Virginia, Democrats, the Tea Party, and Reality

Something's going on in Virginia that I think is worth taking note of. The gubernatorial race there is all over but the voting and Democrats make one final push for their candidate, Terry McAuliffe.

Reuters: President Barack Obama and fellow Democrats attempted on Sunday to tap into voter anger about a 16-day U.S. government shutdown and turn Virginia's upcoming governor's election into a referendum on Tea Party conservatives.

With Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe leading polls over Republican Ken Cuccinelli before Tuesday's vote, Obama and Democratic speakers at a rally in the Washington suburb of Arlington pressed party activists to focus on turning out the vote.

Northern Virginia's Washington suburbs, where many government employees and contractors live, was hit particularly hard by the government shutdown last month that resulted from a stalemate over the U.S. budget and debt ceiling that Americans for the most part blamed on Republicans.

Although Virginia's proximity to Washington DC made the government shutdown particularly painful there, the strategy of making it a referendum on the Tea Party would probably be as effective nationwide, if a Pew Poll on Tea Party favorability is any indication. Nationally, the Tea Party has taken a nose dive in polling, with favorables dropping 7-points during the shutdown to an all time low. At this particular moment in time, 'baggers are about as popular as a fart in an elevator.

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GOP Collapsing Under the Weight of All That Crazy/Stupid

Things are going very, very badly for the GOP right now. Their poll numbers aren't falling, so much as crashing in a precipitous fashion that one pollster described as "jawdropping." The Obamacare demands have been dropped -- looking back, those demands had the lifespan of a fruit fly. The discussion now isn't about how much spending to cut, but whether we'll continue on with sequester-level spending levels. There was never a time when this government shutdown/debt limit gamesmanship wasn't a disaster for Republicans. Instead, it's an ongoing catastrophe that keeps getting worse.

"It’s just a question of the terms of surrender right now," Mark Halperin told the panel at Morning Joe. "Part of what’s driving the dynamic is Democrats know they are winning and Harry Reid and the White House have the attitude of, ‘Why should we give anything because they’re coming our way,’ and they’re waiting"

In other words, this is over. Not because Republicans are in a surrendering mood, but because it cannot possibly turn out any other way. Republicans have lost their little gambit.

But that's not going to be the narrative on the right after the dust clears. The base will hear only a Rambo-like "we could've won if only the politicians had let us" line of propaganda. That Barack Obama and Harry Reid were on the brink of caving in before John Boehner and Mitch McConnell lost their nerve. As a result, many of the right's most faithful voters will learn absolutely nothing from this beating and may make even greater and more suicidal demands of John Boehner.

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How Gerrymandering is Forcing the GOP to Self-Destruct

It's not well-remembered -- mostly because the media didn't do much with the story -- but earlier this year the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) released a report praising their own gerrymandering efforts and giving those efforts credit for the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. In other words, they admitted to stealing elections. The organization poured money into state races, with the strategy of redrawing district boundaries around solidly conservative populations -- i.e., choosing voters, instead of voters choosing them. "The rationale was straightforward," RSLC's report bragged. "Controlling the redistricting process in these states would have the greatest impact on determining how both state legislative and congressional district boundaries would be drawn."

These lines were so unfairly drawn that Republicans kept their House majority despite the fact that the Democrats got 1.1 million more votes nationwide. Want to know why congressional approval ratings are so rock-bottom low? There ya go: we wound up with a House that's the opposite of what we voted for. The fact that democracy was thwarted doesn't have to be well-known for the effects to be felt. All that we have to know is that the House of Representatives is going in the opposite direction than that for which most of us voted. Not surprisingly, there are consequences to this -- and they aren't good for the Republican Party.

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.

But what they do have to worry about is a primary challenge from the right. By choosing only the most reliably rightwing voters to elect them, Republicans haven't given themselves a lot of wiggle room. These are the talk radio-brainwashed types for whom compromise is more than a dirty word, it's a crime. Republicans must toe Rush Limbaugh's completely unworkable line or be thrown out as RiNOs or "Republicans in Name Only" -- which is somewhere in the conservative spectrum between communists and people who deny that Obama's a secret illegal alien Muslim terr'ist.

