Anyone familiar with sentiment in the region is aware that Barack Obama isn’t very popular among white voters in the Deep South. The Obama-Biden ticket did worse than Kerry-Edwards ’04 among white voters in much of that area, despite the Democratic breakthroughs in nearby North Carolina and Virginia.

But the scope of the continuing unpopularity of Obama and Democrats in the South is graphically demonstrated in recent analysis from DKos-R2K. Obama´s overall national favorable/unfavorable ratio in its October poll was 55/37. In the South, it was 27/68. The Republican Party’s rating nationally was 21/67. In the South, it was 48/37. The Democratic Party’s national rating was 41/51. In the South, it was 21/72. And on the congressional “generic ballot,” Democrats led nationally 35/29; GOPers led in the South 47/21.

These are regional averages which almost certainly overstate Democrats´ problems in Florida, NC, and Virginia, but may also understate the problem in the Deep South.

Such numbers will undoubtedly reinforce already strong tendencies by non-southern Democrats to “write off” the region as intractably reactionary if not incurably racist. That would be a major mistake. Most of the congressional districts held by southern Democrats are far friendlier to Obama than the regional averages indicate, and we need to hold as many of them as possible (the same is true of many statewide offices, and in the state legislative contests that will determine control of redistricting). And as the 2008 results in FL, NC and VA showed, there are demographic trends in the region that give Democrats considerable future hope wherever sufficient concentrations of minority voters, upscale professionals, and academic/research centers co-exist.

What the current numbers probably reflect more than anything is the exceptional unhappiness of southerners with the economy, which has reversed decades of sunbelt growth. If high southern unemployment rates begin to turn around by 2010 or 2012, the South´s outlier status may moderate as well.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Of all the hobbyhorses that the right has jumped on this year, perhaps one of the strangest is their crusade against volunteerism. Their latest salvo against community service comes against iParticipate, a week-long initiative by the Entertainment Industry Foundation, a Hollywood charitable group, to promote volunteerism in storylines and public service announcements in over 100 TV programs. Seems fairly innocuous, right? Not to some conservatives:

But while the project has found widespread support in Hollywood, the fact that it dovetails with President Barack Obama’s call for national service has fueled suspicion in some conservative circles that iParticipate is an effort to prop up left-wing causes.

Twitter users have posted messages complaining that the initiative is an abuse of the public airwaves. Writers on the blog Big Hollywood, part of the conservative news portal Breitbart.com, noted that iparticipate.org’s database of volunteer opportunities includes postings from Planned Parenthood and groups focused on ending global warming. (The database — powered by a nonprofit Web platform called All for Good — also includes listings for pro-life organizations and the conservative group Tea Party Nation.)

On his show last night, Glenn Beck joined in the fun:

[I]s it just a coincidence that all of this falls into line with President Obama’s Corporation for National and Community Service and call for more service and volunteerism?…It’s almost like we’re living in Mao’s China right now.

The assault on iParticipate continues the year-long war conservatives have been waging against community service. Earlier in the year, they trained their fire on that pernicious program, AmeriCorps, with the Examiner claiming that President Obama’s expansion of it had a “strong odor of creepy authoritarianism.” American Conservative magazine warned, “This is part of a long series of Democratic Party efforts to create pretexts to commandeer more of people’s lives.” Beck, as he is wont to do, went further, taking Obama’s call for a “civilian national security force” out of context and asserting that Obama’s bolstering of AmeriCorps “is what Hitler did with the SS.”

This smearing of volunteerism is, of course, deranged. One would think that everyone could agree that Americans devoting time and effort to community and national service was an unmitigated good that transcended ideology. (Indeed, just this weekend, Obama appeared with former President George H.W. Bush at Texas A&M in a joint celebration of volunteerism.) But the blind hatred of Obama — and his community organizing past, which Sarah Palin sneered at during the Republican convention — has led some on today’s right to oppose the seemingly uncontroversial. One gets the feeling that had Obama been an oncologist instead, these same folks would now be waging the War on the War on Cancer. Unfortunately these days, such inanities are simply the new normal for American conservatism.

