"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."

Super PACs Go Up Early

Paul Blumenthal writes at The Huffington Post:

Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), who faces the Senate's toughest reelection, spent the final days of June shooting campaign video -- for an election still more than 16 months away.

Independent groups spent $1.1 million in 2014 general election Senate campaigns in Arkansas and Kentucky during the first six months of this year, 11 times the $100,000 the groups had spent at this point in 2011.

Despite questions about donor fatigue and notable super PAC bets on losing candidates in 2012, independent group campaign spending is off to the fastest start ever in next year's Senate races, according to campaign finance records. The onslaught of spending is forcing candidates like Pryor to start campaigning earlier than ever, pushing the election calendar farther back and propelling incumbents and their challengers to raise even more money to start their campaigns early.
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Club for Growth Action, the super PAC of the conservative Club for Growth, was the first group to go up against Pryor with an ad in February telling Arkansas voters, "When you vote for Pryor, you vote for Obama."

"After Hope and Change" -- The Meme Goes International

The title of our new book, After Hope and Change, anticipated a meme that has spread through the media. Thanks to the NSA controversy, it has gone international:

Australia:




Germany:

House GOP: Individual Incentives v. Party Needs

Congress operates on the Reverse Spock Principle:  the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many. What is good for an individual member in the next election may not be good for the whole party over the long term. In After Hope and Change, we supply some examples.

Alex Isenstadt writes at Politico:

Some top GOP strategists and candidates warn that the ruby red districts the party drew itself into are pushing House Republicans further to the right — narrowing the party’s appeal at a time when some GOP leaders say its future rests on the opposite happening. If you’re looking for a root cause of the recurring drama within the House Republican Conference — from the surprise meltdown on the farm bill to the looming showdown over immigration reform — the increasingly conservative makeup of those districts is a good place to start.

The shellacking Republicans took in 2012 has triggered months of consternation that the party is too white, too conservative and too male. But tell that to the increasing number of House Republicans who are safely ensconced with nary a worry that a Democrat might unseat them in the next election.

The bigger threat to them is a primary challenge from the right bankrolled by the Club for Growth or another deep-pocketed outside group angry they went soft on a key vote.

“It’s obviously easier for a House member to focus on their district. They’re in cycle every day of the year, always on the hot seat, and there’s always a challenger around the corner,” said Matt Schlapp, who served as political director in the George W. Bush White House.

Still, Schlapp added, “You want to be sensitive to the district, but you also need to be cognizant of how your party is going to be successful over time.”

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Of the 234 House Republicans, just four now represent districts that favor Democrats, according to data compiled by The Cook Political Report. That’s down from the 22 Republicans who resided in Democratic-friendly seats following the 2010 midterms, prior to the line-drawing.

They’re also serving districts that are increasingly white. After redistricting and the 2012 election, according to The Cook Political Report, the average Republican congressional district went from 73 percent white to 75 percent white. And even as Hispanics have emerged as America’s fastest-growing demographic group, only about one-tenth of Republicans represent districts where the Latino population is 25 percent or higher.

PM update.  Sean Trende, however, observes:

...81 percent of Democrats occupy districts that are at least five points more Democratic than the country as a whole, while 81 percent of Republicans hail from districts that are similarly Republican. But the bottom line is that whatever malady is supposedly afflicting Republicans should also be afflicting Democrats, perhaps more so, if gerrymandering were to blame.

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Contrary to conventional wisdom, moderate districts do not clearly beget moderate candidates. For some good, concrete examples, think of the Senate. The states that are between two points more Republican and two points more Democratic than the country as a whole currently send senators like Tammy Baldwin, Sherrod Brown, Al Franken, Tom Harkin, Ron Johnson, Amy Klobuchar, Harry Reid, Pat Toomey and Mark Udall to the Senate.

None of these senators is going to be mistaken for a moderate anytime soon. The rest tend to be reliable conservative or liberal votes who have the occasional apostasy -- senators like Kelly Ayotte, Bob Casey Jr., Chuck Grassley, Rob Portman, and Marco Rubio. The senators who really fit the bill as moderate tend to be those who manage to get elected in deeply unfriendly territory: Think Joe Manchin and Susan Collins.

