On the left, at least, there’s been a near-universal condemnation of the Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman piece in the New York Times. Some of the commenters here and on Twitter have misinterpreted what I had to say about the article, so I want to make one thing clear right now, and then I want to revisit this issue when I have the time to pull together all the links I’ll need to discuss it intelligently.
What I was reacting to was not the criticism that Hillary Clinton is running a too-liberal campaign on the issues. I was reacting to the defeatism of the advisers around Clinton. If I thought that people vote in large numbers based on the careful messaging and policy-positioning of candidates, I’d think that these two things are related. But I don’t feel that way. There could be several million people in this country who would vote for Hillary and not for Barack regardless of anything that they might say.
Clinton appeals to certain people on a visceral level. So does Obama. But they’re not the same people. By positioning herself on the liberal side of the things, Clinton can hope to energize Obama voters who aren’t excited by her campaign, and there are fairly few voters who will be so turned off by her lack of centrist messaging that they’ll change their vote from Democratic to Republican. There’s nothing wrong with running a campaign that fires up the Democratic base. And that criticism of her in the Martin and Haberman piece is part concern-trolling and part just plain bad analysis.
Without doing anything specific, however, Clinton has a broader appeal than Obama. I don’t mean that she’s more popular in absolute terms, although she might be. I mean that there are voters out there available to her that simply weren’t available to Obama. Not all these voters are racist. Some just really like the idea of a female president. Some identify more with Clinton’s generation. Some remember the economy in the first Clinton presidency fondly and want more of the same. Some just trust the Clintons in a way that they never trusted a relatively unknown senator from Illinois. Maybe they like the Clintons’ southern roots or DLC past. Maybe they’ll remember the DLC stuff as a positive even if Hillary isn’t out pounding those old messages day after day.
The country has become too polarized, and it might be that Clinton can’t do anything about it. But, my argument is that she should compete in areas that her husband won. I don’t mean that she should run a centrist or anti-Obama campaign. She might not have to do any of that to have success in some of the places that her husband had success.
Anyway, for me, that’s the promise of Hillary Clinton. As I said before, I would not confidently predict that she can pull it off, but she’ll never know if she doesn’t try.
More later…
The problem with this argument, is that in the red states Clinton won:
Hillary doesn’t even need to win all the Obama states, but a broader distribution of votes by district would be immensely helpful.
How possible is that really; given the census and subsequent redistricting?
Obama pulled in a huge number of voters in 2012; Republicans lost the popular vote and still won in their districts given how they’ve been gerrymandered. I think I read that Democrats need to be up +6 on the presidential ballot to win back the House. Given issues of race and given her sex; Hillary has a good chance of doing that WHILE running the President’s playbook IMO.
It’s not either or; simply by activating Democrats she can win and win a governing coalition.
that’s my hope, but not if she plays it safe and doesn’t invest in districts she doesn’t technically need to win the presidential election.
I really think there is enormous confusion in these discussions about what campaigns influence and what EVENTS influence.
Landslides or big wins are generally the creation of events. To wit:
*FDR (Depression)
*Eisenhower (Korea)
*Johnson (Civil Rights, Excellent economy)
*Nixon ’72 (Perceived end of Vietnam War)
*Reagan ’80 (Iran, Inflation)
*Reagan ’84 (Economy)
I could go on – in some of the cases above the extremism of the other candidate played a role.
The criticism of Clinton completely misses this.
I disagree with you on 72, 80, and 84. Those landslide victories were a result of political realignment in which the Republican Party was able to compete nationally due to cracking open the South while still staying very competitive in the Northeast. Successfully conducted wars and good economies don’t help the party playing defense, as Clinton and Bush Sr. can tell you.
In the absence of an existential crisis, elections are won years in advance, sadly. Unless she makes a major gaffe during her campaign, she’s not going to (under her own power) perform much better or worse relative to the demographic makeup of the electorate than Obama. Or Kerry and Gore for that matter.
Events clearly effected all three, though in ’72 you had one of the dumbest campaigns (not candidate) who had to withdraw his own VP selection. But 80 was all about Iran and the economy.
The Southern reaction that started in ’72 was a reaction to an event: Civil Rights.
I agree with you though that elections are determined by factors external to candidate campaigns.