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How the NSA Controversy Could Make Partisanship Even Worse

At first, the story about the NSA's massive domestic surveillance program was actually working in President Obama's favor. A Pew poll showed that most Americans approved of the program, yet it continued to be the big Washington story -- meaning half-baked White House nontroversies like Benghazi or the IRS scandal had been knocked off the front page. The President was able make what would normally have been some controversial moves, mostly under the radar, as the media's attention was fixed on one shiny bauble. For the most part, Republicans -- who would normally have dived on any whiff of scandal -- took the administration's side on the issue. Despite the landmark nature of the revelations, it looked like it was going to be clear sailing.

But then a second poll came out -- this one showing Americans not supportive of PRISM. Then Gallup had similar findings. Now Reuters/Ipsos has a different take, nearly as problematic for the administration:

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Romney Done In by Misplaced GOP Focus on Voter Suppression

There’s an Associated Press story out there today that may reinvigorate the Generals in the Republican War on Voting. It seems that a certain demographic got a little too excited about the 2012 election and, for all intents and purposes, choose the winner in the presidential race.

Associated Press: America’s blacks voted at a higher rate than other minority groups in 2012 and by most measures surpassed the white turnout for the first time, reflecting a deeply polarized presidential election in which blacks strongly supported Barack Obama while many whites stayed home.

Had people voted last November at the same rates they did in 2004, when black turnout was below its current historic levels, Republican Mitt Romney would have won narrowly, according to an analysis conducted for The Associated Press.

Census data and exit polling show that whites and blacks will remain the two largest racial groups of eligible voters for the next decade. Last year’s heavy black turnout came despite concerns about the effect of new voter-identification laws on minority voting, outweighed by the desire to re-elect the first black president.

We see these numbers despite the fact that the Brennan Center For Justice estimated that Republican voter suppression efforts would disenfranchise as many as five million voters in 2012. Unfortunately for the Grand Old Party, a few of their anti-democratic efforts to keep minority voters from the polls didn’t go as well as they’d hoped. In the swing state of Wisconsin, for example, a voter ID law was struck down as unconstitutional. In a damning ruling, Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess wrote that the law was clearly about disenfranchising voters and that this was contemptible. "Voter fraud is no more poisonous to our democracy than voter suppression," he said.

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Soft-on-Crime Anti-Background Check Vote Does Damage

With the retirement of Sen. Joe Lieberman, it looked like the era of Three Amigos might be over. By joining up with John McCain and Lindsey Graham, Lieberman joined a team of three Senators who were the source of some very bad ideas -- most of them involving throwing fistfuls or money at the Pentagon and Israel, backing military action as the only solution to pretty much every foreign policy problem, and attacking anyone unwilling to throw money and start shooting as muddleheaded, weak-in-the-face-of-terrorism wusses. It looked the Three Amigos had become two and America was in severe danger of benefiting from the loss. But along came young New Hampshire Republican Kelly Ayotte and the Two Amigos were Three again. Brainless militarism once again had three guaranteed advocates.

But the new lineup may not be long-lasting -- at least, not if the newest compañera keeps ignoring the will of her constituents.

Huffington Post: A new poll has New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R) down a total of 15 points from her previous approval rating in a survey that followed her vote against requiring background checks for firearms purchases.

Ayotte's plunge underscores the changing politics around gun control and gun safety. In years past, lawmakers worried that a vote for gun control would bring the anger of the National Rifle Association. In the new reality, votes against gun control also carry a political risk, as the Ayotte poll indicates.

A full three-quarters of New Hampshire voters support such background checks, along with 56 percent of Republicans, according to Public Policy Polling. A WMUR Granite State Poll taken in January and February found that more than 9 in 10 state residents supported implementing background checks at gun shows.

