Every economy needs at least three things: 1) to be moving forward, 2) to be in harmony with the people’s values, and 3) to be sustainable over the long term.  These three needs are in tension and pursuing all of them at once often requires some balancing to achieve a healthy economy.  This is why the two recent presidents with the best reputations for managing the economy were a Republican who greatly expanded the national debt, Ronald Reagan; and a Democrat who ended his term with a balanced budget, William Clinton.  Both had to bargain with opposition control of Congress. 

Democrats traditionally put most of their attention on 1) keeping the economy moving forward; while Republicans tend to emphasize 3) unsustainable levels of taxation, spending, borrowing, and debt.  The battle is then for 2) the public’s support.  When the level of debt rises so high that typical Americans become uncomfortable, the … Read the rest

Like Hurricane Sandy, the 2012 Election was not overhyped, and by the morning we knew it had packed a wallop, but the full damage assessment was not immediately clear.  People could see the damage wherever they looked but it took more than a week to realize why more and more Republican voices were responding to an election that appeared quite close in the total popular vote with such alarm.  Now that a couple of weeks have gone by we can see that on almost every level the damage for Republicans was worse than it looked initially.    

Republicans held the House in the culmination of a decade long strategy of winning governor’s mansions and state houses allowing them to draw favorable congressional districts, but the good news for Republicans ends there.  Republicans held the House with political tactics, but in the arena of ideas, this was no status quo… Read the rest

James Hazzard Co-authored this Post

Part 1 — Introduction: Signs of a Wave?

Will we see a 2012 Republican wave where Democrats are swept out because Barack Obama was elected to fix a broken economy and four years later the economy is doubtlessly still struggling?  Or will we see a Democratic wave where middle class voters reject the politics of the privileged class?  Or will these waves cancel each other out yielding the razor close election many pundits and analysts have been predicting all along — and leaving voters without any new clear voice in the public policy discussions of the coming years?  All of this will be decided as Election Night in the United States of America unfolds. 

While both Democrats and Republicans have had good months and bad throughout the seemingly endless 2012 campaign, recent polls and commentary are pointing to a very close race and a long … Read the rest

Even without a mega-storm blasting the Eastern states, we were headed into a period of polling uncertainty, but the storm intensifies the cloudiness of polling predictions from this point forward.  Like everyone else, we will take note of every new tidbit of information, especially reputable polls in presidential swing states like Florida and Colorado that were not in Sandy’s path of destruction, as well as the key Senate race battleground states, but even these will grow increasingly unreliable as election day draws closer.

The key point to understand that even a professional pollster will tell you is that public opinion polls are extremely valuable, but the least of their value lies in telling you who is ahead, and especially who is going to win the next contest.  The famous and most reported “horse race” question:  “If the election were held today, for whom would you vote?” is the least interesting … Read the rest

10/29 The aptness of the wave analogy may be proving itself in its demise. We believe a Democratic wave was indeed forming in early October. Obama was leading in the polls and in defining his opponent, and Democratic Senate candidates were leading the key races. The wave appeared to have enough momentum to potentially carry Democrats in striking distance of eking out a narrow victory in the House as well. But if you are riding a wave and slip off, you can’t just get back on. Once a wave passes, it has passed leaving us with no wave at all, just as many analysts predicted — although we still see potential for closing week or Election Night surprises. Ratings for the week: Scenario 1: Republican wave 17%. Scenario 2: Democratic wave 19%. Scenario 3: Anti-incumbent wave 8%. Scenario 4: No wave 34%. Scenario 5: Pro-incumbent wave 22%.

10/21 With President … Read the rest

All year long we have been hearing political analysts predict a very close election.  The nation, they argue, is closely divided between blocks of partisans with dramatically different views of the role of government.  Well, we will let Mitt Romney explain the theory: “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims…” well perhaps you have already seen this quote. 

What this theory does not explain is how the last three elections were historic wave elections, close for much of the summer but breaking decisively for the Democrats in 2006 and 2008, and for the Republicans in 2010.  Since December 2011, CenteredPolitics has rejected the “close election all the way to the finish” theory arguing that 2012 was far more likely to … Read the rest

For all of this year we have rejected the widely stated conventional wisdom that the closely divided electorate means this will be a razor thin election.  The electorate has been this closely divided for more than a decade (at least going back to the 2000 election that was decided by a Supreme Court Decision to stop counting the votes) but wave elections have been more common than narrow victories over this period.  In most cases the polls remain close throughout the summer, but diverge as the election draws closer, and often the election night yields an additional surprise in the magnitude of the shock.

This pattern certainly describes the two most recent national elections.  The Democratic wave in 2008 and the Republican wave in 2010 both took shape no earlier than August.  In 2008, Barack Obama led John McCain by 3 percentage points in the Real Clear Politics average  … Read the rest

“The shoe is on the other… table which has turned.” Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network

Remember when health care reform was widely popular?  In 2008 and 2009 overwhelming majorities supported reform of the health care system, but CenteredPolitics.com warned that public opinion would swing against the effort based on an analysis of polls taken then, and polls taken during Bill Clinton’s health reform effort. 

If Republicans make re-litigating health care a major topic for this election, they will find that they are now pushing the health care boulder up the same hill that Clinton and then Obama tackled.  They can’t repeal without replacing but the public has no appetite for three more years of health care reform partisan squabbling.

The poll swung against ClintonCare for three predictable reasons, that were only stronger in 2009 when Obama started his effort, and all are still in effect today. 

1)      Complexity:  Health … Read the rest

A lot of people are looking at close polls in the presidential horse race, and generic congressional preference and predicting a return to the almost evenly divided red state-blue state nation that characterized the 2000 and 2004 elections.  This may well prove true, but most elections, including the most recent even numbered years 2008 and 2010, have been wave elections with more decisive outcomes.  And most of the time, the forces that move swing voters to line up behind one of the sides are not nearly as obvious six months before the vote as they are after the victory party for one side and the lights go out for the other.

In the next six months we are likely to see history making events that challenge and change our assumptions.  This is true of most six month periods.  Elections make history, and elections are swayed by history being made.  Most … Read the rest

We happened upon a debate between the influential centrist group the Third Way and Huffington Post featured blogger Mike Lux.  Uninvited, we are inserting ourselves as referees because this really is a case where both sides are right, and the Democratic message-meisters would benefit greatly from incorporating the insights coming from both perspectives.  The message that comes out of the synthesis of these two points of view is the strongest Democratic economic message in 2012.

Third Way takes on the question of which is a more effective frame for the Democrats’ economic message in 2012, a fairness framework or an opportunity framework?  Their survey of independent voters in 12 swing states, with particular emphasis on a narrower swath of swing independents (defined as independents that are neither strongly favorable nor strongly unfavorable to either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney) concludes that the opportunity frame wins hands down.

 Opportunity trumps … Read the rest