A Republican Win Validates Conservatism. A Democratic Win Validates...Conservatism.

So, yeah, I'm pretty pleased about how things went last Tuesday. Certainly, compared to where we were at about 7:00 PM PST, things improved significantly. It wasn't really looking like the Democrats would take the Senate and their lead in the House was much slimmer.

Given all that, you'd think maybe I could find something positive to say this week? Hmmm, well let's start in that vein. I think, of the many odious individuals who lost re-election, I'm particularly glad to see that Richard Pombo of California will have to find a new job. I suspect that most people who become politically engaged have an issue or two which are trump cards for them. For me, for a long time, it was the environment and little else that garnered my vote. While I was vaguely aware of other issues, I cared about the environment at a visceral level. Fortunately for me, the obvious choice on environmental issues, the Democrats, were in line with my other less strongly held beliefs. I now have other concerns that are just as significant (foreign policy, fiscal issues), but our air, water and earth will always hold a special place in my heart.

Pombo was particularly dreadful about the environment. He wanted to sell off national parks to help close budget gaps, he has been a huge proponent of drastically reducing royalties that energy companies have to pay to the US Gov't. to drill on US land, and he was 13th on the list of most corrupt Congressman on a Washington watchdog group. He was defeated on Tuesday and that's a good thing.

Such happy events aside, and as nice as it feels to be on the winning side, electorally, for once, the reality is that there are still huge structural problems for Democrats to overcome.

Exhibit A is the emerging spin that Democrats only won because they ran conservative Democrats and thus the election was not a rejection of Conservatism, but a validation of it. This plays into a broader concept generally, which is that most any given thing will benefit the Republicans and harm the Democrats. Some of this is due to active spinning on the part of the GOP, and at some level that's to be understood as simply good tactics on their part. Always present things in the best light possible. In the months before the election the Republicans were virtually taunting the Democrats to bring the war up. The conventional wisdom, as conveyed by the major newspapers and networks, was that this would harm the Democrats. The Republicans, taking advantage of the cultural bias towards them on National Security, would be able to hammer the Democrats mercilessly if they tried to engage on the Iraq war. It didn't turn out that way. Sometimes the GOP believes this, as I think was the case on the Iraq war, and some times they are trying to call the bluff of the Democrats. An example of the later was on the NSA wiretapping scandal, in which they publicly goaded the Democrats on, encouraging them to bring it up in the media and push for investigations. 'Go ahead, make my day' comes to mind. Privately though they were working furiously to crush any sort of real investigation.

This bias works to the GOP's advantage though because the media has internalized it so deeply. The Republicans hardly have to work at it; often the media will take up the theme on their own or with only the slightest prompting. Essentially the image is of the Democrats as incompetent extremists, one that is extended to all realms. Sometimes the incompetence is played up, other times the extremism. For the later witness the President, in the waning days of the campaign, claiming that a Democratic victory at the polls would be a victory for the terrorists. I have to say, I find it infuriating to be conflated with terrorists.

In any event, if you scan the newspapers or news outlet websites, all the discussion is about how this wasn't so much a win for Democrats as people voting against Republicans. Particularly, Democrats only won because they ran conservative candidates. Now, there is a kernel of truth to this. Democrats DID run some conservative candidates, and certainly the electorate was deeply dissatisfied with their Republican congressional reps. But the media is taking a pretty superficial look at the polling results and the candidates, through the lens I mentioned above, and constructing an analysis almost completely from whole cloth.

If Conservative Democrats are going to beat Insufficiently Conservative Republicans, then it stands to reason that, one, we are unlikely to defeat any supremely conservative Republicans. Richard Pombo should not have been defeated by that logic. Corruption may have been an issue in his case, but he is not alone in being an arch-conservative defeated. Well, you say, corruption was a problem for many Republicans. Perhaps that's the case, but if you have to invoke it as a caveat to your main thesis frequently, then maybe the thesis is wrong, and the caveat is more central, hmmm?