"In October, the last time that PPP surveyed voters about Ayotte, she had a 48-35 approval rating," Huffington Post reports. "She has now tumbled underwater, with 46 percent disapproving and 44 percent approving. The 11-point surge in disapproval threatens Ayotte's 2016 reelection, when she could face popular Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan. Ayotte won her 2010 race by 23 points, but in a hypothetical matchup against Hassan trails 46-44."

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War on Women May Be More Wide-Ranging Than the GOP Realizes

I'm not a big fan of the headline Mother Jones chose for Kate Sheppard's piece on the GOP's ongoing attacks on reproductive freedom. "Progressives Advise GOP: Back Off On the War on Women" has the distinct flavor of concern trolling. But it turns out to be accurate; two progressive groups have advised the Republican Party to knock off the War on Women, because it's losing them elections.

It was clear in both the lead up to and the aftermath of the November 2012 election that Republican candidates are not faring well among women voters. From Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin to Mitt Romney's 11-point loss among women voters, it became painfully clear that the GOP has a lady problem. A new memo from a pair of liberal groups that pulls together some of the polling figures makes a strong case for paying more attention to this divide.

The memo, from Stephanie Schriock of EMILY’s List and Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, notes that even the Republican National Committee's own post-election report found that, "[Women] represent more than half the voting population in the country, and our inability to win their votes is losing us elections." But while Republicans have made some effort to soften the party's positioning on issues like immigration and LGBT rights, the party has not moderated its stance on reproductive rights or other issues of interest to many women voters.

The memo points to the unprecedented attack on access to abortion underway in states like North Dakota and Arkansas, the 160 Republicans that voted against the Violence Against Women Act at the federal level, and the ongoing fights over both contraception coverage and cuts to the federal family planning budget.

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GOP Loser-Heroes and the Conservative Cult of Victimhood

One of the more overlooked hurdles to the big Republican Party rebranding project is the fact that the base loves victims. Sarah Palin perfected cashing in on this tendency, making a career out of being a victim of the "lamestream media." And their love of victims necessarily makes them lovers of losers. Anyone who can play the victim card while saying, "I just might've won if it wasn't for..." is a hero. As is the case with Mike Huckabee, you can even get a show on Fox News. This isn't universally true, of course -- neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney are too beloved by the base these days -- but that's more a case of taking their losses with a measure of dignity and grace than anything. To be a rightwing loser-hero, you have to complain and gripe and whine and basically throw a child's "It's not fair!" sort of tantrum. For whatever reason, poor losers are winners in wingnuts' eyes. Graceful losers are RINOs.

But how constructive is it to continually refight the last battle? No matter how much she complains and whines, the 2008 election isn't going to be overturned somehow and Sarah Palin made vice president. Nursing grievances serves no useful purpose -- especially when you seem completely unwilling to learn a damned thing from your loss. At heart, the rightwing loser-hero represents as big a hindrance to the GOP as their runaway racism, sexism, homophobia, and Christian supremacism. When you're trying to win elections, it probably is a good idea to listen to losers -- provided the purpose is to learn from mistakes. But it's a bad idea to listen to losers who blame everyone in the world but themselves. The belief that your campaign was perfect and the media, voters, and opposition was flawed is no way to get ahead in politics. Which means this tendency among Republican voters to idolize losers is a tendency Democrats should applaud.

Behold the stupid:

NationalJournal:

Since Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus introduced the “Growth and Opportunity Project” in mid-March, the party has proven over and over and over again that it just isn’t ready to change.

The latest example of the GOP being intellectually and politically stuck in the 2012 presidential primaries comes courtesy of one of the stars of those disastrous contests: former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum. According to Santorum, the Republican Party’s path to revitalization is not a new round of engagement with women, young voters, and other groups that delivered an electoral landslide to President Barack Obama in November. No, Santorum has a different plan for saving the GOP: defunding Planned Parenthood.

