2010 Elections

In prepping for my last two segments on Fox News (here and here) I had to review new polls which had some not so good news for Democrats. The first was from Public Policy Polling. The second one from NBC/Wall Street Journal.  In digging down on these polls, I found some suprising results (perhaps for DC):

Democrats Still Hold a Substantial Lead in Party ID - In each poll, the Democratic Party held a 9 point Party ID advantage over the GOP (45/36 in NBC/Wall Street Journal, 43/34 in Public Policy).  9 points is of course a bigger spread than the  actual vote in each of the last two elections, which broke 53% to 46% for the Democrats.  In 1994, by comparison, the GOP had a party ID advantage over the Democrats. 

What is remarkable about these findings is that the structural shift away from the GOP and towards the Democrats is not showing signs of abating.  Looking at the Congressional Generic Ballot (even these days, with Ds and Rs being in the mid 40s) and Obama/Dem approval (mid to high 40s) there is evidence the Democrats have lost some ground since 2008.  But there simply is no evidence in either of these polls that the GOP has gained at all, and remains in the same mid 40 percent range - or less - the party achieved in each of its last two losing election performances (Real Clear Politics average of the Generic Congressional Ballot now has the Democrats up a bit, 43/42.6 - if you take out the always GOP biased Rasmussen it is closer to 2 points now).

In fact, a reasonable interpretation of these polls is that the GOP is stuck at a ceiling of 45/46/47, the Dems have dropped to similar terrain, but with Party ID being so strong for the Dems, there is more of a clear path now for the Dems to regain their lost ground than for the GOP to grow beyond their current position. With the GOP now stuck in the mid 40s, a lot of what happens in 2010 will depend on what happens with that 5-8 percent the Democrats have lost - will they come home? Not turn out? Go to the GOP?

It is fair to say from these polls that neither party should be happy with their position 4 1/2 months from the 2010 midterms.  The Democrats have lost too much of its recent historic vote, and the GOP has not shown any capacity to take advantage of the Democratic weakness.

Spending and Deficits Are a Secondary Concern For Most Voters - Adding in a third recent poll, a YouGov/Economist poll, the other remarkable thing in these recent polls is how clear it is that spending and deficits - despite the media frenzy of late - remain a secondary concern - at best - for most voters.  In each poll, as most polls over the past five years, the economy is the overwhelming concern of voters, with the spending/deficit numbers far behind.  As it should - for every day Americans suffering through a "lost decade" of no wage and income growth, the state of the economy is a much more immediate and significant concern than the more abstract concern about the federal budget.   Concerns about deficits and spending spike among conservatives and Republicans, but in the In The Economist poll, for example, less than 10 percent of moderates and independents cited the deficit as a major concern.  In the NBC poll, those citing the importance of deficits actually dropped over the past month and still trailed the economy by 20 points. There simply is no data in these polls showing spending/deficits to be the killer app of 2010.

In each poll there was a great deal of intensity about spending and the deficit among Republicans, and much more interest in the economy/jobs in the rest of the electorate.  Which begs the question - how did the Democrats allow fiscal issues to become so dominant? I take a look at that in another post, this one on how the all important debate over the economy might play out this year.

Come to Our Event Wednesday Which Will Look at All This In Greater Detail - On Wednesday, NDN will be holding an event, noon, at our offices, which will take a much deeper look at all this matters.  Join us live, or on the web. 

If anyone can find polling which shows spending and deficits to be ranked higher than these two polls showcased by Fox News please send them our way.  And for a roundup of our thinking about the American economy, visit here.

Was on Fox News this morning talking politics.  We took a look at a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll which you can see here.  The clip is below.

I'm going to write a longer piece on this later today but my general sense of where things stand is that neither party should be happy with where they are today.  The Republicans are stuck at about the same vote share they had in their terrible 2006-2008 elections - 46 percent or so.  The Democrats are way off their vote share in the last two elections - 53 percent - and are hovering in the mid 40s on most measures.  What happens to that 7-10 percent of voters who voted with the Dems in 2006 and 2008 - whether they come back to the Ds, stay home, go with the Rs - is the big question today as we go ever deeper into this complex election cycle.

Yesterday we were pleased to see the work of NDN Fellow Mike Hais pop up on The Guardian's blog.  The Guadian's Michael Tomasky leads his piece bemoaning the tired predictions we've come to expect from pundits and journalists alike,  the "1994 repeating" narrative that is easy to write but hard to prove. Like those who follow Hais' Data Matters blog regularly, Tomasky was struck by Hais' "persuasive" analysis.

