Why Is Newsom Campaigning In Red States? [Answer: Obama 2008]

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. California Governor Gavin Newsom spent much of 2022 trying to raise his profile outside the state. The effort continues.

Hannah Wiley at LAT:

Saturday’s swing through Idaho didn’t just energize Biden’s much-neglected base in such a conservative corner of the West. It helped build a future one for Newsom.

... 

The visit to Idaho, which kicked off Newsom’s second tour through red states over the past few months, was all about shoring up enthusiasm for Biden’s accomplishments and touting party accomplishments, while showering beleaguered local Democrats with some love, attention and a little campaign cash from his political action committee Campaign for Democracy.

Newsom cut the Idaho Democratic Party a $10,000 check for the event, the maximum allowed; it’s a sliver of the more than $3 million he’s funneled to Biden and Democrats in Republican-run states such as Florida, Tennessee and Mississippi over the last three months. This week, he’ll have private meetings with Democrats in Montana during an annual family Fourth of July vacation, with a stop later in Utah.

The swing through Republican-led states gives Newsom the chance to remind local Democrats how critical they are in fighting back against what he described as a GOP-led “rights regression.”

Why is he campaigning in red states that would never support him in a general election?  The answer:  they send delegates to the Democratic national convention.  In 2008, as we explain in Epic Journey Obama showed that campaigning in otherwise-neglected red states could be a cost-effective way of building up a delegate lead.

McCain's Acceptance Speech

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's character. Trump infamously said that John McCain was not a war hero. Signing a defense bill bearing McCain's name, he refused to utter it. Trumpist Arizona Senate candidate Kelli Ward suggested Saturday that the McCain family's Friday statement about stopping treatment was an effort to undercut her.

This passage from John McCain's acceptance speech, recounting his captivity in North Vietnam, is unlike any other.

I was dumped in a dark cell and left to die. I didn't feel so tough anymore.

When they discovered my father was an admiral, they took me to a hospital. They couldn't set my bones properly, so they just slapped a cast on me. And when I didn't get better and was down to about a hundred pounds, they put me in a cell with two other Americans.

I couldn't do anything. I couldn't even feed myself. They did it for me. I was beginning to learn the limits of my selfish independence. 

Those men saved my life. [applause]

I was in solitary confinement when my captors offered to release me. I knew why. If I went home, they would use it as propaganda to demoralize my fellow prisoners.

Our code said we could only go home in the order of our capture, and there were men who had been shot down long before me. I thought about it, though. I wasn't in great shape, and I missed everything about America, but I turned it down.

A lot of prisoners had it much worse...[applause]

A lot of -- a lot of prisoners had it a lot worse than I did. I'd been mistreated before, but not as badly as many others. I always liked to strut a little after I'd been roughed up to show the other guys I was tough enough to take it.

But after I turned down their offer, they worked me over harder than they ever had before, for a long time, and they broke me.

When they brought me back to my cell, I was hurt and ashamed, and I didn't know how I could face my fellow prisoners. The good man in the cell next door to me, my friend, Bob Craner, saved me.

Through taps on a wall, he told me I had fought as hard as I could. No man can always stand alone. And then he told me to get back up and fight again for my country and for the men I had the honor to serve with, because every day they fought for me. [applause]

I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else's. I loved it not just for the many comforts of life here. I loved it for its decency, for its faith in the wisdom, justice, and goodness of its people.

No Trump

My former student Clifton Yin writes at The Baltimore Sun:

When I was 22 years old and a delegate to the 2008 Republican National Convention, I made the mistake of voting to make Sarah Palin the party's vice-presidential nominee. In hindsight, she was not ready to be president had John McCain won the election and immediately become incapacitated. That unlikely scenario never played out. But in enabling even the possibility of a novice becoming the most powerful person in the world, I let down my party and my country.

Today, delegates to the upcoming convention face a vote of even greater impact: to potentially make Donald Trump the Republican presidential nominee. I urge them to do everything in their power to prevent that catastrophe.