The Raw Story reports that Santorum presented his three-point plan to save the party in a fundraising email over the weekend: mobilizing “pro-family conservatives,” “refuting the lies and half-truths that our detractors in the GOP are spreading about us,” and attacking the women’s’ health care provider.

Yes, let's go with Rick Santorum's ideas, seeing as how they worked so well the last time. He's got the plan to win over those lady voters.

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Stolen Seats, Unresponsive Government

Good news, at least one poll shows that Democrats are poised to take the House of Representatives and with it John Boehner's gavel. In an eight point landslide. There are few outcomes that would be better for America. After all, it's Boehner and his willingness to be led around by the nose by Tea Party Republicans that most stands in the way of progress in America. It's they who believe that up is down, that black is white, and that undermining demand at every opportunity is good for the economy. No wonder Americans reject them.

There's one little hitch: the poll is a bit optimistic and even if it's merely close to being correct, Republicans have so rigged House elections that it wouldn't be enough.

ThinkProgress:

According to a Quinnipiac poll released today, if the election were held today 43 percent of the electorate would support a Democratic U.S. House candidate, as opposed to just 35 percent who would back a Republican. That 8 point lead for Democrats is significantly more than the GOP’s margin of victory during the 2010 Republican wave election (6.6 percent) and even more that the Democratic margin of victory during the 2006 wave (7.9 percent) — when Democrats were bolstered by both an unpopular Republican president and a failing war in Iraq.

And yet, if Democrats succeed in maintaining this substantial lead through next year’s congressional election, they will likely emerge with a tiny majority of just 5 seats.
Last January, the Republican Party published a triumphant report bragging that “Republicans enjoy a 33-seat margin in the U.S. House seated yesterday in the 113th Congress, having endured Democratic successes atop the ticket and over one million more votes cast for Democratic House candidates than Republicans.” The report touts the role GOP gerrymandering played in enabling Republicans to keep the House despite losing the popular vote, citing states like Michigan, where “Michiganders cast over 240,000 more votes for Democratic congressional candidates than Republicans, but still elected a 9-5 Republican delegation to Congress.”

See, that's why I always call Republicans shameless. When you're actually bragging about how great a job you did of stealing elections, no other description fits quite so well.

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Homophobia Wedge Turns Against the GOP

There's been a wave of Senate Democrats announcing retirement lately, with South Dakota Sen. Tim Johnson being the last. That all these announcements are happening at once is not coincidental -- the party has asked people to make their intentions known now, in order to avoid surprises closer to 2014 the elections.

Another wave of announcements has come from the Senate lately -- and it could be the result of similar election strategizing.

Washington Post:

Then there were 10. No, wait. Nine.

In the past month, the rapid rise in public support for same-sex marriage has left Supreme Court justices perplexed and some political veterans, such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, struggling to keep up.

But there may be no better measure of this historic change and its disorienting speed than what has happened among the Democrats of the U.S. Senate. They are often representatives of an urban party in rural places. That makes them the zebras of Washington’s little world: perpetually vulnerable, sniffing the wind.

As recently as the last election, 17 of those Democrats did not support same-sex marriage. By this week, however, the number was smaller.

And getting more so by the day.

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Is There GOP Life After CPAC?

At our core, Republicans have comfortably remained the Party of Reagan without figuring out what comes next. Ronald Reagan is a Republican hero and role model who was first elected 33 years ago -- meaning no one under the age of 51 today was old enough to vote for Reagan when he first ran for President. Our Party knows how to appeal to older voters, but we have lost our way with younger ones. We sound increasingly out of touch.
-Republican National Committee's "Growth and Opportunity Project" report.

By now, it's no secret that the GOP is a party with problems. While many reports focus primarily on Republican outreach to Latino or women voters, the fact is that the party has alienated Americans across the board. The list of demographic groups Republicans have either lost by actually attacking them or merely by ignoring them is far, far too long to post. Listing the demographic left to them is just as informative, if much more concise: middle-aged straight, white Evangelical males. The end.