Was it, now? The battleground for 1980 didn’t look all that different from 1976. If you flip the allegiance of the Solid South, the post-victory maps and margin don’t differ all that much, with the exception of NY/MA/PA.
Yeah, stagflation and the Iranian hostage crisis (which I think is way overrated in regards to the damage it did, but W/E) certainly didn’t help things but Carter’s death warrant was signed in 1968. Without the South, he wasn’t going to win no matter how well his Presidency did. And he wasn’t going to win the South without catching a few lucky black swans.
On a national scale Perot took as many voters from Bush as he did from Clinton. I agree the realignments will make some states a very heavy lift for Clinton – like Arkansas, actually – but there are other states that we’re relatively close in like Georgia, Missouri, and Arizona which she could flip. More relevantly (since she’ll already have 271 from something like Virginia if she gets Georgia) there are a number of House districts she could flip in states all over the country.
Agree with you nationally, but in some states Perot clearly helped Clinton.
Georgia and Arizona are doable. Missouri is not short of a catastrophic meltdown on the GOP’s part. Obama didn’t get Missouri in ’08 even with the bad economy as a major boost. And Missouri has been resistant to the three trends that allow Democrats to compete in previously red states: decrease in whites, urbanization, and completion of secondary education.
Hell, Indiana and Tennessee represent more fertile ground for the current composition of the Democratic Party than Missouri. At least Indiana is becoming more racially diverse and Tennessee is exploding in Nashville-concentrated urbanization and economic growth.
Missouri has a Democratic governor and a Democratic Senator. It is winnable. I’d roughly estimate 8 years of demographic shifts will compensate for not having an ongoing economic catastrophe weighing on the other side.
That’s the thing, though. Missouri hasn’t been subject to the same demographic shifts that are cracking open the South and Appalachia. 2012 Missouri more-or-less looks like 1980 Missouri in college attainment, racial diversity, and urbanization. Missouri Dems can’t use the same strategy and rhetoric to win locally in which Clinton-Obama can use to win nationally.
Deathtongue, you claim that a Democratic Party Presidential candidate can’t win in Missouri these days. Explain, then, why Dem candidates for Senate and Governor have won most recently, but a POTUS candidate can’t.
Because local Dems in successful red states run different campaigns and on different platforms than what national Dems do.
If Hillary Clinton was to make a serious bid for Missouri’s electoral votes, she’d have to at the very least seriously downplay the Democratic Party’s social liberalism and multiculturalism. Much like Bill Clinton had to do in 1992 and 1996. Unfortunately, doing that would weaken her in the general election in other states.
There’s no way that Clinton or anyone else would risk losing Virginia, Colorado, and Florida for a chance at winning Missouri, so no national Democrat is going to be able to win that state’s votes for the electoral college. Not unless the Democratic Party significantly retools its platform or the GOP locally or nationally seriously messes up.
Your claim here is a little overly definitive, I believe. If Hiilary runs a strong campaign and the GOP candidate is a nutball whose campaign is no better or worse than Romney’s or McCain’s, I’d claim Missouri is winnable despite your points. Hell, OBAMA almost won in Missouri.
OT:of course this is their strategy. Those scaredity cat Dems better WAKE DA PHUQ UP!!
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Morning Plum: Mitch McConnell’s fiendishly clever strategy for coming Obamacare war
By Greg Sargent June 10 at 9:27 AM
If you want to understand the evolving GOP strategy for the political war that may be unleashed by a Supreme Court decision gutting Obamacare subsidies for millions, pay close attention to this new exchange between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Fox News’ Bret Baier:
BAIER: Doesn’t this hold some potential problems for the GOP? What do you think the solution is if you have to deal with this quickly?
McCONNELL: Depending on what the Supreme Court decides, we’ll have a proposal that protects the American people from a very bad law. Obamacare was the single worst piece of legislation that’s been passed in the last half century. The single biggest step in the direction of Europeanizing our country…What we will do is offer a proposal to protect the American people.
BAIER: But won’t there be some in your party who say that any vote, even that — that patch — will be a tacit endorsement of Obamacare in some way?
McCONNELL: I think we have to see what the Supreme Court decides before we announce a proposal to deal with it.
The repetition of the word “protect” has a distinctly focus-grouped aura to it. But this clever formulation contains the seeds of its own refutation, and neatly indicates why the Republican post-King argument will, of necessity, be incoherent and (one hopes) politically untenable.
