Tennessee Headed in a Blue Direction?

Is Tennessee headed toward battleground status? Ok, perhaps not, but we do know from polling that Tennessee voters are less hostile to the Democratic presidential ticket than they were four years ago, and our red-blue gap is shrinking faster than most other deeply red states. At least that’s a plausible conclusion one can draw from data compiled by Nate Silver at the The New York Times‘ FiveThirtyEight blog. Silver compared the final presidential election result in 2008 with a weighted average of current election polling in each of 18 solidly red states:

Source: FiveThirtyEight at The New York Times

In 10 of 18 states the red grows redder — a polling lead for Mitt Romney that exceeds John McCain’s 2008 margin of victory. In the other seven, all still with Romney ahead, the redness has paled — a smaller Romney edge in polling now compared with McCain’s margin four years ago. The two states with the biggest shift blueward are South Carolina followed by Tennessee — the latter showing the red margin of advantage cut in half. And the polling data is pretty good in extent and quality: Silver’s weighted number for Tennessee relies mainly on two surveys: a YouGov poll earlier this month (finding Romney +8 among registered voters) and a Vanderbilt poll in May (Romney +7 among registered voters).

Extrapolating optimistically (if impulsively), Tennessee should be a battleground state by 2016. Not holding breath.

A version of this post appears on the Nashville Scene‘s Pith in the Wind blog.

Ground Game

We keep hearing that the presidential election this year may come down to who has the better ground game, and perhaps it will if Mitt Romney can manage to go a week or two without another self-inflicted verbal catastrophe.

But what kind of effective ground game can the Romney campaign possibly be cultivating if they are sending a fund-raising letter to someone like me?

Public election records that campaigns mine to target contributors and voters show that I’ve been registered in the same county for over 20 years, vote in essentially every election, and have never voted in a Republican contest in our open primary system.

Granted, I’m just one schmoe in a state that doesn’t matter at all strategically. But if the Romney folks are dropping mail pieces on people like me, then supporters who actually give money to his campaign should be seriously concerned about how their dollars are being spent.

Campaign Consciousness and Governing Consciousness

I usually find Times columnist David Brooks’ faux-moderate conservativism to be more insipid than enlightening, but today’s column offers a trenchant (and perhaps even original) insight into what’s wrong with our campaign-driven politics. Noting that in Congress, Paul Ryan repeatedly shows himself unwilling to accept half-measures or compromise on fiscal matters or entitlements, Brooks accuses Ryan of choosing “political fantasy” over significant progress:

Ryan was betting that three things would happen. First, he was betting that Republicans would beat President Obama. Second, he was betting that Republicans would win such overwhelming Congressional majorities that they would be able to push through measures Democrats hate. Third, he was betting that a group of Republican politicians would unilaterally slash one of the country’s most popular programs and that they would be able to sustain these cuts through the ensuing elections, in the face of ferocious and highly popular Democratic opposition …. Ryan’s fantasy happens to be the No. 1 political fantasy in America today, which has inebriated both parties. It is the fantasy that the other party will not exist. It is the fantasy that you are about to win a 1932-style victory that will render your opponents powerless.

The piece goes on to fashion a duality between “campaign consciousness” — the strident policy argument vibe one cultivates before an election — and “governing consciousness” — the mindset between election seasons that leads office holders to “navigate our divides to come up with something suboptimal but productive.” Brooks tags Ryan as good on the former but lousy on the latter.

Although Brooks confines his accusation to Ryan, influential figures in both parties exhibit this tendency, feeding the paralyzing gridlock that prevents anything from getting done in Congress even when it’s not campaign season. Brooks is right that way too much of the campaign discourse we endure rests on an absurdist assumption that winning the electoral college will magically activate a governing mandate. As if.

