New Democratic Coalition

At The Hill, Cameron Joseph writes of the New Democratic Coalition in the House, some of whose members may face tough fights in 2014.

The group now includes 53 members, down from the 68 at their peak but an improvement over their low of 41 after 2010.

“We’ve always fashioned ourselves as the faction of new ideas and innovation,” Kind said. “These new members are impressive. They are more pragmatic; they are more reasonable; they’re trying to break through this hyper-partisanship and get things done.”

The 2012 turnaround came after a disappointing 2010 cycle, when several New Democrats were swamped by the GOP wave.

Now, they’re playing defense again.

The New Democrats who could face tough races this election include: Reps. Ron Barber (D-Ariz.), John Barrow (D-Ga.), Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.), Lois Capps (D-Calif.), Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), Elizabeth Esty (D-Conn.), Pete Gallego (D-Texas), Joe Garcia (D-Fla.), Ann McLane Kuster (D-N.H.), Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.), Dan Maffei (D-N.Y.), Mike McIntyre (D-N.C.), Patrick Murphy (D-Fla.), Bill Owens (D-N.Y.), Scott Peters (D-Calif.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.).

The New Democrats are looking to avoid the fate of the Blue Dog Coalition, which has been hit hard by redistricting, retirements and high voter disapproval of Obama in their more rural, often Southern districts.

The Blue Dogs fell from 54 to 25 members in 2010 and saw their roles further decreased to 15 after the last election.

GOP Tech Company

National Journal reports on GOPstaff/campaign veteran Phil Musser.

Musser and partner Alex Skatell -- he's 26 -- recently launched a budding digital empire, Media Group of America LLC, which includes a digital consulting firm, a center-right news site viewed by more than 3.5 million people this month, and a technology tool they claim will "leapfrog" President Obama's cutting-edge campaign. (Asked if he's worried, Obama's top digital strategist quipped, "In a word, no.")

Let the trash-talking commence. Musser and Skatell are among a handful of Republican operatives clamoring to bridge the digital divide revealed by the 2012 election, in which Obama's campaign deployed a sophisticated data-mining operation to reshape the electorate into a winning coalition of young people, women and minorities.
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MGA's signature online tool is called COR, for Central Organizing Responder, and like Obama's Narwhal, it can merge different campaign spreadsheets on one data platform. That means canvassing lists, phone banks, fundraising reports, event sign-in sheets and social networks are all integrated with outside data for highly detailed profiles of voters and supporters.

One key difference between COR and Obama's digital strategy: it's for sale. Possibly as soon as next month, Musser and Skatell envision a Netflix-like sharing arrangement in which campaigns pay a monthly fee for software that even an old-school political consultant can navigate.

Too Divided for Civil War

Byron York  --who really understand the GOP -- makes an important if paradoxical point:  the party is too divided for a civil war.  Republicans are fighting each other over the right approach to Obamacare, national security, and immigration, among other issues.

The conflicts inside the GOP today just don’t line up in the configuration of a classic civil war. There are multiple issues involved, and the lawmakers on various sides of various issues don’t lean the same way on each issue. Republicans who are opponents on one issue are allies on another. Looking at the Senate, for example, it’s unlikely that there will be a total civil war between Senate Faction A and Senate Faction B when some members of the opposing factions are united in Faction C, or Faction D, or so on. In other words, it may be that the Republican Party is too divided to have a real civil war. Perhaps chaos would be a better description. We’ll know more later.

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In other words, the party is divided every which way. And at least some of that division is entirely understandable. It’s what happens to parties when they don’t have a leader. And Republicans, after two straight presidential losses, have no one who even approaches national leadership. So factions appear and divisions worsen.

But the very number of divisions within the GOP makes it difficult to imagine the party falling into a classic civil war, with two sides lined up against each other over some irresolvable dispute. The coming battles inside the Republican party will be a series of moving fronts, with changing sides and changing tactics. It could be ugly at times, and it could be serious enough to ensure a chaotic presidential primary fight in 2015 and 2016. But all-out civil war? Probably not.

Court and Country

The first book in this series:  Upside Down and Inside Out, talked about the "court" and "country" parties.  Ross Douthat writes:

As theories go, it’s well suited to the times. The story of the last decade in American life is, indeed, a story of consolidation and self-dealing at the top. There really is a kind of “court party” in American politics, whose shared interests and assumptions — interventionist, corporatist, globalist — have stamped the last two presidencies and shaped just about every major piece of Obama-era legislation. There really is a disconnect between this elite’s priorities and those of the country as a whole. There really is a sense in which the ruling class — in Washington, especially — has grown fat at the expense of the nation it governs.

The problem for conservatives isn’t their critique of this court party and its works. Rather, it’s their failure to understand why many Americans can agree with this critique but still reject the Republican alternative.