Similarly, it would stand to reason that we could defeat moderate Republicans by running conservative Democrats. I'll let Tom Schaller lay out for you what happened on that front:

As for the goofy talk about the election actually being a victory for conservatism, the fact remains that it was disproportionately GOP moderates (particularly from the Northeast and Midwest) who lost Tuesday, and to progressives who ran to their left. Using the most recent National Journal data, 224 House Republicans can be ranked from most liberal (#1) to most conservative (#224).

What do we find from Tuesday?

• The most liberal Republican to lose was ranked #1 -- Jim Leach of Iowa; the most conservative was Texan Tom DeLay, ranked #213.
• Overall, of the 28 flipped GOPers, more than half -- 16 -- were from the most liberal third of the caucus (1-75); 7 were from that middle third (76-150); and just 5 were from the most conservative third (151-224).
• Most striking is the fact that 10 of the 28 most liberal Republicans in the GOP House caucus lost, including five of the dozen most liberal Republicans: #1 Leach; #3 Nancy Johnson; #6 NY’s Sherwood Boehlert’s vacated seat; #7 CT’s Rob Simmons ; and #12 NH’s Charlie Bass.

In short, the liberal wing of the GOP suffered a disproportionate share of losses compared to the moderate and/or conservative wings. Since the Democrats who beat them ran uniformly to the left of their opponents, the notion that conservative Democrats knocked off a set of mostly liberal Republicans defies simple logic. It’s not that there aren’t exceptions like Pombo and Chocola and Ryun who also lost -- it’s that they are the exceptions. Put another way, for every Chris Chocola there were two Charlie Basses.

The last three he mentions, Pombo, Chocola and Ryun, were quite conservative. The Senate side is a little less clear, simply because the numbers are far fewer. Lincoln Chaffee, a moderate Republican who arguably would have been very much at home in the Democratic party, and was well liked by his constituency, was voted out. I have seen an article to the effect that, despite being highly regarded, he was voted out as a protest against Republican domination. This happened up and down the ticket.

Looking at some of the other Senate candidates, particularly Tester and Webb, the CW is that they are conservatives. If you look at their own statements though, that doesn't necessarily bear out. Tester is against gun control, but he's an organic farmer who wants to repeal (not modify) the Patriot Act, is pro-choice and pro-environment, wants to increase the minimum wage, and push for alternative energies. You can view his positions here, but I think it's pretty clear that while he's no flaming liberal, he's also not conservative. Seems moderate to left to me. As for Webb, here's an NPR interview with him (I'm sorry, I can't get the transcript). In case you can't listen to it, he talks a great deal about Iraq and national security, and this is largely due to the pointed interest of the interviewer. But Webb is at pains to make it clear that he had large concerns about other issues, particularly ones of economic equality. He voices support for a minimum wage hike and discusses the parallels with the disparity in wealth distribution we saw in the 1880's. You can see Webb's positions here. On balance he sounds like a populist, and not of the reactionary, nationalistic kind. I don't think I'm going to see eye-to-eye with him on everything, but he's hardly a died-in-the-wool conservative. To represent the choice as being between Liberal Dem or Conservative Dem is a false dichotomy. There are moderates.

Which isn't to say the Democrats didn't elect some progressives. Chris Bowers at MyDD breaks down the likely distribution of new House members:

Looking only at Democrats who took over Republican-held seats, here is a list of incoming Democratic freshmen in the House who are probably going to join the Progressive caucus:

* AZ-08: Gabrielle Giffords
* CA-11: Jerry McNerney
* IA-01: Bruce Braley
* NH-19: John Hall

In addition to the already listed McNerney, here are the incoming netroots candidates (we only endorsed challengers in 2006):

* MN-01: Tim Walz
* NH-02: Paul Hodes
* NC-08: Larry Kissell (maybe)
* PA-07: Joe Sestak
* PA-08: Patrick Murphy
* WA-08: Darcy Burner (probably)

In addition to the already listed Braley, Hodes, Sestak, Murphy and McNerney, here are the incoming Democrats from blue districts who took over Republican-held seats:

* CT-02: Joe Courtney
* IA-02: Dave Loebsack
* CT-05: Chris Murphy
* FL-22: Ron Klein
* CO-07: Ed Perlmutter
* KY-03: John Yarmuth
* NH-01: Carol Shea-Porter
* NY-24: Michael Arcuri

So, it looks like about 60%-70% of the incoming Democratic freshmen who took over Republican-held seats meet one of the three following criteria:

* Joining the progressive caucus
* From a blue district
* Netroots candidate

Netroots is a term for internet based grassroots organizations. The netroots largely endorses moderate or progressive Dems.