But even if there are Democrats mirroring Ryan’s behavior, it can also be said that Barack Obama has (suffers from?) the opposite profile — too much governing consciousness (an inclination to capitulate for marginal gain) and too little campaign consciousness. As Thomas Frank argues in an essay getting a lot of attention, overeager conciliation undermines your negotiating leverage, inviting the very rigidity on the other side that ends up undermining your conciliatory move.

A version of this post appears on the Nashville Scene‘s Pith in the Wind blog.

A Debate Debate in a Tennessee Congressional District

In Tennessee’s 4th Congressional District, incumbent Republican Rep. Scott DesJarlais is refusing to debate his Democratic opponent Eric Stewart on the (ostensible) grounds that Stewart isn’t running enough of an issues campaign to justify meeting on the same stage. DesJarlais’ campaign manager had this to say:

“Eric has yet to release a meaningful platform of any sort, even on his own website, and has placed the debate cart before the platform horse. We simply challenged him to actually articulate where he stands on key issues like taxes, energy, spending, the definition of marriage, and who he will be voting for in the presidential election.”

For an office holder with the advantage of incumbency, a large campaign finance edge and a reputation for articulateness that falls somewhere short of Aristotelian, ducking debates is hardly a novel or startling strategic move. Justifying the dodge as a response to an opponent’s supposedly thin platform is, I suppose, as good a way as any to avoid saying “I don’t want to debate him because it will only hurt me and I can win without doing it so piss off.”

Even so, the DesJarlais spokesman’s “even on his own website” charge is sufficiently concrete that it invites a little followup. Is it the case that Stewart fails to articulate positions on fundamental issues? The short answer is that the DesJarlais campaign claim is pretty much valid.

On the issues Stewart’s website is sketchy and shallow. It has only two issue categories. The first, on jobs and the economy, makes a few vague statements about business tax credits, overseas hiring by government contractors, ending “tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations” and rebuilding infrastructure, but offers no specific ideas or proposals. The other category, Social Security and Medicare, does assert that Stewart will “fight against any effort to privatize Social Security and work to defeat any legislation that tries to turn Medicare into a voucher program,” which does qualify as an issue-oriented pledge to oppose aspects of the so-called Ryan plan.

To be fair, DesJarlais’ website isn’t much more detailed, although it does cover more issues with its own half-baked pablum (healthcare, energy, immigration, abortion, marriage rights, the second amendment), and of course DesJarlais has a voting record in Congress, such as it is.

But is this unfair to Stewart? Do challengers commonly run issue-free campaigns, focusing exclusively on their incumbent-opponents’ records? For perspective I picked out a contested race with a similar dynamic: a serious Democratic challenger facing a freshman Republican incumbent. In Illinois’ 8th Congressional District, Republican Rep. Joe Walsh faces a challenge from Democrat Tammy Duckworth in a closely watched contest. And frankly, the issues page of the Duckworth campaign website makes Eric Stewart’s look minimalist in comparison. Duckworth offers separate pages with policy statements not just on the economy and entitlement programs as Stewart does, but also on fiscal policy, education, energy, national defense, Afghanistan, Israel, civil rights (including women’s rights and workers’ rights), and veteran’s issues. And her statements on most of these issues are quite specific — identifying concrete priorities, and naming bills and programs she supports and opposes.

Stewart doesn’t help himself with this response to the incumbent’s debate avoidance: “Scott DesJarlais wants to talk about votes I might cast in the future. I want to talk about votes he’s cast in the past.” Yes, we get it, you are trying to unseat an incumbent by directing voter attention to his views and votes — that’s the challenger’s task. But to suggest that “votes I might cast in the future” are somehow a distraction from the real business of a political campaign is daft.

None of this is to excuse DesJarlais’ lame efforts to avoid debates. There is no good reason to not debate a legitimate major party opponent. But his stated reason for the dodge — that his opponent has yet to articulate serious positions on many issues — does appear to have some truth to it. Of course, that’s precisely a reason to have a debate, not a justification for avoiding one.

A version of this post appears on the Nashville Scene‘s Pith in the Wind blog.