There's probably little I can say to dissuade those who support Mr. Trump because they agree with his style or statements. Some who have rallied to his cause are clearly just jockeying for positions in a potential administration. Why else would Rick Perry bend his knee after describing Mr. Trump's candidacy last summer as "a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness, and nonsense"? Or Chris Christie? The New Jersey governor never stood taller than when he declared that "ignorance is behind the criticism of Sohail Mohammed," a highly-qualified Muslim-American he appointed to the state bench. Only ambition can thus explain his stooping to endorse someone who proposed a national Muslim-ban as a solution to the chimera of radical Islamic terrorism. There's probably no reasoning with "leaders" like Governors Perry or Christie either.

But many Republican voters and leaders are embracing Mr. Trump hesitantly, engaging in incredible feats of intellectual bargaining to justify their support.

Some rationalize that his primary weakness is impulse control; for example, one congressman advised him to "think before you say what's on your mind." To them, I say it's a much greater concern if he actually believes what he says. Speaker Paul Ryan criticized Mr. Trump recently for making "the textbook definition of a racist comment" in regard to a judge he doesn't like. Taken together with his reluctance to repudiate the support of white supremacists, it means the party of Lincoln could have a racist as its standard-bearer in 2016.

Others opine that despite his radical policy pronouncements, Mr. Trump is a conservative at heart. To them, I say the only common thread in what he professes to believe is incoherence. After all, Mr. Trump bemoans offshoring but manufactured his clothing line in China, and he calls for a trade war against that country but insists they'll help us put pressure on North Korea.

Still others harp on the importance of "party unity," but we are not communists or fascists and therefore are under no obligation to support the party in pursuit of a Pyrrhic victory. The GOP should be a vehicle for conservative solutions, not Mr. Trump's ego and self-enrichment.

To all Republicans, supporters and fence-sitters alike: Mr. Trump will let us down. The word of a man who oversaw four bankruptcies, mocked a disabled reporter, compared his sex life to wartime military service, et cetera ad infinitum has little value and cannot be trusted.

I can't tell the delegates whom to vote for, or even how, as the convention rules have yet to be finalized. But it can't be for Mr. Trump — the stakes are too high.

It would have been difficult to vote against Governor Palin's vice-presidential candidacy, as convention leaders made it a vote by acclimation. I could have held up a sign to show my disapproval, or confided in a reporter, but my opposition would likely have been drowned out and overlooked in a sea of supportive delegates. And the truth is any doubts I had were forgotten in that historic moment as the party nominated a woman to its ticket for the first time..

Speaking out isn't easy, especially when you're voicing an unpopular opinion — but principles only mean something when you stand up for them when they're inconvenient. So I pray that when the delegates stand on the convention floor, they think carefully about the consequences of their actions. I pray they will not be swayed by the fanfare or misguided party loyalty, as I was. I pray they make history again by rejecting Mr. Trump's candidacy.

Most Sanders Supporters Will End Up Voting for Clinton

Some polls have shown that a number of Sanders supporters would not vote for Clinton in the fall.

But if 2008 is any indication, nearly all of them will.

On May 6, 2008, Alexander Mooney reported at CNN:

According to the exit polls, half of Clinton's supporters in Indiana would not vote for Obama in a general election match up with John McCain. A third of Clinton voters said they would pick McCain over Obama, while 17 percent said they would not vote at all. Just 48 percent of Clinton supporters said they would back Obama in November.

Obama gets even less support from Clinton backers in North Carolina. There, only 45 percent of Clinton supporters said they would vote for Obama over McCain. Thirty-eight percent said they would vote for McCain while 12 percent said they would not vote.

Obama voters appear to be more willing to support Clinton in November. In Indiana, 59 percent of Obama backers said they'd vote for Clinton, and 70 percent of Obama backers in North Carolina said they'd support the New York Democrat.

In Indiana, 88 percent of Democrats voted for Obama. 

In North Carolina, 90 percent of Democrats voted for Obama.

Both figures were close to the national figure of 89 percent.

Why Clinton Is Likely to Win the Nomination

Joan Walsh writes at The Nation:

In the 2008 presidential primary, Democrats chose between a black candidate and a white candidate. Yes, that described the race of the two leading rivals,but also their constituencies: Barack Obama won 82 percent of African-American votes, while Hillary Clinton won most whites, including 62 percent of whites without a college degree.