The Guadian shout-out is here.  Hais' original piece is here.  Enjoy!

Yesterday I offered some thoughts on the volatility we are seeing in American politics today.  The New York Times's Matt Bai, writing from his new perch in the main paper, offers this take:

But to suggest that this week’s primaries are just part of the latest revolt against incumbency, brought on by pervasive economic angst, is to miss some deeper trends in the electorate that are more consequential — trends that have brought us to an unprecedented disconnect between, on one side, the traditional shapers of our politics in Washington and, on the other, the voters who actually make the choices.

The old laws of politics have been losing their relevance as attitudes and technology evolve, creating a kind of endemic instability that probably is not going away just because housing prices rebound. Nor is that instability any longer driven only by ideological mini-movements like MoveOn.org or the tea parties, as some commentators suggest. Voter insurrection has gone as mainstream as Miley Cyrus, and to the extent that the parties in Washington take comfort in the false notion that all this chaos is fleeting, they will fail to internalize the more enduring lessons of Tuesday’s elections.

As someone who has been making the case that a "new politics" is emerging in America, driven by vast changes in demography, media/technology and the global economic and geopolitical landscape, I have great sympathy with Matt's thoughtful take.  But at the same time, those who discount the large structural economic changes at work now (driven to some degree by these same changes in media and technology Bai describes), and how they are leaving way too many Americans behind, miss what may be indeed the most consequential set of societal changes underway in America today.  

We are in no ordinary economic times.  We are leaving one economy, a 20th century economy, with a certain set of rules, global players, skills and knowledge required for success, and entering a new and very different 21st century economy.  This new economy is more globally competitive, technology-dense, universally-wired together and in need of transition to a low-carbon foundation.  So far America has not done a particularly good job in transitioning to this new economy of the 21st century, as we are both leaving too many in our current workforce behind, and critically, not making the needed investments in our infrastructure and the knowledge and skills of our future workforce to ensure our future success.

I agree with much of Matt writes this morning, but challenge him to look a little deeper at what may be the most consequential societal changes afoot today - the birth of a new and much more challenging 21st century economy.   This economy is one which America still has not come to adequately come to understand, and is certainly far away from having a compelling national strategy to transition our 20th century economy and strategies into the 21st.

Last night's results offer us an opportunity to reflect on our analysis leading up to it and how last night's events might shape our understanding of what we should be looking at in the run up to November.  Today Simon has an interesting post up about the volatility of the American electorate.  As he offers a prospective informed by a retrospective analysis, I wanted to offer up some of NDN's prescient recent electoral analysis:

Earlier this month NDN Fellow Mike Hais wrote a piece on the Democratic Party's new coalition and another on the composition of the Tea Party compared to the larger American electorate.  They are must reads going into November's elections.

For those interested in how Camp Obama will respond between now and then, check out NDN Fellow Dan Carol's piece on rediscovering the Obama narrative.    

Also be sure to check out Hispanics Rising 2010, which takes a detailed look at the Hispanic population and electorate.

Finally, in Mid-April, I appeared on MSNBC to discuss the Tea Party, midterm elections and Republican vulnerability. You can watch it here. Around the same time Simon appeared on Fox to talk about a similar subject.  You can watch that here.

For years now American have been disappointed with those running the country.  In 2006 they swept the governing party from power.  In 2008 they gave the Democratic challenger, Barack Obama, a true outsider in every sense of the word, the largest share of the vote for a Democratic Presidential candidate since 1964. In this cycle we've seen establishment figures of both parties get roundly defeated again and again.  The disappointment with those in power continues.  So what gives?

In 2005 Rob Shapiro and I wrote then that the lack of wage and income growth we had seen in the US economy in the first five years of the decade, if unaddressed, would begin to sweep those in power from office.  As the appendix to this essay I wrote recently about the centrality of the economy to American politics today shows, public opinion about the state of the economy tanked in 2005, years before the Great Recession.  Since 2005 the economy has consistently been the number one issue in most polls.  Since 2008 it has been the overwhelmingly dominant concern of Americans.  As it should - the last decade was a lost decade for the American people.  We just finished an entire decade where the average American gained no ground, with many - way too many - even ending the decade with lower wages and income than they began it. 