According to Gallup’s daily tracking poll, President Obama’s job approval rating has seen a nice little bounce in the wake of the Nobel Peace Prize announcement last Friday. From a term-low 50% approval rating a week ago, Obama’s rating now sits at 56%. That uptick certainly seems to defy the conventional wisdom among the chattering classes about Obama’s victory. The responses from the commentariat ran from frothing-at-the-mouth outrage from the usual conservative suspects to slightly abashed cheers from the president’s supporters. But hardly anyone saw the award as an unalloyed good.

But as we have learned repeatedly over the years, what passes for beltway CW hardly applies to the rest of the country. When you extricate yourself from the myopic maelstrom that is Washington punditry, you realize that most Americans actually have common-sense views that aren’t infected by who-up-who’s-down overanalysis. For many Americans, a sitting president winning the Nobel Peace Prize is, in fact, an unapologetically good thing. Obama, who has displayed an impressive ability to disregard the noise of cable and commentary, again showed sound instincts, accepting the award with humility and as a call to action, rather than turning down the prize, as some on both right and left urged. (As if this no-nonsense president would even consider making such a melodramatic gesture.)

Breaking down the Gallup numbers further, it appears that the bump has come strictly from Independents (up nine points) and Republicans (up eight). (Democratic numbers did not change.) This might suggest, as Gallup warns, that the bounce could be fleeting. But it also tells us that even with the right-wing explosion about the award, those most likely to be swayed had their own ideas. It affirms what the Obama campaign bet on during the campaign: When it comes to public opinion, Americans are pretty good about blocking out the media narrative du jour.

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s decision to bestow this year’s award on President Obama is both an endorsement and a challenge.

The prize is an endorsement of Obama’s idea of what America should be. We may be the world’s strongest power, but America should have the strength to listen and lead, not order and ignore. Obama’s America listens as much as it speaks, it projects specific and achievable long-term goals for world peace, and it isn’t afraid to tell friends and enemies alike that peace is achievable but only by making unpopular choices. More than empty words, Obama’s engagement is buttressed by a hard-nosed realism that is interested in acting as much as talking.

Would President Obama have won if he wasn’t immediately preceded by George W. Bush? Likely not — the differences in their ideologies, temperament, and interpretation of American power would probably not have been enough if the contrast hadn’t been sharply juxtaposed by historical proximity. But then again, would an African-American Democrat with little governing experience have been elected president without that contrast?

The prize is also a challenge, both to Obama and to the international community. Obama was inaugurated only two weeks before nominations for the prize were closed, suggesting that it was Obama’s idealistic hope on the campaign trail that won him consideration at the outset. His first months in office have inspired billions, but the next three years pose the challenge of turning hope into results.

His international partners have likewise been challenged. With Obama buoyed by the prestige of the prize, the burden to work for peace has shifted to them. It would normally be difficult to say no to the world’s most popular leader. How tougher would it be now that he’s won the Nobel Peace Prize?

After Barack Obama’s victory last November, there were stories about how the election shifted international perceptions of America. It turns out we weren’t just imagining it. Coming on the heels of the Olympic disappointment — which conservatives have tried to spin as a referendum on Obama’s global appeal — a new poll from GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media finds that the Obama effect is, in fact, real and impressive.

According to the firm’s new Nation Brands Index (NBI), the U.S. is now the most admired country in the world, jumping to the top spot from its seventh-place finish in last year’s poll. Simon Anholt, the founder of NBI, said, “What’s really remarkable is that in all my years studying national reputation, I have never seen any country experience such a dramatic change in its standing as we see for the United States for 2009.”

The survey asked 20,000 people in 20 countries around the globe to rate nations in a range of categories, including culture, governance, people, and exports. The U.S. was followed by France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan. On the other end of the list, Angola finished at #49 and Iran is at #50.

The results affirm the pride that many Americans felt about their country following Obama’s win last year. It also shows that Obama’s humbler, progressive brand of leadership is having its desired effect. The target of resentful, sidelong glances from the rest of the world under the Bush administration, America seems to have reclaimed its position as an admired exemplar. Renewed trust and popularity don’t mean that Obama will win every diplomatic battle, but it certainly puts us in a better position than where we were when the neocons were running the place.