McConnell’s reply raises a question: How can Republicans simultaneously argue that the American people must be “protected” from the damage that undoing Obamacare will do — from the damage that will ensue from a Court decision unraveling subsidies that are crucial to the law’s basic functioning — without implicitly conceding that the right response is to reverse the immediate impact of the decision, and cleanly restore the subsidies?
In this interview, McConnell is telegraphing a partial answer to that question. Republicans will argue that the post-King chaos is the fault of the law itself, and not the fault of the Court decision (which Republicans urged on) that is knocking out a key pillar of it. In this telling, the cause of all the damage will be that Obamacare held out the false promise of economic security for millions, in the form of expanded coverage, but that security was then snatched out from under all those people (thanks to Obummer’s incompetence) when the Court clarified what the law actually says. All this is only the latest way in which Obamacare is hurting countless Americans.
That’s pretty damn slick.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/06/10/morning-plum-mitch-mcconnells-fiendishly
-clever-strategy-for-coming-obamacare-war/
slick, maybe. Stupid certainly.
Most of these guys have made a career (or half of one anyway) by “rooting out Obamacare forever”. Kinda hard to back away from that kind of statement.
They can parse all they want to, when the thousands of eligible voters get kicked off their insurance, these guys are going to take the fall.
It’s not slick and Greg Sargent is helping him promote the idea by even trying to claim it’s a possible argument.
No.
Every journalist should stop and say wtf are you talking about; Obamacare provided the subsidies, Republicans sued to stop them, Republicans took away your healthcare.
It’s simple. It’s true. It’s the only response.
where in America today do you find these things you call “journalists”? Newspapers report what their wealthy owners want reported.
that’s the John Thune tweet:
And Thune was immediately attacked for his stupid tweet. Even a writer for National Review took at the Senator- “So dishonest,” the NR writer responded.
Maybe The Turtle will offer us single payer instead. Hahahaha.
Alison Grimes tried to do that and she failed. Meanwhile, Terry McCullife ran an Obama campaign in VA and won.
This country is polarized and has always been polarized; but if you run a base campaign you can get your voters to the polls and win. Where Clinton may be able to help are in reddish districts that the President’s race prevented him from getting any kind of a hearing; the Democrat there may be willing to tie themselves to the Clinton’s (no matter how populist/liberal) and win that way.
Her race and her sex are her biggest assets; that and her husband’s legacy. If she courts black, latino, and female voters she can put together a coalition that will win and may even have coattails to help her govern.
The next election is pivotal for one reason: the Supreme Court. Either Democrats will get to name the next two justices and change the balance or Republicans will and we can sit out a generation and hope and pray for crumbs from our plutocratic overlords.
This. The conditions that have created the polarization are way beyond the control of any candidate. If you want to win, you’d better understand that the key is turning out your voters, not persuading people to switch sides. There aren’t enough potential switchers to matter.
Now that’s not to say she shouldn’t organize in at least 40 states. She should, and she is in fact doing so.
It makes no sense to blow resources in the deepest red states if all you’re looking at is how many electoral votes Clinton gets. No way she’s gonna flip Alabama or Texas. But such spending could flip some down-ticket races. I’m not sure if it’s worth the expenditure (bang for the buck wise) or if it’s worth the risk, given that it means pulling dollars from states that could go either way.
Here’s my problem with the idea of the ‘promise’ of Hillary Clinton. If you do a demographic analysis of the electoral college from 1988 to 2012, you’ll find that the arc strictly follows a demographic arc (that is, since Dukakis racial minorities grow at a rate at about 2% every four years) rather than anything involving the personal efficacy of candidates. The Reform Party complicates things, but if you make the reasonable assumption that the 1992 Reform Party split Democratic and Republican votes equally and in 1996 was 60% Republican/20% Democrat/0% non-voter it follows this arc quite nicely.
The salient fact of the matter is that the Obama Coalition is actually the Dukakis Coalition plus time. What’s more, with his share of the vote he would’ve won in 2012 or 2008; contrariwise, with Obama’s share of the vote he would’ve lost in 1988. That is, our Presidential candidates’ personal ability to run campaigns is meaningless compared to brute demographic force and coalition composition.
This is why I don’t think that for all of the talk about energizing women voters and reaching out to Latinos, Clinton in the absence of a black swan isn’t going to do much better or worse than Obama unless she significantly changes the Democratic Platform.
