From First Read:
Privately, Republican strategists admit that the expectations game has gotten out of control for them, with some analysts now predicting House gains in the 50s or 60s. But they’re embracing the expectations. In fact, they have helped Republicans and GOP-leaning groups raise a significant amount of money, which has enabled the GOP to expand the map. Bottom line: The expectations could end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Republicans will have to do very, very well on election day to avoid falling short of the expectations they’ve set for themselves, but who cares? What is the upside for the Democrats and the nation of the Republicans falling short of expectations? I hear people say that it will cause all this infighting in the Republican Party. You know what? The GOP is in a chaotic and dangerous state, and the outcome of the elections can’t fix that. A party that almost uniformly denies the worth of scientific evidence and expert analysis is not fit to govern. No matter what happens on election night, the GOP is going to be duking it out with itself for the foreseeable future. What’s dangerous is that the Republicans are going to make any gains at all. What’s dangerous is that anyone is taking them seriously.
Too many people are looking at the political landscape through the prism of the historical differences between the parties. A lot of progressives are oblivious to the realignment in politics represented by the Obama/McCain campaign, outcome, and aftermath. Basically, what we have is a coalition that represents everyone from the near-left to the middle-right. It’s made up of all the people who respect empiricism, science, and evidence. On the other side are all the people who find reality to be suspect (or are paid to make reality suspect). You can be for or against health care reform or reproductive rights and be part of the Obama coalition. What matters is whether you have a factual basis for your beliefs. Do you allow factual evidence to shape your views, or do you reject evidence that counters your views. Do you parrot mindless, misleading talking points? Do you ignore glaring errors in arithmetic? Are you guided primarily by emotion? If so, you aren’t a part of the Obama coalition.
It might be hard to understand what I’m saying because we tend to think in political terms. But, what’s going on in this country transcends the issues that typically divide the parties. Why are Robert Gates and Colin Powell in the Obama coalition? It’s not because they have suddenly adopted Obama’s foreign policy views, it’s because they know that Obama is at least dealing with foreign policy in a rational fact-based way. They can live with that, especially after their experiences with the alternative. And that’s why it’s important for the maintenance of the Obama coalition that it keep one foot grounded in the middle where fact-based people of a conservative bent can feel welcome.
It’s important to distinguish this from the worldview of the Democratic Leadership Council. Being welcoming to the middle isn’t the goal, but a concession and a strategy for keeping the Crazy at bay. It’s only one tent-stake among many to secure us in this storm of Stupid while we wait for it to blow off.
The people who believe in our basic institutions and want to improve and reform them stand on one side, even if they have vast differences about how to do those things. On the other side are people who want to tear down our institutions and start over. Whether it’s Social Security, Medicare, federal funding of education, the United Nations, or various amendments to the Constitution, the other side wants to upset how we have traditionally done things, and they aren’t making rational arguments for doing so. To protect the way this country works, we have to join hands with people with whom we have big disagreements.
And, at the top, the Obama administration has to do a delicate dance to keep it from flying apart as our divisions create inevitable frustrations. That’s how I see things in our current political environment, and it’s why I have a consistently different take on events than most other progressive bloggers.
I agree with this, and support wqhat you are doing. The FOX/Tea Party/Evangelical coalition are reactional revolutionaries, and are seriously dangerous.
If they were to somehow take control of the White House and Congress there is no known limit to what they would attempt. The bottom line, as you point out clearly, is that they are not examining the likely outcome of their proposals. In fact, they dismiss the enitre idea that outcomes are subject to projection by rational means.
History does not treat such people kindly, because the historical record of what happens when people with this mindset achieve power is quite grim. That is little consolation to those who live through such times.
Eep! Reactional;/reactionary…
I agree with most of that, but, based on my own anecdotal experience with people I consider the “reasonable right” they really don’t consider themselves part of the Obama coalition. They’re happy the GOP is going to make gains in November not because they want any of the GOP’s policies enacted, but because it will pull the fulcrum in power in DC right on top of their own political views. The small “C” conservatives are going to get exactly what they want once there’s a Republican House and a few more Jim Demint’s in the Senate: nothing progressive will ever get done and the political compromises that are reached on the issues of the day, from climate change to immigration, will be on terms extremely agreeable to them. Obama never really lost these small “C” conservatives because he never really had them: the embarrassment of Bush and McCain made them a reluctant supporter of what they considered the Obama fad. When pressed on what Obama did wrong, they can’t really say, but they certainly know that Obama didn’t “play the game” well enough to continue to garner their support.
If someone is still calling themselves a Republican then they aren’t part of the coalition. But there are millions of people whose political views are a lot like Lincoln Chafee’s, or Arlen Specter’s, or even Olympia Snowe’s views, who don’t consider themselves Republicans anymore. That doesn’t make them liberals except, perhaps, on the environment or maybe labor, but we need their votes to win state and nation wide.