They reject it for two reasons. First, while Republicans claim to oppose the ruling class on behalf of the country as a whole, they often seem to be representing an equally narrow set of interest groups — mostly elderly, rural (the G.O.P. is a “country party” in a far too literal sense) and well-off. A party that cuts food stamps while voting for farm subsidies or fixates on upper-bracket tax cuts while wages are stagnating isn’t actually offering a libertarian populist alternative to the court party’s corrupt bargains. It’s just offering a different, more Republican-friendly set of buy-offs.

Second, as much as Americans may distrust a cronyist liberalism, they prefer it to a conservatism that doesn’t seem interested in governing at all. This explains why Republicans could win the battle for public opinion on President Obama’s first-term agenda without persuading the public to actually vote him out of office. The sense that Obama was at least trying to solve problems, whereas the right offered only opposition, was powerful enough to overcome disappointment with the actual results.

Statehouse Haunting

At Politico, Glenn Thrush reports that the GOP's 2010 statehouse victories still haunt the president.

“The Obama team has done some amazing things, those guys are really something, but the Democrats plain got skunked on the state houses,” says former Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-N.Y.), chairman of REDMAP, the group founded by Republican über-operative Ed Gillespie in late 2009 to influence state races ahead of the critical once-a-decade map-drawing process.

“They weren’t in the same league as us, and that’s having lasting consequences,” added Reynolds, who represented the Buffalo, N.Y. area for five terms.

It might be the greatest opportunity cost of the Obama Era in terms of sheer damage to Democrats, a gift that keeps giving to the Republicans in the form of GOP-dominated redistricting and a barrage of state actions that challenge Obama’s core agenda on health care, civil rights and abortion.

“Huge pain in the ass, yeah, every day,” is how one senior Obama aide described the GOP’s creation of safe House seats — and the subsequent assaults on Obamacare, abortion rights, gun control, voting rights and municipal unions emanating from suddenly GOP-dominated states like North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio.

”Everyone is focusing on the House as hampering us, but no one has really focused on losing all those governorships and state legislatures,” the person added.

GOP Tech

Peter Wallsten reports at The Washington Post that RNC is planning to open a Silicon Valley office and hire software developers.

Officials say the multimillion-dollar program would give Republican candidates the ability to amass more detailed information than ever about individual voters. The data would help candidates narrowly tailor appeals for votes and money. The system would, in many ways, try to mimic many of the digital innovations that helped President Obama’s reelection campaign last year.

The move follows a scathing spring review by the Republican National Committee, which assailed the party and the campaign of its 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, for falling short in digital marketing and voter outreach. The report called for more “intellectual curiosity” and for party members to be “more sophisticated” with data and to improve collaboration. In short, it said, “Republicans do not do this very well.”

Although they’re behind, Republican officials say their new effort could at some point put them ahead of Democrats, who are assessing how to make the Obama campaign system available to other party candidates. The RNC program will be housed largely inside the party structure, giving GOP candidates up and down the ballot easy access to data, party officials said.

“We’re thinking big,” said Andrew Barkett, 32, a former Facebook engineer who joined the RNC in June to oversee the new system. Barkett describes what he’s building as a “tool belt” for GOP candidates that will prove more effective than the “locked treasure chest” created by the Obama campaign.

Some in the party, although welcoming the effort, caution that leaders shouldn’t expect it to solve more fundamental problems, such as how Republicans can broaden their appeal before the next presidential campaign.

The RNC plan “addresses the data problem, but you still have a content problem — one that will affect all the candidates in 2016,” said Zac Moffatt, co-founder of the pro-GOP data firm Targeted Victory and Romney’s 2012 digital director. “You can find all the voters, but you still need to determine what you are going to say to them.”

Christie v. Paul

Politico reports:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is ripping libertarians — including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — for challenging government surveillance programs and failing to understand the dangers of terrorism.

“This strain of libertarianism that’s going through parties right now and making big headlines I think is a very dangerous thought,” the New Jersey GOP governor said on Thursday at a Republican governors forum in Aspen, Colo. “You can name any number of people and (Paul is) one of them.”

Christie, a potential 2016 candidate who appeared on the panel with Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, said lawmakers who are questioning government surveillance programs should hear from the families affected by the Sept. 11 attacks.

“These esoteric, intellectual debates — I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation. And they won’t, because that’s a much tougher conversation to have,” Christie said.

What is Christie up to?  Some possibilities:

1. He's sincerely articulating his policy views.
2. He sees Rand Paul as a threat to the GOP.
3. He thinks that he could beat Rand Paul in a head-to-head contest for the GOP nomination. With his penchant for making gaffes and hiring neo-Confederate wackos, Paul is more self-destructive than other potential GOP contenders. Christie may be trying to build Paul up now so that he can take him down later.

I vote for number 3.