Right now, the forecast looks like: 2016 Democratic Party retakes the Senate and Presidency making significant but ineffective progress in the House; in 2018 the Democratic Party loses the Senate again and the Republican Party further entrenches. Due to a lack of being able to get any domestic policy done, the country slowly continues its death march and the Democratic Party prays that a recession doesn’t happen to enable the Republicans in 2018/2020. But with a declining federal deficit, high household debt, high trade deficits, and stagnation in Europe significant economic slowdown is all but guaranteed.
The promise of Hillary Clinton is that she’ll be able to reach a fairly large group of voters who have been voting Republican for religious/racial/geographic identity reason but who actually support Democratic policies. She’s particularly well suited for this as a fair number of these people actually did vote for her husband, and got a relatively good period in our history for it.
While the overall trend is clear, there have been deviations. We did relatively well in 1996 and 2008 and relatively poorly in 2004. If Clinton manages a “relatively good” performance in 2016 the House will actually be in reach (it will be roughly at a 50/50 split).
was very close to Reagan’s IIRC.
They also both enrage certain people on a visceral level. And they’re not all conservatives.
Some of them post right here.
But some of us are the same people.
Actually I would bet MOST are.
I remember the 2012 inaugural – the second loudest cheers were for Hillary (not Biden or Bill)
I think almost the whole article is concern trolling and bad analysis, but at the end they quote Mook with evidence that the plan is more like you might want it to be:
They may not be giving Heitkamp and Manchin what those worthies want (budget-balancing talk?) but they’re not giving up on 40 states.
I know that I keep on beating the horse about Kentucky, but it’s the best example.
You have a state that ranks among the top 3 success stories about OBAMACARE…
you currently have a GOP nominee for Governor -BEVIN-that VOWS to dismantle OBAMACARE…
And yet, he’s competitive in the race….
And, I’m supposed to believe that Hillary Clinton can get through with people who continue to vote against their own self-interest on a large scale…
uh huh…
Is he saying to dismantle Kynect or Obamacare? Because Kentuckyans are so stupid the name makes the difference for them IIRC.
Oh, I KNOW that they are dumb enough to believe that they can have Kynect WITHOUT Obamacare.
And, so, Hillary Clinton would have to go into the state and slap reality into them….
Maybe she’d even succeed…
I still think it’s a waste of time on people who vote against their own obvious self-interest.
Except Grimes ran away from it completely, IIRC. Then again, that’s not all she ran away from during the campaign.
They’re voting against their economic self-interest. They’re defining ‘self-interest’ in other, different ways.
People are not just homines oeconomici. The reduction of all human affairs to transactions is a belief that you can find on the left (Marx) and the right (Rothbard).
That’s a pity, because at least the Marxist and Austrian views of human sociology at least give a provision for peace and understanding.
The more syncretic ones can’t seem to come up with anything other than ‘clench your butthole and hope that enough Americans die quickly enough that we won’t reach a tipping point on climate’.
This is Kentucky – Bevin will likely be governor. I’m moving out of this God-forsaken commonwealth in the next month or two. Although, going to Texas is probably jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, but it’s time to go.
Good luck, Oscar. You do know that it gets mighty hot there, so you’re right about that frying pan to the fire thing. As a vet of those kinds of moves, all I can say is keep on truckin’.
It really is all part of the USA. I had one of my best days in Texas.
The question is whether or not we can afford to admit that the country is polarized; if so, in what manner, in what fora.
We absolutely cannot (in my view) afford to acknowledge publicly that we have thought through the ultimate consequences of polarization. Even if [some of] those consequences are inevitable, our posture must be that they are, quite literally, unthinkable.
Sort of like how the Founding Fathers intentionally delayed a reckoning on slavery until the non-slave states were populous and mechanized enough to win a war against slavery.
We’ll see what happens in 2032, when the rural revanchists have become enough of a minority that they won’t even be able to hide behind their previous Senate. Assuming that climate change hasn’t made this point moot, of course.
Democrats, and especially their consulants, are trapped too much in a “geography is destiny” mindset. And as a result they never make their case in geographical areas in which they might pick up enough votes to alter outcomes.
For the past three decades, Democratic surrender began at the start of the campaign and was engineered by lazy campaign staffs.