Democrats havent won yet

[Sean Pa]

Democrats Haven't Won Yet
David Corn
October 11, 2006


David Corn writes The Loyal Opposition twice a month for TomPaine.com. Corn is also the Washington editor of The Nation and is the co-author along with Michael Isikoff of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War. Read his blog at http://www.davidcorn.com.

Nancy Pelosi measuring the curtains in the Speaker?s office. Ranking Democrats on House committees rushing out to buy gavels. Democratic staffers drafting subpoenas.

Those are the images running through Democrats? minds as they read the polls from recent days. Public approval of Congress has fallen to the lowest point in over 10 years: 32 percent in a Washington Post/ABC News poll. That poll noted that registered voters favor Democratic congressional candidates over Republicans 54 to 41 percent. A USA Today/Gallup poll gave the Dems an even wider margin: 59 to 36 percent. On every key issue, the polls show Democrats have an edge over Republicans. Asked which party can be trusted to handle terrorism?the Bush administration?s signature issue?the Democrats were ahead in the Post/ABC poll by 6 points. (This comes after the White House spent weeks in September trying to depict the Democrats as wimps on terrorism.) And when a New York Times/CBS News poll asked which party comes ?closer to sharing your moral values,? the Ds beat the Rs 47 to 38 percent.

George W. Bush?s approval rating has dropped in all the surveys. The Times/CBS poll placed him as low as 34 percent. In the Post poll, 63 percent said his war in Iraq had not been worth fighting?a new record. And the numbers related to the Mark Foley scandal offer no good news either. In the Times/CBS poll, 79 percent said House Republican leaders cared more about their own political standing than the safety of congressional pages. Almost half said House Speaker Dennis Hastert should resign. A CNN poll found that 79 percent believed Republican top-dogs in Congress handled the Foley matter ?inappropriately.? Slightly more than half said Republican leaders were involved in a ?deliberate cover-up.?

Political handicapping has followed the numbers. Veteran House-watcher Charlie Cook has upped the number of toss-up seats from 18 to 25. A few of the new at-risk seats are directly linked to the Foley scandal. For instance, Rep. Tom Reynolds, who heads the National Republican Congressional Committee and who has been implicated in the Foley affair, has suffered a free-fall in the polls for his race in upstate New York. And Foley?s seat is probably lost to the GOP. (To vote for Foley?s Republican replacement, a resident of that Florida district will have to pull the lever next to Foley?s name, which could not be removed from the ballot.)

This is more than enough to make a Democrat giddy. Still, Pelosi ought not to order those new curtains yet.

The national political weather is clearly awful for Republicans. The unending war, Hurricane Katrina, Foley?all that trumps falling gas prices and a rising Dow. A storm is heading toward Congress on Election Day. And were the United States a European-style democracy?where voters tend to pick party representatives rather than individual candidates?the Republicans would expect to lose scores of House seats. But congressional districts have been so thoroughly gerrymandered to protect incumbents that only 40 to 50 House seats are considered to be in play. That means that the current political tides will likely affect merely 10 percent of the entire body.

So White House chief strategist Karl Rove, Republican Party chair Kenneth Mehlman and their partners-in-politicking need to fret just about a small number of House races. Do the math: If 50 House races are competitive and the Democrats need a 15-seat gain to take the House, Republicans could thwart the Dems by holding on to 18 or so of these races.

Consequently, Democrats ought to keep in mind another image: At an undisclosed location (?Sorry, Mr. Vice President, we need this for something more important.?), a war room is set up, divided into two dozen cubicles. The operatives working in each square are focused on one of these do-or-die races. The Republican Party has given them unlimited resources. They have been instructed to do whatever it takes: negative advertising, rumor campaigns, dirty tricks. Gentlemen and ladies, they have been told, the civilized (that is, Republican) world depends upon you. Do not permit the (Democratic) hordes to breach your gate.

And in the cubicles, computers of massive power hum quietly. Data is being analyzed. The Republican Party is looking for its most sympathetic voters. Block by block. Household by household. It?s called ?micro-targeting.? This practice goes far beyond identifying folks who have registered for a party and getting them to the polls. What political micro-targeting entails is searching through massive amounts of consumer data on individuals and finding correlations that indicate who is likely to vote one way or another. Who in the 23rd District prefers bourbon to gin? Bourbon drinkers tend to vote Republicans; gin fanciers lean Democrat. Now which bourbon drinkers in that district subscribe to Field & Stream rather than The New Yorker. And so on. The Republicans have been wise to this game for several years, with the Democrats playing catch-up.