Again, this is anecdotal so I’m not trying to make this a Grand Theory on Politics, but friends who i consider the “reasonable right’ don’t identify as “Republican” either. I think their predominant attitude is that Obama screwed up, went too far, whatever, and now he’s going to reap what he sowed. I think really figuring out who’s to blame, how this all happened, the stuff that we obsess about daily on these blogs, is irrelevant/too confusing to them. The bottom line is that they believe this is all going to work out just fine for them. As long as the embarrassment of Bush is behind them and the progressives are put in their place, its all gravy.
I think you’re confusing the dilemma faced by “reasonable republican” politicians with the approach of your average reasonable republican voter. The Lincoln Chafee’s and Arlen Specter’s of the world were pushed out of the GOP- joining the Obama coalition for these folks is more analogous to the famous saying “any port in a storm.” Average reasonable right voters rationally want their policy views enacted and preserved- voting Dem, like they may have done (or stayed home) in 2008 isn’t what they consider the most effective way to do that. They either don’t understand the dangers of electing more Demint’s or giving the GOP power to impeach in the House, or they don’t care. All roads lead back to preservation of the status quo or change on their terms.
Right, but a moderate Republican in the Lincoln Chafee mode wants a lot of what Obama is doing. He’s slashed taxes for people and small businesses, he’s got a disciplined and engaged foreign policy, he’s included moderate Republicans in his cabinet and listens to their advice. His heath care model is the same one that Lincoln’s father offered as an alternative to HillaryCare.
These people are no longer Republicans. They are Obama voters. And we need them to stay that way because they are the only thing standing in the way of the mainstreaming of Palinism.
Right, but everyday voters haven’t been forced to make the hard choices that Arlen Spector, Colin Powell and Lincoln Chafee had to. And Obama hasn’t forced them to because he treats the GOP like they are the “loyal opposition,” acting in good faith. Nobody thinks like we do about the GOP outside the progressive blogosphere because in polite company the GOP is assumed to be the same party its always been. As much as fear the impending government shutdown and likely impeachment (or threat of impeachment) of Obama when the GOP comes to power in the House is that it may force individual voters to truly consider the state of the two parties and choose accordingly. I think you overestimate the extent that everyday folks are probing and weighing the issues like Colin Powell does. Sure, they would come to the same conclusions as him if they did, but they’ve got kids to raise and DVR episodes of their favorite shows to catch up on.
When presented with the argument that the Republican Party is not acting in good faith, there are many people who agree. The problem is that it is very rare that this argument gets made.
The unfortunate part is that it is not the White House or Congressional Dems’ responsibility to do this. It’s the 4th estate’s. The news media. And they are deeply compromised. Their bosses hate Obama and their marketing departments are freaking out about FOX news stealing the lions’ share of the cable audience. Couple that with the fact that we have a generation of news anchors that have never significantly challenged authority and are very weak in their critical thinking skills, and you have the situation we have today.
But it’s not the lack of stupid “moderates” that’s threatening to hand the steering wheel to the KKKrazies. The “enthusiasm gap” is a reaction precisely to “He’s slashed taxes for people and small businesses, he’s got a disciplined and engaged foreign policy, he’s included moderate Republicans in his cabinet and listens to their advice. His heath care model is the same one that Lincoln’s father offered as an alternative to HillaryCare.”
The teabaggers look like they have solid, immovable principles (even though they can’t ever define them). The Dems are the ones promoting the idea of “no difference” by compromising with the nutcases instead of fighting them. So now their only hope is that marginal voters will figure out that GOP = BAD, pretty much on their own, maybe with the help of a bunch of attack ads that might have come too late.
The “reasonable right” are the folks I find most spouting “philosophical principles” that go back through every conservative era. They buy the surface rhetoric of the Republican Party and never look below the surface. It’s a result of the Reagan bumfuddle.
If Obama never had these conservatives, they are just being coy about being reasonable. It’s the old Newt charm offensive ploy constantly played out on PBS and NPR by conservatives. “We don’t have horns, a tail, and a pitchfork. Vote for us.”
And anyone who calls the 2008 election an “Obama Fad” is immediately suspect in my mind of being prejudiced against an African-American president. Was there a “Bill Clinton fad” or a “Ronald Reagan fad” or a “George W. Bush fad”? In the case of all off these, fad is a better description of what put them in power.
There are now a lot of the LGBT community who also argue that Obama didn’t “play the game” well enough to continue to garner their support. It makes you wonder what the Log Cabin Republicans were really up to in their lawsuit.
