Posts published in November, 2012

Campaign Stops

Is Rush Limbaugh’s Country Gone?

By Thomas B. Edsall

The morning after the re-election of President Obama, Rush Limbaugh told his listeners:

I went to bed last night thinking we’re outnumbered. I went to bed last night thinking all this discussion we’d had about this election being the election that will tell us whether or not we’ve lost the country. I went to bed last night thinking we’ve lost the country.  I don’t know how else you look at this.

The conservative talk show host, who had been an upbeat, if initially doubtful, Romney supporter throughout the campaign, was on a post-election downer:

In a country of children where the option is Santa Claus or work, what wins? And say what you want, but Romney did offer a vision of traditional America. In his way, he put forth a great vision of traditional America, and it was rejected. It was rejected in favor of a guy who thinks that those who are working aren’t doing enough to help those who aren’t. And that resonated.

Limbaugh echoed a Republican theme that was voiced before and after the election: Barack Obama has unleashed a coalition of Americans “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it — that that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them” — as Mitt Romney put it in his notorious commentary on the 47 percent.

You can find this message almost everywhere on the right side of the spectrum. The Heritage Foundation, for example, annually calculates an “Index of Dependence on Government,” which grows every year:

Today, more people than ever before depend on the federal government for housing, food, income, student aid, or other assistance once considered to be the responsibility of individuals, families, neighborhoods, churches, and other civil society institutions. The United States reached another milestone in 2010: For the first time in history, half the population pays no federal income taxes. It is the conjunction of these two trends—higher spending on dependence-creating programs, and an ever-shrinking number of taxpayers who pay for these programs—that concerns those interested in the fate of the American form of government.

William Bennett, conservative stalwart, television commentator and secretary of education under President Reagan, complained on the CNN Web site that Democrats have been successful in setting

the parameters and focus of the national and political dialogue as predominantly about gender, race, ethnicity and class. This is the paradigm, the template through which many Americans, probably a majority, more or less view the world, our country, and the election. It is a divisive strategy and Democrats have targeted and exploited those divides. How else can we explain that more young people now favor socialism to capitalism?

In fact, the 2011 Pew Research Center poll Bennett cites demonstrates that in many respects conservatives are right to be worried:

Not only does a plurality (49-43) of young people hold a favorable view of socialism — and, by a tiny margin (47-46), a negative view of capitalism — so do liberal Democrats, who view socialism positively by a solid 59-33; and African Americans, 55-36. Hispanics are modestly opposed, 49-44, to socialism, but they hold decisively negative attitudes toward capitalism, 55-32.

Much of the focus in the media in recent years has been on the growing hard-line stance of the Republican Party. At the same time, there are significant developments taking place as a new left alliance forms to underpin the Democratic Party. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira originally described this alliance in 2002 as the emerging Democratic majority in a pioneering book of the same name. More recently, the pollster Stan Greenberg and a group of liberal activists have described it as the “rising American electorate.”

Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who has devoted much of her work to analyzing the changing shape of the liberal and conservative coalitions, said in an e-mail that the rising American electorate

will have profound implications because the R.A.E. has a very different approach to the role for government, very different views on race and tolerance, different views on gender roles, and very different views on economic opportunity and security. These are some of the biggest divides in our culture.

Robert Borosage, co-director of the liberal-left Campaign for America’s Future, put it more bluntly in a blog post:

In our Gilded Age of extreme inequality, with a middle class that increasingly understands the rules are rigged against them, this was the first election in what is likely to be an era of growing class warfare.

Two post-election polls – one released Nov. 14 by the Democracy Corps (founded by Stan Greenberg and James Carville), the other released Nov. 16 by the Public Religion Research Institute – reveal the decisively liberal views of the core constituencies within the rising American electorate and its support for government activism, especially measures to help the disadvantaged.

The findings from the P.R.R.I. survey are very illuminating:

*When voters were asked whether cutting taxes or investing in education and infrastructure is the better policy to promote economic growth, the constituencies of the new liberal electorate consistently chose education and infrastructure by margins ranging from 2-1 to 3-2 — African Americans by 62-33, Hispanics by 61-37, never-married men by 56-38, never-married women by 64-30, voters under 30 by 63-34, and those with post-graduate education by 60-33.

Conservative constituencies generally chose lowering taxes by strong margins — whites by 52-42, married men by 59-34, married women by 51-44, all men by 52-41; older voters between the ages of 50 and 65 by 54-42.

*The constituencies that make up the rising American electorate are firmly in favor of government action to reduce the gap between rich and poor, by 85-15 among blacks, 74-26 for Hispanics; 70-30 never-married men; 83-15 never-married women; and 76-24 among voters under 30. Conservative groups range from lukewarm to opposed: 53-47 for men; 53-47 among voters 50-65; 46-54 among married men; 52-47 among all whites.