With powerful databases in hand, the Republican National Congressional Committee can tailor messages to the individual. It can send one potential Republican voter a mailing that highlights the Republican plan to build a fence at the border to keep out all those scary illegal immigrants. And it can send a mailing that hails Bush?s attempt to concoct a comprehensive immigration reform package to another voter in the same district. (It can do likewise with get-out-the-vote phone calls and door-to-door campaigns.) Not only can there be different messages for each district?remember, whatever it takes?there can be different messages within the district. All according to the data. The point is to assemble winning majorities voter by voter in those hold-back-the-tide districts.

In Washington, the focus is often on the national political narrative. And the Bush White House has naturally been scheming to shape this narrative to its advantage, realizing that doing so would provide general assistance to GOP candidates across the country. Step One was picking a fight with the Democrats on the terrorist detention legislation. The White House eventually got a bill it liked but not the battle it wanted, because Republicans?Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner?led the opposition (before folding). Whatever Rove had planned for Step Two was blown aside by the Foley scandal. No doubt, he has other ideas on how the GOPers can get their national mojo back. But the game is now on the ground, outside of Washington?and in those cubicles.

Predictions are pointless. However, it does seem that even the Senate has become within reach of the Democrats. Yet if there are more page scandal revelations, more bad news out of Iraq and more Republicans slippage in the polls, Rove and the Republicans might just be able to stem a tsunami by sticking the right fingers in the right holes. If that happens, it will be quite a feat?and another sign the American political order is susceptible to the wily manipulations of well-financed and willing-to-do-anything politicos.



<font color="#990000">Is this a reasonable article, trying to get through the minefield of Political opinion in American politics is frightningly difficult, but this article seems to sort the wheat from the chaff. What do you think??

</font>source

[travelinman]

To a point, yes it is.

The fairy tale is where he says the rats are playing catch up and that Rove is some mystical magician and can pull defeat out of his ass whenever he wants.

The rat?s problems are that they will not accept that the majority of Americans are traditionally Christian, moderately conservative, want lower taxes and don?t believe in entitlements.

If the rats today were the party of John Kennedy and not the party of entitlements and diversity the pubs wouldn?t stand a chance.



<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ October 12, 2006 08:51 AM: Message edited by: travelinman ]</font>

[cincygreg]

The deluge of political ads on tv is once again mindboggling. It seems the ante gets upped every year on the number of ads. But, I havent seen as many yard signs around this year.
Many will be going to the polls this year just to vote on issues (such as the smoking ban and it's alternative partial ban) and some of the actual races may become secondary. The ads may trigger a bit of the "lesser of two evils" approach to some or it may just come down to which ads were less annoying LOL!

Interesting article Sean.

[Lew]

I concur with Trav. If you went back in time to the post-war era and showed the Democrats the red and blue maps from today, they'd have a heart attack. But think to Reagan's line about how he didn't leave the Democrat party, the Democrat party left him.

But I do like to see the political hacks in panic mode. In my day, so to speak, the times when we've had our best success economically have been when power has been disbursed among the parties (Reagan when he had a Democrat congress, Clinton when he had a Republican congress).

You've got the gun crowd, you've got the abortion crowd, you have numerous single interest blocs that are passionate about their cause. But at the end of the day, the majority of the voters are not of any bloc, and they don't really care about politics or ideology or any of that. It is, and always has been, the economy (and more to the point, the perception of how the economy is doing).

[cincygreg]

Issues and Initiatives baby, all issues and initiatives.
Long list of laws headed to voters
Updated 10/12/2006 11:38 PM ET

More on GOP, Dems and issues
By Thomas Frank, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON ? Voters next month will decide the most citizen-sponsored referendums in a non-presidential election in nearly 100 years, as groups step up efforts to shape policy by putting measures directly to popular vote.
Eighteen states will decide 76 ballot initiatives in November, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. That's exceeded only by 87 such measures in 1914 ? when initiatives were popular as part of the Progressive movement that fought moneyed special interests, the conference says.