The Republican Party is in deep trouble and everyone knows it. They can't hope to win the White House without radically reforming. And, since they're one appointment away from losing the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, that means real trouble for a conservative agenda that relies more and more on judicial activism. They could conceivably lose that SCOTUS majority before the next election. But it gets a lot more likely if they lose the presidency in 2016. On the presidential side, even in normal circumstances, a Democrat winning 2016 puts 2020 in danger, through the advantage given by incumbency alone. Add in unresolved demographic issues and defeating a Democratic incumbent in 2020 would be an exercise in futility. Especially without a Supreme Court willing to hand Republicans Citizens United-type advantages.

Enter the Republican National Committee's "Growth and Opportunity Project," a 100-page report recommending major reforms to the Republican Party in advance of the 2016 elections.

"When Republicans lost in November, it was a wake-up call. And in response I initiated the most public and most comprehensive post-election review in the history of any national party," RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in prepared remarks in advance of a Monday morning speech at the National Press Club. "As it makes clear, there’s no one reason we lost. Our message was weak; our ground game was insufficient; we weren’t inclusive; we were behind in both data and digital; our primary and debate process needed improvement."

There's only one hitch: conservatives, especially those in the base, hate change.

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Why Republicans are Terrified -- And Why That Should Worry You

Last month, Nate Silver took a look at Republican chances to win a majority in the Senate. The verdict: maybe, but probably not. Of course, it really is hard to say with any certainty this far in advance, but this assessment does not say good things about the party overall. If all things were equal, Republicans would be the clear favorites. The vast majority of Senate seats being contested in 2014 are held by Democrats -- 21 of 35 -- meaning the Republican Party can use most of their resources working to gain seats, while Democrats will be forced to spend mostly on holding them. And out of all those 21, Republicans need a mere 6. In other words, they could lose all those races at a rate in the neighborhood of 3:1 and still come out on top -- but they probably won't even reach that paltry level of success.

Today Republicans get more 2014 bad news. Political analyst Stuart Rothenberg writes that Democrats will likely pick off a few governorships that cycle.

While the fight for the House of Representatives will take center stage next year, another battle could be almost as important for the two parties: control of a handful of big-state governorships.

Republicans like to point out that while they lost the presidency and seats in both chambers of Congress in 2012, their party continues to hold governorships in 30 states, including nine of the country’s 12 largest states.

But most of those governors — 23 to be exact — were elected in 2010, a great GOP year that doesn’t reflect the nation’s (or many states’) political fundamentals. (That number includes Utah’s Gary R. Herbert, who ran in a special election in 2010 and again in 2012.)

In congress, the big Tea Party wave turned into the one term Tea Party anomaly. And it's looking like that will likely hold true at the state level, as well. It's at this point that Democrats and liberals will need to pay close attention. You'll notice that these races where Republicans are expected to do poorly -- governorships and the senate -- are all statewide races. That means these races can't be rigged by gerrymandering. Not only is that why Republicans can expect to have a bad year, but it's why it's the year Republicans are most likely pull out the stops on dirty tricks to win elections. You see, if things turn out as predicted, the GOP will be royally screwed.

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The NRA Way: If at First You Don't Succeed, Try Again. Fail Better

This ought to turn out well for them. Roll Call reports that the National Rifle Association plans to spend big to bring down Democratic senators up for reelection in 2014.

The National Rifle Association will launch a print advertising campaign targeting mostly Democratic senators up for re-election in 2014, according to sources close to the group.

On Thursday, full-page ads are scheduled to run in local newspapers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Maine, North Carolina and West Virginia. They will be supplemented by digital advertising in these states and 10 others, including Alaska, Colorado, Montana, New Hampshire and South Dakota.

Additionally, the group has scheduled full-page ads to run Feb. 25 in regional editions of USA Today, reaching parts of 15 states.

The NRA is planning to spend more than $375,000 on the campaign. But the NRA's clout with voters has eroded over the years. In fact, things have gotten so bad that if the NRA really wants to hurt Democrats' chances, they might do more damage by endorsing them.

