not resolve the GOP presidential nomination contest, but did place Mitt Romney in a position where probably the most he has to lose going forward is time and money.

Romney won four primaries (Vermont, Massachusetts, Virginia and Ohio) and two caucuses (Idaho and Arkansas), and looks sure to win a majority of delegates at stake last night.  According to 538’s Nate Silver, the cumulative delegate totals at this point are 332 for Romney, 139 for Santorum, 75 for Gingrich and 35 for Paul.  1144 are needed to win the nomination.  So Romney is clearly on a pace that will, if continued, carry him to the nomination.

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Will Marshall on Senator Snowe’s Retirement

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI President Will Marshall explains the significance of Senator Snowe’s surprise retirement for Politico’s Arena:

“The decisions by Sen. Olympia Snowe and Rep. David Dreier to quit Congress are part of a broader trend: the ideological “purification” of the Republican Party at all levels. Moderates have become persona non grata in the GOP, with a whopping 71 percent of Republicans now identifying as either very conservative or conservative.

“This explains why the avowedly moderate Jon Huntsman never got traction in the GOP nominating race, and why the erstwhile moderate Mitt Romney is now pretending to be “severely” conservative. The absence of moderates’ restraining hand is evident in Virginia, where the GOP-controlled legislature has passed a bill forcing pregnant women to get ultrasound procedures before they can have an abortion.”

Read the entire article

Election Watch: Romney Squeaks By in Michigan

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Mitt RomneyThe Republican presidential nomination contest reached another milestone yesterday with two more major primaries, in Arizona and Michigan.

The delegate “haul” in both states was reduced by half, since they violated the RNC’s calendar rules by holding their primaries before March 1. But since these primaries were the first events to occur after Rick Santorum’s three-state sweep on Feb. 7, and because Santorum had risen rapidly in both national and Michigan polls since then, they became something of an existential threat to the Romney campaign. Indeed, prior to the results the air was full of panic-stricken, if largely anonymous, claims that party leaders would have to recruit a late-entry candidate if Romney failed to win in Michigan, his native state.

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PPI Battleground Home Values Index

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In these 16 states, home prices are down an average of 16 percent since October 2008—from a median of $160,596 to a median of $131,191 in December 2011.

The states included in the PPI analysis are among those hardest-hit by the housing crisis: Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, New Hampshire, Indiana, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

PPI’s analysis is based on data derived from Zillow and the U.S. Census Bureau. The overall median home value for the battleground states is a weighted average based on the proportion of housing units in that state.

For more information, see Gold and Kim’s policy report, “Underwater: Home Values in 2012 Battleground States.”