Intraparty Tensions

A number of posts have described intraparty GOP tensions. At The New York Times, Jennifer Steinhauer writes of the Senate:

The willingness of Republicans to skewer one of their own became increasingly apparent on Friday as more and more members of the party peeled away from Mr. Hagel, President Obama’s nominee for secretary of defense, saying they would not vote to confirm him after Mr. Hagel melted like chocolate on a dashboard under combative questioning from Republicans.
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There were other moments as well. Earlier in the week, Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, took to talk radio to refer to a Republican colleague, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, as “amazingly naïve” for his proposals to overhaul the nation’s immigration system. Mr. Rubio did not choose to respond or question the judgment of Mr. Vitter, whose phone number once appeared in a client list of a Washington madam.

As Politico reports, however, there was a response from somebody on Team Rubio:

Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) associates, furious about fellow Republican Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) calling the Floridian “nuts” and “naïve” over his immigration reform efforts, are hitting Vitter where it hurts.

“David Vitter has done some nuttier things in his life,” a source close to Rubio wrote in an unsolicited email to POLITICO.

That’s a not-at-all subtle reference to Vitter’s 2007 admission that his phone number appeared on a client list of a Washington, D.C. madam. A New Orleans-based prostitute and madam have also, separately, accused Vitter of being a client, but he has denied those charges.

Asked for comment about the jab, Vitter’s press secretary didn’t respond to two emails. A receptionist at Vitter’s Washington office said the press staffer “must be away from his desk.”

In a number of posts, and in After Hope and Change, we have discussed frustration with the president among congressional Democrats.  Politico also reports that the frustration still smolders:

President Barack Obama and his top advisers have declared that they’re done playing “the inside game” in Washington, but one crucial Democratic constituency — his former colleagues in Congress — say the president shouldn’t deep-six a strategy that he only half-heartedly tried in his first term.

As Obama prepares an aggressive public lobbying campaign for his ambitious second-term agenda, Democrats on Capitol Hill are bluntly warning him that he has to do more to engage them if he expects his congressional allies to take a series of politically tough votes.

Interviews with dozens of members of Congress and senior aides reveal frustration and in some cases exasperation that a president who came from the Senate has no apparent appetite for cultivating relationships on Capitol Hill.

These Democrats say they almost never hear from Obama personally, haven’t been to the White House since Rahm Emanuel was still chief of staff and are mystified that the president passed over a popular legislative affairs aide for the job as top congressional liaison. One high-profile Democrat who recently spoke to a group of Hill Democrats came away stunned at their anger toward a president they hardly know.

Conservative Victory Project

The New York Times reports on a new super PAC designed to remedy the Todd Akin problem:

The biggest donors in the Republican Party are financing a new group to recruit seasoned candidates and protect Senate incumbents from challenges by far-right conservatives and Tea Party enthusiasts who Republican leaders worry could complicate the party’s efforts to win control of the Senate.
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The group, the Conservative Victory Project, is intended to counter other organizations that have helped defeat establishment Republican candidates over the last two election cycles. It is the most robust attempt yet by Republicans to impose a new sense of discipline on the party, particularly in primary races.

“There is a broad concern about having blown a significant number of races because the wrong candidates were selected,” said Steven J. Law, the president of American Crossroads, the “super PAC” creating the new project. “We don’t view ourselves as being in the incumbent protection business, but we want to pick the most conservative candidate who can win.”

Politico reports on some negative reaction:

Both the Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund – two of the most prominent groups that have boosted candidates on the right – mocked the new initiative as yet another hapless establishment-side attempt to muzzle the GOP base.

Matt Hoskins, executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund, branded it the “Conservative Defeat Project.”

“The Conservative Defeat Project is yet another example of the Republican establishment’s hostility toward its conservative base. Rather than listening to the grassroots and working to advance their principles, the establishment has chosen to declare war on the party’s most loyal supporters,” Hoskins said. “If they keep this up, the party will remain in the wilderness for decades to come.”

Club for Growth spokesman Barney Keller essentially responded by pointing to the scoreboard in recent primaries in which conservative insurgents have prevailed and emerged as influential GOP leaders.

Political Money in California

Steve Harmon writes at The San Jose Mercury News that California Democrats owe the unions, big-time:

Labor's heavy lift on two campaigns paid big dividends last fall.

While the wealthy Munger siblings famously poured a combined $83 million into losing causes, labor unions flexed their financial muscle to capture two campaigns with about the same amount -- $85 million, according to the final round of the 2012 campaign finance reports, which were released late Thursday.

Labor went all in, spending $65 million to defeat Proposition 32, which would have stripped their political clout by outlawing the collection of union dues for political campaigns. That money enabled unions to put together a field program with volunteers blanketing the state, creating what union leaders say was a ripple effect that led to the stunning victory by Gov. Jerry Brown's tax-hike measure, Proposition 30.