As Nolan McCarty has observed, this is a huge problem for the polarization-due-to-gerrymandering hypothesis. The Senate is usually cited as the epicenter of polarization and partisan dysfunction in our country, yet its “lines” have remained unchanged since Hawaii became a state in 1959. McCarty also notes that if you look at the ideology of House members who represent swing constituencies, their ideologies have likewise spread apart over time.

GOP to Recruit Women

Roll Call reports:

With a stagnant number of women in its caucus, the House GOP’s campaign organization announced a new program Friday, Project Grow, to recruit, mentor and elect more female candidates in 2014.

“We need more women to run,” Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., said. “Project Grow will plant that seed that will get them thinking of doing it.”

CQ Roll Call reported earlier this week that the National Republican Congressional Committee was in the early stages of formalizing a female candidate recruitment program for the upcoming midterm cycle. The NRCC’s announcement was part of a joint event with six GOP committees that are making an new organized effort to help female candidates.

The “Women on the Right UNITE” effort is run by the Republican National Committee, NRCC, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Republican State Leadership Committee, College Republican National Committee and Republican Governors Association. The goal is to help female candidates ascend to all levels of government.

"But You Can Play Bridge"

In After Hope and Change, we talk about outside groups in the 2012 election.

The Atlantic covers a talk in which Karl Rove uses an apt metaphor for non-coordination coordination:

"At Crossroads, we watched for three weeks while they assaulted Bain. And you can't talk to the campaigns directly. You can't coordinate with to them. But you can play bridge. So after about three weeks we said we think this is hurting, so why don't we signal to them."

So Rove's American Crossroads Super PAC went out and ran $9.3 million worth of ads in July 2012 in 14 battleground states fighting back against the Obama campaign attacks, using a Washington Post editorial that said they were overblown.

"We were trying to signal to the Romney campaign, if you want to engage on this, you lead, we'll follow. Now they can't talk to us, but they can talk to the press. And the press immediately would call us up and say, we just talked to the Romney campaign about your ad and they say first of all, the issue's not hurting us and B, in politics, if you're responding, you're losing. Well, a lot of times in politics if you're responding you're winning," Rove continued.
"We decided wrongly that they were right and so we didn't proceed. And we should have."

Here is a web page about the use of signals in bridge: 

RULE 1: DO NOT OVERUSE SIGNALS. PERHAPS ONE SIGNAL PER PARTNERSHIP PER HAND SHOULD BE THE GENERAL RULE
RULE 2: DO NOT OVER-RELY ON SIGNALS. Your partner is NOT ALL KNOWING. Never let a signal interfere with YOUR OWN GOOD ANALYSIS AND JUDGMENT. Most bridge players fall in love with signals and they overuse them. DO NOT BE ONE OF THESE PEOPLE. 

Governors and Governing Conservatism

At Politico, Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Elizabeth Titus write:

While Republicans inside the Beltway continue to stumble and fumble their way to irrelevancy, Ohio Gov. John Kasich — and other conservative heartland governors — are quietly offering a blueprint for success: competence, consistency and actually creating jobs rather than just talking about it.

As Republicans look ahead to 2016, they worry most about the capacity of any party leader to navigate a base that is at odds with most Americans on gay rights, immigration and the broader demographic currents reshaping our politics.

There’s an emerging playbook for doing this, and it’s not based on a bunch of phony outreach or “caving” on the party’s principles. Kasich, who on Sunday is scheduled to sign a $2.7 billion tax cut, in addition to an earlier estate tax cut, is one of the chief architects and practitioners.

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Kasich is replicating much of the approach that Mitch Daniels took as Indiana governor during two terms ending in January. It’s what Scott Walker forced on Wisconsin, and Mike Pence is now trying to do in the Hoosier State. The public backlash is intense initially, abates over time, and eventually gives way as job growth pushes other issues into the background, including the GOP’s dilemma with immigration and same-sex marriage.

This makes the governors of all three states essential to any conversation about the Republican ticket in 2016 — and any hope of a Republican revival before then. They don’t carry the baggage of Washington and its constant hot-headed fighting, and could plausibly swat away the most contentious issue by simply saying: “Look what I did in the state I ran."