So, all this doesn't bear a lot of relation to the analysis being done by the major media outlets. It's not the only thing that seems to be misrepresented. There's been much discussion about the impact of 'values' voters, that may not bear up under scrutiny:

The Post's Alan Cooperman, writing on the front page of Saturday's paper, is a particularly egregious offender, citing numbers that don't really prove his thesis that "faith" voters were key to the Democrats' win. Cooperman writes that Democrats "sliced the GOP's advantage among weekly churchgoers to 12 percentage points, down from 18 points in 2004 congressional races" and that while "in 2004, 74 percent of white evangelicals voted for Republicans and 25 percent for Democrats, a 49-point spread ... This year, Republicans received 70 percent of the white evangelical vote and Democrats got 28 percent, a 42-point spread."

Both of these sets of figures sound really impressive -- until you look deeper at their actual meaning. When comparing results between elections, it is not only important to look at absolute numbers but also relative numbers: How a specific subset of the electorate moves from one election to another relative to the change in the electorate as a whole. Although vote totals in districts have not yet been finalized, making it difficult to tabulate the exact national popular vote for the House, it appears that the nation voted a net 10 points more Democratic in 2006 House elections than it did in 2004 (a move from a Republican advantage of about 49 - 46 to a Democratic advantage in the ballpark of 53 - 46). So for a group to have disproportionately helped the Democrats take the House this year, it would have to have increased its net support for the Democrats by more than 10 points -- which none of the groups cited by Cooperman actually did.

I realize that this is a lot of inside baseball, and probably dreadfully boring, so just take a look at the parts I bolded. The diary goes on to show groups that DID swing heavily for Democrats. They aren't what's being mentioned in the media.

My point in all this is that due to certain institutionalized biases and myopia in the media, the average person doesn't get an accurate sense of what's going on. How many of you knew that the Democrats have an agenda for the first 100 hours of the next session in the House? It's been around for some time now, but you probably only heard about it since the election. That's the sort of information that would have helped people before the election to make an informed decision.

So, until such biases are rectified, I'm going to be cautiously optimistic about how the Democrats will fare for the forseeable future.

To Win An Election It's Better To Beg Forgiveness Than Ask For Permission

Disclosure: I am going to reference MyDD and TalkingPointsMemo a fair bit here. I have given some (modest) money to both in the past, to fund their work (polling and reporting, respectively).

As we head into the final days of the 2006 midterm election a lot of people are trying to figure out whether the GOP's vaunted ability to 'close the deal' is going to pull them through to victory again. At this point even the mainstream media is speaking in terms of waves (Newt Gingrich's revolution in '94 is the last time we had such), but this time a Democratic one. The generic congressional ballot, a measure of general attitude of the voters toward the parties, has been at historic highs that favor the Democrats. In the last few days that may have started to turn around:

Over the last eighteen hours, two generic ballot polls have given me real pause. Pew just came out with a new generic ballot poll showing the Democratic lead in the generic ballot down to only 47%-43% among likely voters. This is a shift from 50%-39% last week, and the closest it has been in Pew since before Hurricane Katrina. The Pew numbers give more solidity to the ABC-WaPo numbers earlier in the day, which showed the Democratic lead down to 51%-45% among likely voters, after it was at 54%-41% two weeks ago. Granted, the Newsweek poll conducted during the same time period shows Democrats still ahead by a whopping 16 points, 54%-38%, and the Time poll (PDF) of likely voters shows Democrats with a fifteen point lead, 55%-40%. All of these poll still show large Democratic leads among registered voters (9%, 10%, 15%, and 16% for an average of 12.5%), and several more generic polls will be coming out between now and Tuesday morning. Still, this does certainly make me even more skeptical than usual of forecasts predicting a massive Democratic wave.