In 2016, once again, throughout most of the primary campaign, there’s been a black candidate and a white candidate—when it comes to their supporters, anyway. Only this time, it’s Clinton who’s racking up the black vote, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders who has been leading among whites, especially the white working class, while losing roughly 4–1 among the African-American voters who are the bedrock of the Democratic Party. In states like Iowa, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and Michigan, Sanders beat Clinton among whites without a college degree. And this time, it’s Sanders who is making the political case for the importance of winning back white voters, particularly working-class whites, to the Democratic Party, as Clinton did eight years ago

At The New York Times, Noam Scheiber notes that African Americans tend to be more upbeat about the economy  than other groups, and that they have benefited more from the Affordable Care Act:

Larry Cohen, a senior adviser to Mr. Sanders and past president of the Communications Workers of America, said that Mrs. Clinton’s perceived loyalty to the administration, as well as the nearly uniform support for Mrs. Clinton within the black political establishment, especially in the South, were key factors in limiting Mr. Sanders’s support among African-Americans.

Others largely agree. “I don’t think you can discount how important President Obama is,” said Stanley B. Greenberg, a former Clinton White House pollster who recently conducted focus groups with African-American voters in Philadelphia and Cleveland. “Obama and his election and re-election is seen as on a scale of what the civil rights movement achieved.”

He added that Mrs. Clinton, by way of her service in the administration and her eagerness to defend the president’s policies on the campaign trail, “is seen as having a more instinctive identification with Obama.”

At FiveThirtyEight last week, Nate Silver noted that proportional allocation of delegates makes it hard to overtake a candidate with a significant lead:

I’m intrigued by the parallels to the 2008 campaign perhaps because it’s where FiveThirtyEight cut its teeth. I spent a lot of time in the spring of 2008 arguing that Obama’s lead in elected delegates would be hard for Clinton to overcome. But Clinton’s lead over Sanders is much larger than Obama’s was over Clinton at a comparable stage of the race. At the end of February 2008, after a favorable run of states for Obama, he led Clinton by approximately 100 elected delegates. Clinton’s lead is much larger this year.1 Clinton entered Tuesday’s contests ahead of Sanders by approximately 220 elected delegates. But she’ll net approximately 70 delegates from Florida, 20 from Ohio, 15 from North Carolina and a handful from Illinois and Missouri. That will expand her advantage to something like 325 elected delegates.

Learning the Right and Wrong Lessons

Reposted from Fox and Hounds:

Defeat can be a much better teacher than victory. Hillary Clinton entered the 2008 nomination as the odds-on favorite, but in a stunning upset, lost to a young senator from Illinois. Her loss was emotionally searing but politically educational. Specifically, she learned three lessons that she has been applying during the 2016 contest.

First, organize the caucus states. Assuming that primaries were the main event of 2008, the Clinton campaign failed to put enough money and labor into the caucuses (though she did win Nevada). In the end she actually edged out Obama among delegates from states with contested primaries, but Obama became the inevitable nominee by building an insurmountable lead in the caucus states. This time, she is not taking the caucuses for granted, and her superior organization enabled her to prevent a surging Sanders from winning Nevada.

Second, pay attention to the superdelegates. The Democratic Party provides a certain number of convention seats (712 in 2016) to elected officials and other party figures who are free to exercise their own judgment. In 2008, Obama worked the superdelegates much more skillfully than Clinton, even persuading some high-profile Clinton supporters (e.g., Rep. John Lewis of Georgia) to switch sides. This time, Clinton already has the support of more than 400 superdelegates. Expect her campaign to keep careful watch on them: there will be no poaching in this field of delegate dreams.

Third, hang on to the African American vote, which accounts for a huge chunk of the Democratic electorate. Surprising as it may seem today, Clinton started the 2008 campaign with a big advantage over Obama among African Americans. After Obama won Iowa, however, this constituency shifted in his direction. In 2016, Clinton does not have to worry about battling a charismatic African American senator. Still, she is taking no chances, and her campaign surrogates are constantly belittling the depth of Bernie Sanders’s commitment to civil rights. The Clinton line of attack has produced an odd side effect: the Sanders campaign is crowing at the discovery of 1963 photo showing Chicago police grabbing Sanders at a civil rights protest. It is quite rare for candidates to brag about their arrest records, but this novel approach is probably not enough to overcome Clinton’s long ties with civil rights leaders. In Nevada, Clinton won 76 percent of African American caucus-goers, compared with just 22 percent for Sanders.