*One of the clearest divides between the rising American electorate and the rest of the country is in responses to the statement “Government is providing too many social services that should be left to religious groups and private charities. Black disagree 67-32; Hispanics disagree 57-40; never-married women 70-27; never-married men, 59-41; young voters, 66-34; and post-grad, 65-34. Conversely, whites agree with the statement 54-45; married men agree, 60-39; married women, 55-44; all men, 55-43.

The Democracy Corps survey specifically broke out the collective views of the liberal alliance and contrasted them with the views of those on the right. Some findings:

*By a margin of 60-13, voters on the left side of the spectrum favor raising taxes on incomes above $1 million, while voters outside of the left are much less supportive, 39-25. In the case of raising the minimum wage, the left backs a hike by an overwhelming 64-6 margin, while those on the right are far less supportive, 32-18.  The rising American electorate backs raising the minimum wage by 64-6, while the people outside it back a hike by just 32-18. The left coalition supports a carbon tax or fee by 43-14 while right-leaning voters are opposed, 37-24.

Policies supported by the rising American electorate — which closely overlaps with the Obama coalition — provoke intense opposition from the right. In the aftermath of the election, Romney blamed his defeat on the “gifts” Obama handed out to “the African-American community, the Hispanic community and young people.”

In fact, the rising American electorate represents a direct threat to the striking array of government benefits for the affluent that the conservative movement has won over the past 40 years. These include the reduction of the top income tax rate from 50 percent in 1986 to 35 percent; the 15 percent tax rate on dividend and capital gains income, which was 39.9 percent in 1977; the lowering of the top estate tax rate from 70 percent in 1981, with just $175,000 exempted from taxation, to a top rate of 35 percent this year with $5.1 million exempted from taxation.

At the same time, the Pew survey cited above shows the high levels of skepticism and hostility toward capitalism on the part of the emerging Democratic majority. Insofar as the liberal coalition succeeds in electing senators and representatives who share those views, the business community will have increasing difficulty in winning approval of its deregulated market and free trade agenda.

As Obama negotiates with Republican House and Senate leaders to prevent a dive over the “fiscal cliff,” he will be under strong pressure from his reinvigorated liberal supporters to take a tough stand in support of tax hikes on the well-to-do and to more firmly limit spending cuts.

“Looking ahead to their post-election agenda, this is not a group looking for ‘austerity,’ ” the Democracy Corps wrote in a report accompanying its post-election survey. “Indeed, their issues are explicitly progressive and investment-oriented,” in terms of human capital. The report went on:

The rising American electorate’s most important priority for the president and the Congress is “investing in education,” followed by “protecting Social Security and Medicare.”

In effect, the 21st century version of class conflict sets the stage for an exceptionally bitter face-off between the left and the right in Congress. The national government is facing the prospect of forced austerity, weighing such zero-sum choices as raising capital gains taxes or cutting food stamps, slashing defense spending or restricting unemployment benefits, establishing a 15 cents-a-gallon gasoline tax or pushing citizens off the Medicaid rolls, pushing central bank policy favorable to the financial services industry or curtailing Medicare eligibility.

In broader terms, the political confrontation pits taxpayers, who now form the core of the center-right coalition, against tax consumers who form the core of the center-left. According to the Tax Policy Center, 46.4 percent of all tax filers had no federal income tax liability in 2011 (although most people pay a combination of state, sales, excise, property and other levies).There are clear exceptions to this dichotomy, as many Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries (tax recipients) vote Republican, and many college-educated upper-income citizens of all races and ethnicities (tax payers) vote Democratic. Nonetheless, the overarching division remains, and the battle lines are drawn over how to distribute the costs of the looming fiscal crisis. The outcome of this policy fight will determine whether Limbaugh is correct to fear that his side has “lost the country.”

Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics,” which was published earlier this year.

This is the last column in the 2012 edition of Campaign Stops. We began on a Sunday a year before the election with a piece by Thomas B. Edsall on how politics look when governments don’t have enough money. We end today with another piece by Mr. Edsall on the rising American electorate that returned President Obama to the White House. 

In between we have published hundreds of pieces — by feminist political scientists, conservative historians, demographically oriented statisticians, political theorists, religious thinkers and many others, including one every week by the Op-Ed columnists Charles M. Blow and Ross Douthat. Mr. Blow and Mr. Douthat will continue to write their print columns on the weekend and to be a major presence online during the week. Tom Edsall will remain with The Times as a weekly online columnist after he takes a well-deserved rest (his contributions to Campaign Stops totaled almost 100,000 words). 

Campaign Stops also published more than 95,000 comments from its passionate readers, some of whom could be columnists themselves — a huge benefit of the kind of open format that the web provides. We’ll be back in November 2015, ready to debate the issues that have driven American political history since the beginning, but also eager to find out what fresh developments we’ll be talking about that we can’t anticipate now.

A New Southern Strategy

By The Editors

Karen L. Cox writes in the Sunday Review that the use of the term “Confederacy” to describe the South says a lot about how hard it is for the region to move beyond its historical reputation, however richly deserved, for one that reflects more current realities.