Labor added more than $20 million to the Proposition 30 campaign and claim that the fervor behind those two campaigns helped Democrats capture super majorities in the Senate and Assembly.

In California, state legislative campaigns costs as much as statewide campaigns in much of the country. The Riverside Press-Enterprise reports:

Last year’s campaign in Riverside County’s 31st Senate District consumed more than $9 million, making it the deepest political money pit of any California legislative contest in 2012, final reports show.

The second-most expensive legislative race last year, the Sacramento-area 8th Assembly District, racked up almost $8.4 million in total spending. Right behind it was the campaign in the Stockton-to-Modesto 5th Senate District, which burned through more than $8.1 million, according to end of-year campaign finance statements filed this week.

Lawmakers earn a base salary of $90,526, plus living expenses when the Legislature is in session.

“I had no idea it was going to cost as much as it did,” said state Sen. Richard Roth, D-Riverside, a Riverside attorney and first-time candidate who survived a bruising June primary campaign and went on to defeat Republican Jeff Miller, a state assemblyman, in the 31st. The seat includes Corona, Riverside, Moreno Valley and Perris.

Republicans Aren't Dead Yet

From left and right, some clarity emerges about the recent past and near future.

At The American Prospect, Paul Starr says that Democrats exaggerated the impact of Obama's victory:

But if you step back now, look at government as a whole, and think about the likely course of politics in the next several years, things look different. In what was a bad year for Republicans, they emerged with enough power to stymie major Democratic legislative initiatives and to advance key items on their own agenda through the arms of government that they continue to control.

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The fiscal-cliff legislation severely limits domestic policy for the rest of Obama’s presidency. With income-tax increases off the table, most of the focus in the coming rounds will be on spending cuts, particularly in Social Security and Medicare. However those issues are resolved, spending on discretionary programs as a percentage of gross domestic product will be virtually certain to fall back to levels last seen in the 1950s. If any Eisenhower Republicans are left, they should be smiling.

Meanwhile, Republicans have considerable power to set the nation’s direction through other arms of government. Chief Justice John Roberts’s decision to vote with the liberals last June to uphold the Affordable Care Act should not obscure the reality that the Court remains in conservative hands. Even the “Obamacare” ruling represented a doctrinal victory for conservatives in two crucial areas—the limitation of the interstate commerce clause and congressional spending powers—and this year Roberts appears poised to lead his fellow conservative justices in decisions declaring affirmative action and critical provisions of the Voting Rights Act to be unconstitutional.

The other critical base of conservative power lies in the states, where Republicans have one-party control of 24 states, compared with only 12 for the Democrats. The GOP made the most of its victories in 2010, seizing the chance to gerrymander state legislative as well as congressional districts and positioning itself to dominate those legislatures as well as the U.S. House for the rest of the decade.

At The Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove writes:

Yes, there will be fewer whites and more minorities in the future, and Republicans will have to adjust. But the situation is more complicated than that.

Start with the obvious: If demographics were determinative, then Republicans shouldn't have gained 63 seats in the House of Representatives in 2010—the largest midterm shift since 1938—while also taking 30 governorships.

When presidential re-elections yielded realignments in the past, the winner earned a bigger share of the vote than he had in the past. FDR won 60.8% of the vote in 1936 after winning 57.41% in 1932. But Mr. Obama won 51.06% in 2012, down from 52.87% in 2008. Over the course of his first term, his support dropped among young people (a swing of 2.4 million net votes to Mitt Romney), women (a net swing of 1.6 million votes to Mr. Romney), and African-Americans (a net swing 945,000 votes).

And while Mr. Obama may believe he can ignore moderate and conservative whites, congressional Democrats would disagree. Mr. Obama won Florida by a razor-thin 74,309 votes (0.9% of the total), yet Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson won re-election by 1,065,184 votes, or 13%, many from white voters. In North Dakota, Democrat Heidi Heitkamp won a Senate seat by less than 1% while Mr. Obama lost by 20%, and in West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin won re-election by 24% while Mr. Obama lost by 27%. Such Democrats from swing states or districts will be uncomfortable with Mr. Obama's strategy of playing to his party's left wing.

District System for Electoral College? Not So Fast...

Right after the election, some Republicans pondered the district system for the electoral college. Politico reports:

Republican proposals in swing states to change how electoral votes are allocated have set off alarms that the party is trying to rig future presidential elections.

But the plans are going nowhere fast.

In the majority of states where such measures are being considered – Virginia, Florida, Ohio and Michigan, all states that voted for President Obama in 2012 but have Republican-controlled legislatures – proposals to split Electoral College votes proportionally have either been defeated or are strongly opposed by officials in those states.

The only remaining states are Pennsylvania, where an electoral vote change was unsuccessful in 2011, and Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker has expressed hesitance about any changes to the system.