If Hillary Clinton learned useful lessons from her earlier failure, Jeb Bush learned the wrong lessons from his family’s success. He planned to start the campaign with a huge warchest and list of endorsements, just as George W. Bush had done before the 2000 campaign. This “shock and awe” strategy aimed to intimidate other candidates so Bush could clinch the nomination early in the season.

Under certain circumstances, that strategy could make sense, but in this case, it underestimated the liabilities of the Bush name. Conservatives lament the expansion of government during the last Bush administration, and many other voters have bad memories of the Iraq War. The strategy also overlooked the demagogic appeal of a billionaire celebrity.

In 2000, George W. Bush essentially secured his nomination by defeating John McCain in the South Carolina primary. Sixteen years later, that same state put an end to his brother’s campaign.

Six Years Ago Today

On October 27, 2008, Senator Barack Obama spoke in Canton, Ohio:

"We need a better government – a more competent government – a government that upholds the values we hold in common as Americans."

Today, Michael Hirsch writes at Politico:

The Ebola crisis has underscored what many of Obama’s critics—including those in his party—have been saying with increasing urgency in recent months, that the White House’s approach to national security does not instill confidence and seems more questionable than ever in the face of the muscular new challenges on the scene. Tongues wagged in Washington after David Ignatius, who is generally simpatico with Obama’s restrained foreign policy, called gently in an Oct. 7 Washington Post column for “new blood” on the president’s national-security team.

But others are less gentle with their criticism. “It’s a pathetically weak team,” says one retired general who was in a senior command position, and who faults Hagel as much as Rice for some of the problems.

Recycling an Ad Theme

At Vox, Andrew Prokop notes a new ad from Americans for Shared Prosperity.

 

In After Hope and Change, we discuss the potential candidacy of Mitch Daniels, who eventually opted out of the 2012 race.  The ad above is very, very similar to a 2011 spot by a student group supporting Daniels:

Clinton, Obama, and Change

Andrew Kohut writes at Politico:

Here’s the potential problem: Demographics notwithstanding, views of Clinton among Democrats correlate strongly with views of Obama. No fewer than 71 percent of Democrats who hold a highly favorable view of Obama feel the same way about Clinton. And the converse is true: Democrats who are unenthusiastic about the president are also unenthusiastic about Clinton—just 29 percent rate her very favorably.

And Clinton faces another potential challenge: the desire for change that divides the Democratic base between populists and centrists, given that she was married to one centrist Democratic president and worked for another [Obama -- a centrist?] The appeal of populism among Democrats in 2016 cannot be discounted. Sixty percent of Democrats continue to say their finances are not in good shape, even as many of them see the stock market and real estate values having recovered. Little wonder that a September Pew survey found 62 percent of Democrats saying that regulation of financial organizations has not gone far enough, compared with just 32 percent of Republicans who hold that view.

In 2008, Obama was the "change" candidate while Clinton was the "experience" candidate.  In Epic Journey, we explained:

A 2007 survey asked Democrats which was more important to their candidate choice: experience or the ability to bring about change. Only 26 percent chose experience while 73 percent wanted change.47 If Democrats valued freshness over familiarity, Obama was the one.

So in 2008, Obama beat her by being the outsider.  In 2016, Obama could drag her down by reinforcing her image as an insider.

Huck 50-50 on 2016

At The Hill, Molly Hooper reports:

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (R) says there's a 50-percent chance he will run for president in 2016.

The 2008 GOP presidential contender told "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace that "at this point it's 50/50" at this point that he would pursue a presidential bid.

Huckabee, who recently announced his intention to leave his nationally syndicated radio program, opted not to run for the White House in 2012.

The folksy politician explained that he "would never make this decision based on circumstances, it would be a decision of the heart."

"I've tried to be honest ... so when people ask me, are you open to the possibility? The honest answer is 'yes.' Does that mean I'm running? I don't honestly know," Huckabee said.