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Rove's Plan to Win Elections: Start a GOP Civil War

It's a problem that Republicans simply cannot ignore. In order to win a Republican primary, a candidate has to be acceptably insane. But, come general election time, what Republican voters think is acceptable everyone else finds unacceptable. And even when the nuts manage to get elected, people get sick of them in a big hurry. If the 2010 election was a big win for Tea Party Republicans, 2012 saw to it that many of those big winners turned out to be one-termers. So even when the nuts manage to eke out an election win, their political careers don't have legs.

One man has a plan to reverse this trend. But the problem with his plan is that he plans to replace the nuts with a different class of nuts.

Raw Story:

The organizers of American Crossroads hope to bring electoral victory to the Republican Party by defeating unelectable tea party candidates in GOP primary races. The new super PAC, called the Conservative Victory Project, will be run by American Crossroads president Steven Law and is supported by former Bush political adviser Karl Rove.

“There is a broad concern about having blown a significant number of races because the wrong candidates were selected,” Law told the New York Times on Saturday. “We don’t view ourselves as being in the incumbent protection business, but we want to pick the most conservative candidate who can win.”

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GOP Election-Rigging and Our Broken Government

In terms of votes cast for candidates to the House of Representatives this year, my home state of Wisconsin was close to evenly split. The edge went to Democrats, which is what you'd expect from a state that went for Obama. In the end, the total popular vote from all congressional races went Democrat -- 50.8%-49.2%. And here's where the math starts to get fishy: Wisconsin sent five Republicans to the House and three Democrats. This is a Republican controlled state and the congressional districts have been rigged through gerrymandering.

Wisconsin is a robbed electorate, but we aren't the worst off. That dubious award seems to go to Michigan. In that state, Democrats won the total house vote with a clear majority, 52.7%-47.3%. But they sent only five Democrats to Washington, while electing nine Republicans.

Republicans seem have Democracy bass-ackward and believe it should work the way the filibuster works in the Senate -- i.e., the side with the least votes wins. But I say "seem to" because it's pretty clear that Republicans believe democracy shouldn't work at all and that the most skillful cheater and vote-rigger deserves the office. That is, so long as they're a Republican.

Princeton University's Sam Wang, an election modeller who outperformed Nate Silver in the 2012 presidential election, has been investigating gerrymandering and finds that it's a largely Republican-caused problem.

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GOP Stalwarts Deny Any Change is Needed

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the entirely predictable GOP civil war is moving forward nicely, with those who see the demographic writing on the wall calling for some basic changes to not only messaging, but actual policy. One GOP pollster, for example, said the party needs to jettison it's homophobia. "We should remain a pro-life party, but we will get nowhere being a party standing against gay rights," warned Whit Ayres. Other prejudices and idiocies are suggested for the chopping block as well.

That many Republicans are wising up and realizing that attacking everyone other than straight evangelical white males is electoral suicide is probably a good thing for the nation. That they seem to be losing the argument to the knuckledraggers is good news for Democrats. The change-nothing faction within the GOP is "the more dominant voice, and the one gaining currency within the center of the party," according to WSJ.

It asserts that Mitt Romney's loss to President Barack Obama was primarily a tactical failure, a combination of poor articulation of GOP positions and a weak effort to register voters and move them to the polls. Better execution on both, they say, would have swung the few hundred thousand votes in a few states that would have tipped the presidential election the other way.

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Fox Unable to Fathom How GOP Screwed Themselves

Thursday, a Fox News poll showed that the public believes -- by an extremely wide margin -- that Pres. Barack Obama would probably be reelected. The video above is the reaction from the hosts of Fox's morning lobotomy patient show, Fox & Friends. As you can see, they're not taking it well. You expect Gretchen Carlson to look at the camera and ask, "We've been telling you Obama is pure evil! Haven't you people been listening to us?!?"