The generic ballot measure is an imperfect predictor of how elections will go. It certainly points in the right direction but the Republicans have large structural advantages over the Democrats. Although the Democrats have been better able to compete monetarily this year, the Republicans still have a lot of cash to spend. Take it from Karl Rove:

"For most Americans, particularly the marginal voters who are going to determine the outcome of the election, it started a couple weeks ago," he said. "Between now and the election, we will spend $100 million in target House and Senate races in the next 21 days."

Karl Rove is the architect behind President Bush's campaigns and of GOP campaign strategy in general. 100 million is a lot of clams. Could it be that that massive expenditure is having an effect? How would one spend that money in a way that might turn things around? Polls on Iraq show high public disapproval of the war. A wave of scandals (financial and, ah, personal) has largely set the Republicans back on their heels and kept them there. The economy isn't great. I can't find the attribution, but I have read a rather common sense statement to the effect that, if you have to convince people of it, then the economy isn't doing well. On terror the public now, by a very slight majority, prefers the Democrats to Republicans (a first). So there isn't a lot for the GOP to grab onto in a positive way, to either motivate their base (which is dispirited) or to persuade independent voters.

There are other ways to skin the electoral cat though. If you can't get your people out to vote, keep the other side's votes at home. As an historical example of how this was done, a brief synopsis of the NH Phone Jamming Scandal of 2002 (I pulled much of this from TalkingPointsMemo and TPMMuckraker. If you want to dig into this yourself, plug "Phone Jamming" into the TPM's search box (upper right). More articles than you can shake a stick at!):

...the New Hampshire Republican party hired a Northern Virginia telemarketing outfit -- GOP Marketplace -- to jam the phone banks at the offices of the New Hampshire Democratic Coordinated Campaign and the Manchester Firefighters' Union Local on election day last November.

Both phone banks were being used that morning for get-out-the-vote efforts.

According to the Union Leader, GOP Marketplace hired Idaho-based Milo Enterprises to place repeated five-second-and-hang-up calls to the phone banks' numbers, thus effectively shutting them down on election day. After a few hours, Verizon stepped in and shut the operation down.

One of the major tasks that any good campaign engages in is last minute Get Out The Vote efforts. On election day that includes calling people to see if they have voted. The jamming wasn't a lone wolf operation, the NH GOP new about it:

The FBI's 2003 interview with NHRSC Executive Director Chuck McGee is especially revealing in this regard [we've posted it here]. McGee, who has said he originally hatched the plan to jam Democrat's phones, told the FBI that he'd discussed the jamming before Election Day with the NHRSC's Chair, the Vice Chair, Finance Director, and four other senior level Republican staffers in the state. McGee pled guilty for his role in the jamming and has already served his time.

McGee said that the Party's Chairman John Dowd gave him the go-ahead the night before the election [Dowd, for his part, admitted to The New Hampshire Union Leader that McGee told him of the plan, but said he did not authorize it]; that the Vice Chair gave him the number of the Manchester Professional Firefighters Union, one of the jamming's targets; and that the Financial Director, who signed the check to pay for the jamming, disclosed to the FEC that the money was for "GOTV" (Get Out the Vote efforts) when she knew what it was really for [she corroborated this in her interview with the FBI].

Heck, there's evidence that the Whitehouse knew about it:

James Tobin, the RNC's regional political director in 2002, was convicted for his part in orchestrating a scheme to jam Democrats' phone lines on Election Day, 2002. Turns out he was in more or less constant contact with the White House Office of Political Affairs through much of that day.

Tobin called the White House Office of Political Affairs, which was run by now-RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman, more than 75 times from Sept. 30 to Nov. 22 of 2002. That much was reported today in New Hampshire's Union Leader. You can see the analysis that was based on here. He was also in touch with the White House on the day the phone-jamming was taking place.

He called the White House twelve times on the day of the phone jamming, the first time at 11:20 AM -- not long after Verizon intervened to shut down the scheme. The conversation was five minutes long.

Ken Mehlman is now the head of the Republican National Committee. The RNC paid the legal fees of Tobin during his trial (he was convicted), without comment. So what does this have to do with Tuesday's election? In a stunning display of chutzpah, the RNC is engaging in phone based monkey business in NH again. This time they are flooding voters with repeat calls (robocalls), some of them early in the morning.