In a presidential race, Huckabee would have some important assets:

• He is likeable and extremely articulate on television.
• His populism and lack of Washington experience are a good fit for the public mood.
• He has a strong base of support among religious conservatives.
• The field is open. Christie has gotten the most attention but has yet to close the sale with Republicans.  (A large fraction of Iowa Republicans view him unfavorably.)

He also has some liabilities:

• His outsiderism may make it hard for him to raise money from the affluent people who fund presidential campaigns.
• His gubernatorial record -- especially on clemency -- will provide material for opposition researchers.
• Though he is usually very fluent in media interviews, he has made a disturbing number of gaffes.
• His background as an ordained minister may help in primaries but could trigger anti-evangelical prejudice in the general election.
• Conversely, his eclectic stands on economic issues could help in the general election but have already triggered strong criticism from groups such as the Club for Growth.
• What Ed Rollins reportedly told him in 2011 still applies. From Election 2012: The Battle Begins: 

"Mike, I've put all these things together for you, but you've got to do something for me—you've got to lose forty pounds,” Rollins said. “Look, I'm a fat man, you're a fat man, but I didn't write a book about how I lost a hundred pounds."

Will Huck Run?

Mike Huckabee is considering a presidential run in 2016, reports Jonathan Martin at The New York Times:

Since his defeat in 2008, Mr. Huckabee, a pastor-turned governor, has made a living off his own eponymous show on Fox News, a talk radio program he just gave up and a steady schedule of paid speeches all over the country. He said he did not run for president in 2012 because he did not think President Barack Obama could be defeated, but he also acknowledged he has enjoyed earning a measure of financial comfort and celebrity through his show.

It is those two factors, along with the rise of super PACs that let a single wealthy individual sustain a candidate lacking a major financial network, that he says are making him look closely at a second presidential run.

But he also suggested that one of the reasons he granted an interview about his political future after addressing a gathering of pastors is that he is still bothered about how his first presidential run ended - and he wants the respect of somebody who performed better than more vaunted candidates and one who remains popular with many conservatives.

Discussing the potential Republican field in 2016, Mr. Huckabee said it would be “tough” for Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey to win such conservative redoubts as Iowa and South Carolina, two early nominating states.

“Let me show you some polling,” Mr. Huckabee said, brandishing a two-page memo about a survey his longtime pollster took earlier this month showing him leading the Republican field in both Iowa and South Carolina. He boasted that such good numbers came at a time when “nobody has even talked about me being named” as a candidate.

Team of Nobodies

Another gap between promise and performance lies in the administration of the executive branch.  Glenn Thrush writes at Politico:

For any modern president, the advantages of hoarding power in the White House at the expense of the Cabinet are obvious—from more efficient internal communication and better control of external messaging to avoiding messy confirmation battles and protecting against pesky congressional subpoenas. But over the course of his five years in office, Obama has taken this White House tendency to an extreme, according to more than 50 interviews with current and former secretaries, White House staffers and executive branch officials, who described his Cabinet as a restless nest of ambition, fits-and-starts achievement and power-jockeying under a shadow of unfulfilled promise.

Obama, many of his associates now concede, never really intended to be pushed out of his comfort zone. While he personally recruited stars such as Clinton, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, most other picks for his first Cabinet were made by his staff, with less involvement from the president. “[Bill] Clinton spent almost all of his time picking the Cabinet at the expense of the White House staff; Obama made the opposite mistake,” says a person close to both presidents.That’s a far cry from the vision Obama sketched out in the months leading up to his 2008 election. Back then, he waxed expansive about the Cabinet, promising to rejuvenate the institution as a venue for serious innovation and genuine decision making. “I don’t want to have people who just agree with me,” he told Time magazine, after reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s classic account of President Abraham Lincoln and his advisers, Team of Rivals. “I want people who are continually pushing me out of my comfort zone.”

West Virginia Realigns

At The Washington Post, Karen Tumulty writes of West Virginia:

From Franklin D. Roosevelt’s era until the 2000 election, it was among the most reliably Democratic states, one of only six that Jimmy Carter carried in 1980, and 10 that Michael S. Dukakis won in 1988.