Like a lot of folks, I’ve expressed worries about the likelihood that older white voters will represent a disproportionate share of the electorate in the 2010 midterm elections, creating an unearned GOP advantage. In his latest column, Ron Brownstein meditates on that possibility, but also points out that a Republican message tailored to older white voters could come back to haunt the GOP in 2012:

In midterm elections, the electorate tends to be whiter and older than in presidential elections. ABC polling director Gary Langer has calculated that since 1992 seniors have cast 19 percent of the vote in midterm elections, compared with just 15 percent in presidential years. That difference contributed to the 1994 landslide that swept the GOP into control of both the House and Senate. Seniors had cast just 13 percent of the vote in Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, but that figure spiked to nearly 19 percent two years later, with voting by the young people who had bolstered Clinton falling off sharply….

In 2008, Obama won the votes of just 40 percent of whites over age 65 (compared with 54 percent of whites under 30). All surveys show that white seniors remain the most resistant to Obama’s health care agenda and the most skeptical of him overall. In the nonpartisan Pew Research Center’s most recent poll, Obama’s approval rating among elderly whites stood at just 39 percent. Surveying all of these numbers, veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres says that the Republican margin among white seniors could “easily expand to 25 points” in 2010.

Brownstein also notes, however, that the general assumption of low voting in midterms by minorities is based on mixed evidence. Minority voters actually represented a higher share of the electorate in 1994 and 1998 than in the presidential years of 1992 and 1996. These voters did, however, decline slightly as a percentage of the electorate in 2002 and 2006 as compared to 2000 and 2004. Moreover, the bar is higher in 2010 given the strong minority turnout in 2008. A lot will depend on what happens between now and then, and perhaps on the extent to which Republicans are perceived as playing on white racial or cultural fears.

After 2010, though, any Republican focus on older white voters isn’t likely to pay dividends:

In the 2012 presidential election, the young and minority voters central to Obama’s coalition are likely to return in large numbers. The risk to the GOP is that a strong 2010 showing based on a conservative appeal to apprehensive older whites will discourage it from reconsidering whether its message is too narrow to attract those rapidly growing groups.

Even if, says Brownstein, the share of the electorate for minority voters drops from 2008’s twenty-five percent to twenty percent in 2010, it’s like to rise to near thirty percent in 2012. It’s at that point that any Great White Hopes for the GOP could really begin to backfire.

In political circles, Republicans and Democrats alike have begun comparing the 2010 election with the “revolution” that handed both the House and the Senate to the GOP in 1994. But how applicable is that analogy, really?

On the surface, the comparison is plausible. In 1994, as now, a charismatic outsider took office amid general unhappiness with the record of his Republican predecessor. Then, as now, the president decided to make health care reform a signature issue despite widespread concerns about the economy, taxes, and federal budget deficits. And, as now, Republicans responded with an abrasive political strategy that energized their conservative base, at a time when Democrats were seemingly divided between centrists and liberals discouraged by the new president’s perceived centrist path.

It’s impossible, however, to draw concrete conclusions from such superficial observations. A more disconcerting parallel for Democrats might be the scope of their recent winning streak. In the elections leading up to both 1994 and 2010, Democratic victories, particularly in the House, left the party somewhat over-exposed. In 1994, 46 of the 258 House Democrats were in districts carried by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. The numbers are comparable today, where 49 of the 257 House Democrats are in districts carried by John McCain, with only 34 Republicans in districts carried by Barack Obama. Similarly, if you apply the Partisan Voting Index, (PVI), which compares a district’s prior presidential results to national averages, you find that there are 66 Democrats in districts with a Republican PVI and only 15 Republicans in districts with a Democratic PVI–a similar situation to the 79 Democrats in Republican districts in 1994. Clearly, two straight “wave” elections have eliminated most of the low-hanging fruit for Democrats in the House, and created some ripe targets for the GOP.

But that’s where the fear-inducing similarities end. The Republicans’ 1994 victory in the House was also enabled by a large number of Democratic retirements: Twenty-two of the 54 seats the GOP picked up that year were open. By comparison, the authoritative (and subscription-only) Cook Political Report counts only four open, Democrat-held House seats in territory that is even vaguely competitive. That low number of open seats is significant because it limits the number of seats Republicans can win; if there is a similar wave of retirements in the offing for 2010, the signs have yet to materialize.