There were also 87 ballot measures in 1996, which was a presidential election year.

"We're seeing initiatives go more and more into battleground states," said University of Florida political scientist Daniel Smith, a leading expert on initiatives. "Groups want to use them to mobilize their supporters."

Ohio has four initiatives, including a labor-backed proposal to raise the minimum wage, which sponsors hope will help Democrats in close races for governor, Senate and two House seats. In Missouri, an initiative to allow stem cell research could influence a tight Senate race.

"A lot of regional and national groups have become very adept at using the initiative process, and they have deep pockets so they can operate campaigns in a number of states," said Jennie Bowser, a policy analyst for the legislatures conference.

Initiatives increase voter turnout, particularly in non-presidential election years, and can sway other contests by drawing attention to how candidates stand on the initiative questions, Smith said. His study last year showed that a referendum to bar same-sex marriage in Ohio in 2004 helped President Bush carry that state and win a second term.

This year, "progressives are taking a page out of the right-wing playbook" by putting questions on ballots in Ohio, Colorado and four other key states to raise the minimum wage, said Kristina Wilfore, executive director of the liberal Ballot Initiative Strategy Center.

Unions are sponsoring those initiatives, even though few members earn minimum wage, to help pro-labor Democrats, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said.

Citizens in 24 states can use initiatives to enact new laws by gathering signatures to put questions on a ballot. Since the 1970s, many initiatives have curtailed taxes, imposed term limits and restricted campaign fundraising.

Next month, voters in 33 states also will decide 121 additional ballot measures sponsored by legislatures. Those often involve less-contentious matters such a borrowing money, but they also cover topics such as same-sex marriage.

The 76 ballot initiatives do not include five "citizen vetoes" in which voters are being asked to repeal laws, such as South Dakota's near-total ban on abortion.

Other measures on ballots Nov. 7 would limit public smoking, restrict taxes and increase school spending.

Those issues don't motivate voters the way minimum wage and same-sex marriage can because they have "no clear partisan or ideological dimension," said Stephen Nicholson, a political scientist at the University of California, Merced. "The critical thing is to choose an issue where you're certain support is going to be strong and stay strong."

The concern is , in many peoples minds, what they can control at the polls and not as much who's gonna be doing the things they cant control (just my opinion)

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ October 13, 2006 10:20 AM: Message edited by: cincygreg ]</font>

[cincygreg]

link to that page and the other political stuff on it...

2006 ELECTIONS

[travelinman]

Originally posted by Lew:
I concur with Trav. If you went back in time to the post-war era and showed the Democrats the red and blue maps from today, they'd have a heart attack.

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Just thinking about this makes my head spin. Imagine if the red and blue states were dispersed in 1860 like they are today. We would never have had a civil war.

God! I'm having an identity crisis. Bobby Lee would have been just some other general at West Point with nobody to fight. Stonewall would have just been a crazy-ass teacher in Virginia. Nobody would have heard of J.E.B.

Two good things would be that Grant would have just been another drunk and we would never have known that son of a bitch from Maine.

[cincygreg]

Maybe we should just install machines with a really bhig red button and a really big blue button this time around.

Then again, anyone who happens to be colorblind would have a tough time with it.

Anywho, it seems that those who wish to create change in a civil manner have started to go about doing so, and with all these on the ballot the time is obviously here for those who beleive they can change things or make a difference to follow this path in doing so.

[travelinman]

Originally posted by cincygreg:
Maybe we should just install machines with a really bhig red button and a really big blue button this time around.

Then again, anyone who happens to be colorblind would have a tough time with it.

Anywho, it seems that those who wish to create change in a civil manner have started to go about doing so, and with all these on the ballot the time is obviously here for those who beleive they can change things or make a difference to follow this path in doing so.

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">What ????????

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ October 16, 2006 06:14 AM: Message edited by: travelinman ]</font>

[cincygreg]

Just getting a little off topic trav, not trying to hijack the thread though.

Trying to make a comment on how the right way to do things is to go through whatever needs to be done to get something on the ballot so the people can decide at the polls instead of running around like a bunch of idiots and getting arrested.

Anywho, it seems like the dispersion of red and blue states throughout the country makes for a country that is sort of a "purple-ish" hue!