But in the past decade or so, “West Virginia has realigned politically with the Deep South, at least in presidential elections,” historian John Alexander Williams said in a June lecture in Charleston marking the state’s 150th anniversary. “Between the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections, a time when voters were trending strongly Democratic in other parts of the nation, 366 of official Appalachia’s 410 counties increased their Republican share of presidential votes.”

In 2012, that trendline cut more deeply. Obama lost the seven West Virginia counties he had carried in 2008. It marked the first time that a major party’s presidential candidate suffered a 55-county shutout.

“People haven’t changed here. People are still the same,” said Sen. Joe Manchin III, a former West Virginia governor. “But I’ve never seen more people pushed away from their traditional Democratic roots or their voting habits than in the last six or seven years.” Manchin has put that fraying bond to the test, having sponsored gun-control legislation that failed in the Senate this year.

Next year’s elections could mark a historic hinge in West Virginia politics. Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D), a traditional liberal forged by the Great Society, has announced that he will not run for a sixth term.

His most likely successor is Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, the daughter of a three-term governor, who would be the first Republican that West Virginia elected to the Senate since 1956. Although Capito is considered a heavy favorite, Democrats came up with a strong contender when Secretary of State Natalie Tennant formally entered the race.

Meanwhile, Rep. Nick J. Rahall II, an 18-term congressman and the last surviving Democrat in the state’s House delegation, is facing what many expect to be his most difficult reelection contest.

"A Lifetime of Experience"

In Epic Journey and After Hope and Change, we write about the role of experience in presidential elections. Stuart Stevens writes at The Daily Beast:

Prompted by a New York Times article Monday,“Republicans Paint Clinton as Old News for 2016 Presidential Election” (which opens with a quote from me), there seems to be a great rush among the large professional class dedicated to defending all things Democratic to deny that age and experience will be an issue for Hillary. Which seems a bit silly since in her last run, she did everything she could to use both to her advantage.

“I think that I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House,” she declared on March 3, 2008. “Sen. John McCain has a lifetime of experience that he'd bring to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002."

She told Newsweek, “I wouldn't be in this race and working as hard as I am unless I thought I am uniquely qualified at this moment in our history to be the president we need starting in 2009 … I think it is informed by my deep experience over the last 35 years, my firsthand knowledge of what goes on inside a White House.”

This prompted Timothy Noah in Slate to respond, “Oh, please. Thirty-five years takes you back to 1973, half of which Hillary spent in law school, for crying out loud.”

And there’s the rub. When you ran in 2008 as the candidate of experience based on 35 years of experience and lost to a candidate of the “new,” don’t be surprised if it happens again eight years later.

In recent decades, the candidate who put the most emphasis on experience was Bob Dole.  He lost the vice presidency in 1976, GOP nomination in 1980 and 1988, and general election in 1996.

On November 7, 1987, he used the very phrase that Clinton used:  "I want to lead America into an even greater era of opportunity for our people and security for our nation. And so I offer a lifetime of experience and a record that shows not merely where I stand, but the hopes of a lifetime rooted here in Russell."

The Democratic Campaign Cultural Edge

At Slate, Sasha Issenberg offers some shrewd observations on the Democratic advantage -- and the GOP handicap -- in campaign innovation:

It is no coincidence that in both 2004 and 2012 the engines of radical innovation were the campaigns of incumbent presidents. We tend to underappreciate how radically different a presidential re-election is from any other enterprise in American political life. It is the rare chance for candidates to disrupt the cycle of short-term, election-year priorities and invest in their own research agendas instead of being forced to follow a consultant-driven marketplace.

For Bush, this proved a unique opportunity to synthesize information from consumer-data warehouses with voter registration records and apply some of the same statistical modeling techniques that companies used to segment customers so that they could market to them individually. In Obama’s case, the continuity provided by a re-election campaign encouraged a far broader set of research priorities, perhaps most important the adoption of randomized-control experiments, used in the social sciences to address elusive questions about voter behavior.