The 1994 parallels appear even more tendentious in the Senate. In 1994, Democrats lost eight of the 22 seats they defended, six of which were open. Republicans had only 13 seats to defend, and three of them were open. In 2010, however, the situation lopsidedly favors Democrats. Republicans have to defend 19 of their seats, seven of which are open. Meanwhile, Democrats have to defend 19 seats, only three of which are open. For Republicans to take the Senate, Democrats would have to lose eleven seats without picking off a single Republican. There’s no modern precedent for a tsunami that large.

Another disconnect between 1994 and 2010 involves patterns of demography and ideology. The 1994 election was the high-water mark of the great ideological sorting that occurred between the two parties. That made the environment particularly harsh for southern Democrats, as well as those in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain West, where many ancestral attachments to the Donkey Party came unmoored.

In the South, this sorting-out was reinforced by the decennial reapportionment and redistricting process, during which both Republicans and civil rights activists promoted a regime of “packing” and “bleaching” districts–that is, the electoral consolidation of African-American voters. While this had a salutary effect on African-American representation in the House of Representatives, the overall effect was to weaken Democrats. This dynamic was best illustrated by my home state of Georgia, whose House delegation changed from 9-1 Democratic going into the 1992 election to 8-3 Republican after 1994.

Nothing similar to those handicaps exists today. The ideological filtering of the parties is long over; any genuine conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans left in the electorate clearly have reasons for retaining their loyalties, which will be difficult to erode. Moreover, whether or not you buy the “realignment“ theories that Democrats were excited about after the 2008 elections, there is not a single discernible long-term trend that favors the Republican Party. Bush-era Republican hopes of making permanent inroads among Hispanics and women were thoroughly dashed in 2006 and 2008. Moreover, as Alan Abramowitz recently pointed out, the percentage of the electorate that is nonwhite–which is rejecting Republicans by overwhelming margins–has roughly doubled since 1994.

Still, there is one short-term demographic factor that Democrats should be alarmed about in 2010. Older voters almost always make up a larger percentage of those who go to the polls during midterm elections than they do in presidential election years. And older white voters, who contributed mightily to the Democrats’ midterm victory in 2006, are famously skeptical of Barack Obama. Indeed, they skewed away from him in 2008, even before Republicans devoted so many resources turning them against health care reform with tales of big Medicare cuts and death panels. So the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman may have been correct when he predicted that, “[e]ven if Obama and Democrats are just as popular next November as they were last November, they might stand to lose five to ten seats in the House based on the altered composition of the midterm electorate alone.”

That’s bad, but it’s certainly not political reversal on the scale of 1994. Unlike Bill Clinton at the same time in his presidency, Obama’s approval ratings seem to have recently stabilized in the low-fifties; not great, but not that bad in a polarized country, either. And as both Abramowitz and Ron Brownstein have pointed out, in group after group of the electorate, he remains as popular as he was when he was elected. A cyclical turnover of ten House seats, which seems to be the most likely scenario in 2010, would not a revolution make.

This is a cross-post from Real Clear Politics and The New Republic.

Even as Republicans crow about perceptions of the Obama administration running aground, and look forward with growing conviction to big, 1994-style gains in 2010, an interesting thing is happening in the two big statewide races that are actually being conducted right now, in VA and NJ. After months in which Republican gubernatorial candidates Bob McDonnell (VA) and Chris Christie (NJ) held commanding leads over their Democratic rivals, both races appear to be tightening up considerably.

In VA, the last couple of major polls, from the Washington Post and Insider Advantage, showed Creigh Deeds shrinking McDonnell’s lead to four percentage points. As Margie Omero explains at Pollster.com, Deeds’ improved standing reflects ads he’s recently run in Northern Virginia linking McDonnell’s abrasively right-wing master’s thesis to his record as a public official, particularly in terms of hostility to legalized abortion. Omero goes on to suggest that Deeds can make even more hay in NoVa by focusing more on McDonnell’s expressed hostility to working women. In any event, McDonnell no longer has momentum in his favor.

In NJ, Christie’s favorability ratings have steadily worsened as he became better known, and now Democracy Corps has a new poll out showing his lead over incumbent Gov. Jon Corzine down to a single point (40%-39%, with indie candidate Chris Daggett at 11%). Republicans are probably also nervous about the general pattern of NJ statewide races in recent years, where the increasingly Democratic partisan leanings of the state seem to eventually erase early GOP leads.

This is a cross-post from The Democratic Strategist.