It has been our contention that the performance of the American economy has been the central driver of the great volatility in the American electorate these past several cycles.  While Americans are concerned about many things - education, immigration, health care, terrorism at home and wars oversees - there is really only one issue the American people have been and will continue to vote on until they see improvement.  And that is their sense that their economic struggle has increased, their leaders seem inadequately focused on their plight, and have certainly been unable to make it better.  They will continue to "throw the bums out" until they see their own lives getting better.

What that means for the fall is more than anything else voters are looking for a party, a set of leaders with a plan for them and their families. They are looking to see if their leaders "get it," and are offering a plan - a set of actions, proposals, arguments - which has a reasonable chance to end the conditions which created the lost decade, is commensurate to the size of the problem itself, and will help them and their families have a change to improve their station in life.  This plan must be focused on rising standards of living and growing employment for every day people, and not on important but more distant concerns of fiscal austerity or Wall Street Reform.   It is, to quote an old line, about "putting people first."

My gut is that this fall will be all about winning the economic debate.  The party that wins the big economic argument and convinces voters they have a plan for the future will prosper.  The parties which talk about other matters, or fail to make a convincing case they have a plan will once again be rebuked by a public asking for more than they have been getting from their leaders for way too many years now.

More on this tomorrow.

PS - Was quoted talking about these matters in the FT yesterday.

New Gallup study shows:

- Democrats still hold a substantial national Party ID advantage: 49-41%.

- 33 states show substantial Democratic Party ID advantage.   Only 5 show substantial GOP Party ID advantage. 

And make sure you take a look at the map in the study.  It is amazing rebuke of the everything going the right's way narrative so hot in DC right now:

In a new Newsweek piece on immigration Reform, Arian Campo-Flores writes: 

Given that much of last year was squandered on a health-care debate that has yet to produce an agreement, and given that Americans are clamoring for the administration to focus on jobs and the economy, immigration has fallen far down the priority list, for both the president and Congress. "I don't think there's been a diminution in the desire to do it," says Simon Rosenberg of NDN, which has also pressed for an overhaul. "But there's a greater recognition that the pipeline got backed up in 2009." The top two priorities now, he says, are a jobs bill and financial-services reform. "If those get done, and Washington is working better, then I think other things will be possible this year." Even, perhaps, immigration reform, though he says it may well get pushed to 2011.

As the New York Times reports this morning, there is a new legislative pipeline now.  If the White House and Congress can pass jobs and financial services reform bills quickly, then the basket of other issues waiting for consideration - immigration reform, energy/price on carbon, education reform, transportation, a DOHA treaty, even health care now - will get put into play.  A lot now depends on what happens with these two bills now, and for those wanting progress in these other areas a good plan would be to help get these other two bills passed, quickly. 

The President might consider bringing the Senate and House leadership in for an extended set of discussions next week on how best to get the differing approaches to these bills reconciled as soon as possible, and not leave it to the whims of the Committee process alone to help determine their fate.  That is perhaps the greatest lesson from 2009 - more centralized and cooperative management by the governing party is required for the President to get done all that he wants done in the coming years.

For those wanting to reform our badly broken immigration system do not lose heart.  The President and much of Congress want to get it done, and a lot of prep work has been done in 2009 to prepare for the fight when it comes.  For an issue like this timing is going to be key.   The White House and the Senate and House will have to work closely together, in a very coordinated way, to keep the immigration reform debate from spiraling out of control.   Decks will have to be clear, leaders aligned, confidence high.  I'm not sure we are there right now, but I also think that day is not all that far down the road.  We will need to keep the pressure on, keep making our case to more people, show both determination and patience, and as the President has said, never quit.

From one of our favorite thinkers:

On health care, energy, taxes, immigration, deficits and everything else, Obama should get away from the politics of legislating and go back to being president. He should put forward the best proposals to help solve America's problems. He may or may not get much support from Republicans, but he will earn political capital and power, which in the long run is the only way to enact a big, transforming agenda. This approach is exactly what Obama campaigned on. He promised that he would reach out to all sections of the country, listen to the best ideas and appeal to the nation as a whole. "I don't see a blue America and a red America, I see only the United States of America," he said. Obama needs to shift course and govern as the president he promised to become. That's change I could believe in.

You can read the rest of his Washington Post essay here.

And if you happened to have caught my 620AM appearance on Fox News this morning, yes, it did seem a little short.  I think once the conservative agreed with me on the GOP's role in running up the deficit they had to pull the plug on the segment.

Yes it's crazy early but this is an important week to be slugging it out.   Will be on with John O'Hara, author of "A New American Tear Party," talking about the State of the Union and the year ahead.  6:20 AM.  In case you are up, tune in.