Following their 2004 loss, Democrats found it relatively easy to catch up with Republicans in the analysis of individual consumer data for voter targeting. By 2006, Democrats were at least at parity when it came to statistical modeling techniques, and they were exploring ways to integrate them with other modes of political data analysis. Already the public-opinion firms of the left saw themselves as research hubs in a way that their peers on the right didn’t, a disparity that stretched back a generation. When polling emerged in the early 1980s as a new (and lucrative) specialty within the consulting world, the people who flowed into it on the Republican side tended to be party operatives; former political and field directors who had been consumers of polls quickly realized that it was a better business to be producers of them.

Those who went into the polling business on the left were political consultants, too, but many of them also possessed serious scholarly credentials and had derailed promising academic careers to go into politics. Now that generation—Stan Greenberg, Celinda Lake, Mark Mellman, Diane Feldman, among others—preside over firms that see themselves not only as vendors of a stable set of campaign services but patrons of methodological innovation. When microtargeting tools made it possible to analyze the electorate as a collection of individuals rather than merely demographic and geographic subgroups, many of the most established Democratic pollsters in Washington invested in developing expertise in this new approach. Their Republican rivals, by contrast, tended to see the new tools as a threat to their business model.

Obama's First Real GOP Opponent

Why has the Obama campaign been less than sure-footed in parrying GOP attacks on economic performance and other issues?  Byron York writes:

Here's a theory: Barack Obama has never in his life run against a sharp, determined and aggressive Republican opponent. Facing Mitt Romney, who is all three, is a new experience for the president.

Look at Obama's political career. He won his first election to the Illinois Senate in 1996 mainly by challenging signatures on his Democratic primary opponent's candidacy petitions and getting her kicked off the ballot.

Re-election was no problem in Obama's heavily Democratic district. The only race he would ever lose came in 2000, when he mounted a primary challenge against Democratic Rep. Bobby Rush for a seat in Congress. Republicans were not a factor.

When Obama ran for U.S. Senate in 2004, both his Democratic primary opponent and Republican general election opponent imploded when their (ugly) divorce records were made public. Obama ran for a while with no opponent at all until GOP gadfly Alan Keyes moved to Illinois to offer weak opposition. Obama won in a landslide.

In 2008, Obama faced the race of his life against Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primaries. He ran a good campaign but was also aided by some inexplicable Clinton mistakes in which she failed to exploit the system by which Democratic delegates were awarded.

When the general election came around, Obama faced a Republican opponent, John McCain, who had lost a step from his GOP primary run eight years earlier, whose campaign was riven by internal turmoil, and who simply was not determined to do what it took to win.

The Changing Political Map

At The Wall Street Journal, Michael Barone analyzes the changing electoral map:

A party that attracts new support from a segment of the electorate tends to repel part of its old coalition. As the 1990s began, political pundits were opining that Republicans had a lock on the Electoral College—just before Bill Clinton, with assistance from Ross Perot, picked the lock and ripped open the door. Democrats won the popular vote in four of the five next presidential elections.

Republicans similarly embarrassed the pundits who said two decades ago that Democrats had a lock on the House of Representatives. Republicans won the most popular votes and most seats in seven of the nine congressional elections beginning in 1994.

As a result, the Republican core going into the 2012 election is no longer northern Protestants but white, married Christians. If you compare John McCain's 2008 percentages with the senior Bush's in 1988, you find Republicans suffering double-digit losses in states dominated by giant, culturally non-Southern metropolitan areas—New England, New York and down the I-95 corridor through New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and then down to Florida.

Republicans found support similarly sparse in Illinois, Michigan and (though the loss here seems temporary) Indiana, as well as in California, Nevada and Barack Obama's native Hawaii. Latino immigrants have added Democratic votes in most of these places, and out-migrating, native-born Americans have subtracted Republican votes.

But when you look at this map you also see areas where Mr. McCain ran even with or better than George H.W. Bush, notably the (Andrew) Jacksonian belt settled by Scots-Irish in the 18th and 19th centuries, running southwest from West Virginia through Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma. Western Pennsylvania and rural Texas, which remained solidly Democratic in the 1980s, have become solidly Republican.