“I just said I hadn’t ruled it out. I’m not embracing it because it’s a double-edged sword,”

Walker said in a recent interview with POLITICO. “What may look appealing right now depending on who your candidate was might, four or eight years from now, look like just the reverse. And the most important thing to me long term as a governor is what makes your voters be in play. One of our advantages as a swing state is that candidates come here … that’s good for voters. If we change that that would take that away and would largely make us irrelevant.”

In Virginia, a plan to allocate electoral votes by congressional district was defeated in the state Senate Tuesday after Gov. Bob McDonnell and other GOP lawmakers in the state came out against it.

TPM reports:

On a national level, newly re-elected RNC chair Reince Priebus has declared his support for splitting up the electoral vote in blue-leaning swing states, including his home state of Wisconsin. Former RNC chair Haley Barbour broke with him on Friday, however, telling MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that he did not back Priebus’ plan and did not believe it enjoyed widespread GOP support either. His nephew, influential RNC committeeman Henry Barbour, also dismissed the Priebus scheme as a “gimmick” to Yahoo News.

GOP Senate Problems

Josh Kraushaar reports at National Journal:

One of the first opportunities for Republicans to demonstrate that they’re not the “stupid party,” in the words of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, will be the way its leaders handle some sticky Senate primaries already emerging for 2014. In many battleground states, stepping forward are a handful of not-ready-for-prime-time, gaffe-prone candidates who are well-positioned to win primaries but at risk of getting thumped in a general election.

If this sounds like a broken record, it is. Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, and Ken Buck cost the party two Senate seats in 2010. Last year, it was Todd Akin's and Richard Mourdock’s chance to damage the GOP on the national stage. The only difference between this upcoming midterm and the past two elections is that it’s now so painfully obvious what’s transpiring, yet party leaders are still trying to figure out how to prevent a crisis before it’s too late.

Iowa Rep. Steve King, an anti-immigration hard-liner, is already giving serious consideration to the Senate race for the seat being vacated by Sen. Tom Harkin. Joe Miller, who lost in 2010 to a write-in candidate, is reportedly talking to the National Republican Senatorial Committee about a repeat run in Alaska. A Georgia House member who accused President Obama of following the Soviet constitution is probably running to succeed retiring Sen. Saxby Chambliss, and another who defended Akin’s “legitimate rape” comment is considering a campaign. Meanwhile, Rep. Michele Bachmann is waiting in the wings in Minnesota, as a possible contender against Sen. Al Franken.

Reed Galen writes at RealClearPolitics:

Our problem is not how we “frame” our arguments. It’s that our arguments don’t fit the views of the national electorate: A majority of Americans found our solutions uncompelling. All the data mining, social media interaction and television advertising won’t do a bit of good if our messages and messengers aren’t powerful and believable.

If we don’t give voters a proactive, positive and hopeful alternative to the current state of affairs, there’s no reason for them to give us a first look, let alone a second. The way we discuss issues -- from abortion to immigration -- are so negative that women, minorities and younger voters want little, if anything, to do with us.

There is hope, though. Although Mitt Romney lost nearly all of the battleground states last year, the GOP currently holds governorships in 10 of them. Wisconsin’s Scott Walker survived a recall effort led by well-funded labor interests. Susana Martinez in New Mexico and Brian Sandoval in Nevada have shown that a Republican can win in states with large and growing Latino populations.

The question is whether gubernatorial elections are fundamentally different from elections to federal office.  The issues and expectations at one level do not necessarily carry over to the other.  Tommy Thompson (WI) and Linda Lingle (HI) were successful, popular governors of blue states, but the failed in their 2012 Senate bids.

Blue States and Red States

Gallup reports:

There were more solidly blue states than solidly red states in the U.S. in 2012, by a margin of 20 to 12. After the District of Columbia, the most Democratic-leaning states in 2012 were Hawaii, Maryland, Rhode Island, New York, and Massachusetts -- where Democrats held at least 20-percentage-point advantages in party identification. Republicans enjoyed this lopsided an advantage in Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho.

Connecticut, Vermont, Illinois, and Delaware round out the top 10 most Democratic states. Thus, eight of the top 10 are located in the East.

The top 10 Republican states have a very different geographic profile, with three of the states located in the Midwest (North Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas), two in the South (Alabama and Oklahoma), and five in the West. The full results by state appear on page 2.

These state and regional patterns closely mirror President Barack Obama's state-level job approval ratings in 2012.

Capitol Weekly reports that California's blue streak does not necessarily extend down the age spectrum:

Even though California has seen a decade of growth in the registration of young voters aged 18-to-24, fully two-thirds of the eligible youth population did not cast ballots in the last presidential election, according to a new study.

The California Civic Engagement Project at UC Davis also found that registration and turnout rates in the age group vary geographically within the state, with young registrants differing politically from the rest of the electorate and a growing number favoring “no party preference.”

The lack of engagement is a critical factor in dampening both parties’ new registrants. And that is unpleasant news for get-out-the-vote pros in both the Democratic and Republican parties.