Oh, it’s Chuck Todd and friends trying to fluff the GOP.
Raising money does not win elections when the people are against you. Any number of self-funded millionaires have found that out the hard way. All that money this year is aimed at peeling just enough independent votes or disgruntled Democrats to join a triumphalist GOP victory. But claiming a sure thing also makes the base get complacent–angry but lazy, because it’s a cakewalk. This attitude bit the Democrats hard in 1980 and 2000. Maybe it’s the Republicans turn.
There is a heck of work being done on the ground by Democratic volunteer, but there is always room for more especially on election day. Providing transportation to the polls is always a way of getting elderly and low-income voters to the polls. Last-minute electioneering outside the polls always needs people to give the impression that there are many volunteers supporting the candidate so they must be a good choice. Providing meals and coffee to party poll workers is always needed. All of these things don’t ensure victory but they can make a difference in razor-close races in getting those 20, 50, 100, 500 extra votes. And they are particularly effective in down-ballot races, including judicial races and ballot issue referendums.
No it’s not. Nate Silver’s model has 50 House and 8 Senate Seats. Is that GOP fluff?
I’m sick of Nate Silver. Got it? He could be right. But no matter what he says, you fight to the end to achieve political goals. There is no other way if fighting even means the Democrats only lose 49 House seats and 7 in the Senate instead of 50 and 8. That’s what the repugnants can teach Democrats. You’re in this for real or your not. No model will ever save anyone.
Nate constructs his statistical model and then reports what it says straight up. The problem is not in his analysis, it’s in the underlying data being fed into the model.
Yes, the idea that polling should tell you what to do is absurd and self-defeating. That’s the error that those who want “wisely spend resources” often make–dumping lots of money into a campaign of Baron Hill or Tammy Duckworth and missing contributing money to Billy Kennedy, Rob Miller, Matt Campbell, or Tarryl Clark — or Larry Kissell until the last minute when it looks like they are going to win.
‘Nate constructs his statistical model and then reports what it says straight up. The problem is not in his analysis, it’s in the underlying data being fed into the model.’ Nice. Couldn’t the model suck?
If the model sucks, Nate will try to fix it before 2012.
The modeling process is pretty transparent; there’s a link to on his site. It looks better than most of what the other analysts are doing. Take a look at it and compare it to other models for aggregating polls and handicapping the results.
To the extent that the model cannot adjust for crappy data, it sucks. The other thing about it is there is so much past data embedded in it that it is not terribly sensitive to structural changes. For example if youth and African-Americans turn out at higher levels that most likely voting models that shape the original data are assuming, that structural change can’t be corrected for in advance.
That is why to win Democrats must turn out a whole bunch or unlikely voters in their GOTV campaigns, voters who in previous years have not been conscious there was an election happening. Easy to do if you’re not a news junkie.
And he’s said his MoE is plus/minus twenty five seats. Do you realize what that means? I think even a stats geek like Nate knows that it means he’s throwing darts at a dart board. Why? Because plenty of races haven’t been polled at all, so you don’t know where they stand.
Then it’s not a “self-fulfilling prophecy”.
The fluff aspect is implying that Democrats have no agency in whether this occurs.
Read Nate Silver’s methodology. It has problems this year because of the assumptions being made about what generic votes D and R mean and about who are likely voters. And the model has historical time series weight that one or two last-minute polls can’t overcome.
But Nate is clear that his data is not a self-fulfilling prophecy and in this year could be quite wrong. In part because the assumptions of randomness and independence of variables necessary for statistical validity might not be as true this year as most years. For one example, Rasmussen and other polls that seek to drive narrative instead of report actual public opinion. The opinions are not independent of the pollster and the party, and the biases in them don’t necessarily cancel out.
Oh, man:
I can’t take it.
I’ll be voting straight Dem and doing what I can to GOTV for them. And yet I “want to tear down our institutions and start over” — the electoral system, the Senate, healthcare, the basic economic assumptions, just for starters. The teabaggers/GOP have it all 100% wrong, but they’re the only movement screaming for any kind of change. I don’t want to “protect the way this country works”. I want to “upset the way we have traditionally done things” on a massive scale. So I guess I’m not part of the Obama coalition either. And I don’t think it’s much of a mystery why the coalition that promises change is so on the defensive against a bunch of crazy people.
I agree with how you see things. I also think that our President has done a very good job on virtually all fronts and still remains calm. Because of all of the stresses he is under is why I have often been critical of the House, Senate and others when they would want him to do more when I perceived what they were asking as their job, not his. Many of them have often complained that the President didn’t give them enough guidance or spend enough time pushing for this or that. I hope they will do their jobs better in the future.
Ok, just getting some frustration off my chest. Thanks!