Angry Money

At Real Clear Politics, Michael Barone writes of a most useful term:

What's really interesting is that, if current projections are right, this will be the third election in a row in which the party holding the White House will be outspent by the opposition. In 2004, incumbent Republican George W. Bush's side was outspent narrowly by those opposing him and favoring Democrat John Kerry. One reason is heavy spending by billionaire George Soros, about which we heard few complaints from those now decrying the billionaire Koch brothers' spending as a threat to democracy. In 2008, Barack Obama broke his promise to rely on public financing and raised and spent about $750 million. About half as much was spent on behalf of John McCain, who accepted public financing. Now, despite the clout any incumbent president has, Democrats are likely to be outspent by Republicans.

A "Fine" Time for Republicans

As previous posts have suggested, the president has been having a rough patch lately.  Dan Balz writes at The Washington Post:

All you need to know about the week the Democrats just had can be summed up by noting that both President Obama and former president Bill Clinton, the two best campaigners their party has seen in decades, had to clean up verbal messes they’d made earlier. And, oh yes, Mitt Romney’s campaign raised more money last month than Obama’s — by more than 25 percent.

... 

Over the past 10 days, Obama and the Democrats got a taste of what Romney was going through during the winter and early spring. First there was the intra-party angst, fueled by questions about Clinton’s dependability after he seemed to undermine the Obama campaign’s attacks on Bain Capital by saying Romney had a sterling business record.

Then came the employment report that showed the economy had added just 69,000 jobs in May, which renewed concerns among Democrats about how competitive the election might actually be and about whether Obama had any new ideas for fixing things.

Then came another Clinton moment, when he had to walk back a comment saying that the Bush tax cuts, even those for the wealthiest Americans, might have to be extended temporarily because the economy was weak — a comment 180 degrees off from the position of the White House.

Then came the latest evidence that the Democrats were in serious danger of losing the fundraising wars, perhaps by hundreds of millions of dollars, in view of Romney’s success in May and the potential war chests of Republican super PACs raising money through unlimited, and often secret, donations.

Finally, and unexpectedly, the president committed a major gaffe when, in an unscripted moment and trying to defend himself from critics who accused him of blaming Europe for America’s economic problems, he said, “The private sector is doing fine.” 

At Buzzfeed, Ben Smith wrote on Friday:

Barack Obama's assertion today that the private sector is "doing fine" may be an important pivot in the race for president, a moment when Mitt Romney finally succeeded in casting the president as basically out of touch with Americans' economic woes.

That may not be fair — Obama was making the point that the public sector has been a major drag on job growth — but it is certainly a taste of Obama's own medicine.

The moment reminded me of nothing more than that fatal morning of September 15, 2008, when John McCain pronounced that “the fundamentals of the economy are strong.”
...

And former McCain aides, now, are relishing the moment.

...\.

"We very much look forward watching Team Romney put Obama's head in a vice over this," he emailed "What goes around comes around, assholes."

And the RNC has released an attack video that seems to follow an identical template to Obama's 2008 instant attack.

Obama's 2008 Donors in 2012

Previous posts have looked at the activities of Obama's 2008 contributors. Ben Smith and Rebecca Elliott: write at Buzzfeed:

In 2008, more than 550,000 gave more than $200 to Barack Obama, entering their names in the longest list of individual donors ever seen in American politics. 

That list was a snapshot of the hope Obama inspired in a cross sections of liberals, young professionals, African-Americans, and Democrats who saw in him a generational and historic moment. But now, as Obama struggles to keep pace with his 2008 fundraising clip, that list offers a cross-section of Democratic disappointment and alienation. According to a BuzzFeed analysis of campaign finance data, 88% of the people who gave $200 or more in 2008 — 537,806 people — have not yet given that sum this year. And this drop-off isn’t simply an artifact of timing. A full 87% of the people who gave $200 — the sum that triggers an itemized report to the Federal Elections Commission — through April of 2008, 182,078 people, had not contributed by the end of last month.

Interviews with dozens of those drop-off donors reveal the stories of Democrats who still plan to pull the lever for the president, but whose support has gone from fervent to lukewarm, or whose economic circumstances have left them without money to spare. The interviews and the data are the substance of an “enthusiasm gap” spurred by the distance between the promise of the campaign and the reality of governing, one that has begun to deepen Democratic gloom about this November’s election.

There is an important caveat, however. In the first quarter of 2008, Obama was in a tough primary battle with Hillary Clinton. This time, the main event is in the fall. There is still plenty of time for the donors to ante up.