For the second straight day yesterday, Democratic field offices received dozens of phone calls and e-mails from frustrated voters upset about repeated automated phone calls they thought were coming from Democratic candidate Paul Hodes - though the calls were paid for by a Republican group instead.

The National Republican Congressional Committee spent nearly $20,000 on the calls last week. Depending on the rate, that could mean more than 300,000 automated phone calls into the Second Congressional District.

The RNC said that the calls would continue, despite the Republican incumbent, Charlie Bass, asking them to be stopped! A cynic would say that this is just good theater - it allows Bass to appear independent and moral, while still reaping the benefit of the calls all the same. And these calls do have the desired effect:

I was handing out leaflets for John Hall yesterday at a grocery store. There were two tables, a democratic one and a Republican one.

When I was handing out palm cards, several people said to me something like, "I WAS going to vote for John Hall, until I got all those phone calls. I got seven or eight, right at dinner time."

The guy from the Republican table, who was a local district leader-- friendly and chatty, actually came over to me and said, "You know, most of those are coming from Sue's office, but don't tell anybody."

I don't know how high his connections are to the Kelly campaign, but that's the information he volunteered.

You probably noticed that the candidates mentioned are Kelly and Hall, not Hodes and Bass. That's because the above quote is from a district in New York. That district is getting the same sort of calls. It is being duplicated around the country, in fact. And there are other efforts at disinformation and discouragement of Democratic voters. I'm looking at the front page for TalkingPointsMemo. The proprietor, Josh Marshall, has asked for readers to send in comments on what they are observing, as many of his readers are Democratic activists. This is what's going on on just the page for Nov. 5, 2006:

Harassing and deceptive robocalls in New Hampshire.
Similar robocalls in New York.
Similar robocalls in Kansas, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and California.
Signs saying "Encourage Terrorists. Vote Democrat." in Texas.

My personal favorite is this one (from the same page at TPM):

On Monday morning, when Chapel Hill lawyer Bob Epting approached the early voting center at Morehead Planetarium, he . . . was approached by a female college student who asked whether he was a registered Democrat.

"Yes I am," he said.

She replied, "Good, here's a list of our judicial candidates."

Epting thanked her, folded the piece of paper without looking at it and put it in his pocket. . . .

But after exiting the poll, he remembered the piece of paper and removed it from his pocket. Standing at the top of a dozen or so marble steps, he scanned the list in disbelief. It was a list of Republican candidates.

Lovely. And that's just what I've been able to read today. Never mind the racist ads in Tennessee and Idaho, the RNC ad implying that if you want to die, vote Democrat, the accusation of a GOP candidate that an Iraq war vet, who lost both her legs in combat, wants to 'Cut and Run', and all the other nastiness that's been floating around for the past few weeks. To be fair, there is some of this on the Democratic side of the aisle too. Albert Wynn won his primary in Maryland using some pretty underhanded tactics. Hopefully the Democrats will turn him out in two years. The majority of what I am seeing right now is on the GOP side though.

Misinformation (and a sprinkling of fear), seems to be the national strategy of the GOP in the last days of the campaign. In NH the Attorney General got involved and put a stop to it. It seems such calls are against the law. In particular, there is a $5k fine in NH for calling anyone on the Do Not Call list. With hundreds of thousands of calls, it is estimated that the RNC could have engendered a $100 Million fine because of these (ironic, that's the sum Karl Rove was touting). I suspect though, if this turns the election in their favor and keeps the Congress Republican, that it will be seen to have been worth it. The GOP fears the investigations that a Democratic House would bring. Winning at any cost is the objective now, the fallout can be dealt with later.

I could list a score of instances of other dirty tricks used in the last few elections, deployed at the last moment, that can turn a race. People do it because it works - by the time the law catches up to you, you've already won election and the bar to oust a sitting congressman is a bit higher than for the plebes.

So, please, whatever your orientation, try to find a source you trust on your local races, cut through the noise, and vote (if you haven't already done so).

Oh, an obvious prediction: close elections will be followed by lawsuits. The GOP will be filing a lot of them, I think. No special source of information for this, just a gut feeling born of observation of past behavior.