To be fair, the results aren't anything approaching reality, numbers-wise. The same poll shows the president winning, but that "Obama edges Romney by only 1 point and Gingrich by 5 points." So not by a comfortable margin by any means. In fact, you could call it a statistical dead heat in the Obama/Romney matchup. Still, in a non-numerical sense, the perception of that 44% who say that Obama will win is accurate within the poll, which does in fact show that Obama would win. Fox and Friends were freaking out that the largest percentage agreed with the findings of their poll.

What we see here again is what I've come to call the "clown show effect." While an endless series of GOP debates has amounted to free advertising for Republican candidates, that advertising hasn't been extremely positive. And, of course, Herman Cain's flameout didn't help any.

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GOP Enthusiasm and The Clown Show Effect

When I look at polling, I tend to use myself as a model. I look at the question and think about how I'd answer it. Maybe that's not the best way to go about it. I suppose I'm not always the average voter.

For example, take voter enthusiasm polls. For myself, enthusiasm is pretty much irrelevant. I go out and vote regardless of how stoked I am about it in any particular cycle. Using myself as a model, voter enthusiasm would be a meaningless stat. But other people apparently react differently to their own enthusiasm. The polls really do seem to reflect the final turnout.

Which is why a new Gallup poll must have Republicans feeling a little uneasy. When respondents were asked, "Thinking ahead to the election for president next year, compared to previous elections, are you more enthusiastic than usual, or less enthusiastic?" 49% of "Republicans and independents who lean Republican" reported being more enthusiastic. This compares well with the 44% of Democrats and dem leaners who say the same.

And it's at this point that the good news ends for the GOP. Their enthusiasm has dropped nearly 10% from September, when it was at 58%. Call it the "clown show effect."

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The Great State of Russconsin

Welcome to Russconsin. When Sen. Russ Feingold lost to Tea Party frootloop Ron Johnson just months ago, it appeared that the Democratic Party's moment had faded -- both in Wisconsin and nationally. Republicans descended on state houses and Washington in a "wave election," sweeping out Democrats and flipping blue to red. But then something happened. Republicans either forgot or ignored the fact that polling showed they didn't so much win these contests. Polling showed Democrats had lost. Republicans were swept in as part of a massive protest vote, not as an endorsement of their ideas.

But those Republicans decided, for one reason or another, to behave as if they'd been given a mandate. Perhaps some believed that if people actually saw GOP ideas in action, they'd come to support them -- that now was their time to shine. Maybe others thought that the people really did support their policies, but that the polling was somehow missing that fact. Still others had no interest in legislative careers; elected office being a form of activism, they simply wanted the chance to do as much damage as possible to the hated government, mandate or lack thereof  be damned.

For whatever reason, Republicans engaged in overreach almost immediately. The populace voted them in on issues of jobs and the economy; instead, the GOP began to strip people of rights, increase unemployment through cuts and layoffs, and to give away anything that wasn't nailed down to moneyed interests in the forms of tax cuts, subsidies, and privatization. In Wisconsin, as it did nationwide, this got old fast.

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The GOP's Self-Laid Medicare Trap

The Paul Ryan economic trainwreck budget plan is dead. While not killing it outright, Senate Republican leadership have all but abandoned it. And even if it had ever gotten to the president's desk, it would've been vetoed. The path to survival for Ryan's fantasy-economics porn looks nonexistent and the whole idea exists only as a statement of principle. And that principle isn't being widely embraced by the party.

It may be that Newt Gingrich did Democrats and liberals a tremendous favor by establishing the Ryan plan as a sacred cow. By criticizing it, Newt embarked on what was the worst political week in recent history and set the groundrules for any other Republican campaigns -- the Ryan plan is the most perfect and brilliant piece of legislation ever written and Republican candidates criticize it at their peril.

Which is why Democrats are so eager to make it a campaign issue. Let me correct that; Democrats want to make it the campaign issue. Polling shows that Ryan's plan is about as popular as a fart in an elevator, making it a perplexing hill for House Republicans to choose to die on.

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