Read the entire article.

Beware the Smart Campaign  | 

“I AM not a number. I am a free man!” was the famous cry of prisoner Number Six, who could never escape his Kafkaesque village on the 1960s television show “The Prisoner.” This is a prescient cry for an era when numbers follow us everywhere. Jim Messina, the victorious Obama campaign manager, probably agrees that you are not a number. That’s because you are four numbers.

Read more of Zeynep Tufekci’s Op-Ed »

Campaign Stops

Social and Anti-Social Media

By Richard Parker

On election night, it became the most re-tweeted photo in the history of social media: a picture of President Obama hugging his wife, Michelle.

But the dissemination of that iconic image is only the tip of a far larger iceberg that sank Mitt Romney. Yes, demographics helped Obama beat him. But so did the changing landscape of media consumption. The very groups — young women, Hispanics, African Americans, Asian-Americans — that made the difference are among the fastest adopters of social and mobile media.

A news feed of President Obama participating in early voting on Oct. 25, 2012 in Chicago. Scott Olson/Getty Images

The Obama campaign understood and rode this convergence of demographics and media, even as Karl Rove spent $300 million on television advertising that helped garner nearly two-thirds of white males only to find himself, to his everlasting surprise, on the losing side of the national election.

Republicans may lament that this is not their father’s country but more to the point this is not their father’s marketing either. Irreversible change in the country’s demography collided with irresistible change in the consumption of media. While older white males get their information from television the people who made the difference are on Twitter, Tumblr and smart phones generally. They may even be making decisions about politics differently than their predecessors and there will only be more of them entering the market and the electorate.

In 2008, much of the after-action analysis of social media was of the “gee-whiz” variety — Obama outperformed McCain in this new medium! — yet the precise effect was not exactly clear, other than that it helped win over younger voters. It relied, to a large extent, on sheer volume. The Obama team out-staffed, out-emailed and simply swamped the McCain effort with dozens as many Twitter followers and 400 percent more followers on Facebook.

But the Obama effort in 2008 built more than buzz; it created conversions, according to academic research performed by Jennifer Aaker, a business professor at Stanford, along with researcher Victoria Chang. The campaign built 5 million supporters on social networks, had 2.5 million followers on Facebook, and 50 million viewers watched 14 million hours of video on YouTube, which was then pretty new. This translated into huge offline results: 230,000 events and $639 million raised from 3 million donors. On Election Day, every supporter with a mobile phone number the Obama campaign had in its database got three text message reminders to vote. Obama won by more than 8 million votes.

Of course, an exhaustive study of Obama’s social media in 2012 has not yet been conducted — it’s only a matter of time — but the initial reporting indicates a similar performance. The president’s team, with the head-start of a huge database of supporters, just out-muscled Romney’s campaign. By September 2012, Obama’s Facebook page had 1.2 million likes — while Romney’s had just half as much, according to Inc.’s Meaghan Ouimet. Obama had twice as many YouTube likes, comments and views as Romney —and easily 20 times as many re-tweets as the Republican nominee. Interestingly, the Obama campaign has not yet been all that eager to share its social media victory strategy, though Pro Publica is busy trying to crack the story.

The difference in content and effort created results. Women for Obama, run by the Obama team on Facebook, created a story line mixing text and graphics: It was about the rights of women, their desire to control their own health care and their voting power. Only when that narrative was engaging users did the Obama campaign make the ask, getting them to donate, call or vote. “We Vote, We Decide” was posted right before the election and the page had 1.3 million likes. On the other hand, Moms for Mitt, run by the Romney campaign, had less thematic construction, featuring photos of volunteers, images of Romney and his running mate, and posts urging the “moms” to vote or make calls. It netted just 93,000 likes.

Generally speaking, social media has not proven itself able to change someone’s mind as much as it is capable of putting together communities of like-minded people. We don’t know the correlation of “liking,” say, on Facebook with voting behavior. But putting people together who are like-minded allows them to take other actions: to reach out to more friends online or to join old-school telephone drives and events and also to take more committed actions, like raising money. Obama raised $147 million from small donors who chipped in $200 or less, nearly three-and-a-half times as much as Romney. The barrage of constant e-mails from both campaigns also likely didn’t change minds. It was just the kind of consistency — however irritating — that reminded people to donate and then to vote.

This is about more than media. The Obama campaign correctly understood that to reach certain cohorts most effectively it would have to move beyond traditional media to the media that most resonates with Hispanics, young women, African-Americans and even Asian-Americans. Consider Latinos. The 50.5 million Hispanics in the country have higher usage rates of mobile and social media than Anglos. African Americans and Hispanics have adopted Twitter at faster rates than whites or Anglos.

Consider women, too, of various ethnic backgrounds, who have embraced smart phones faster than their non-Hispanic white counterparts. More than three in five women who are of African American, Hispanic or Asian-American had a smartphone in 2011, compared to just one in three white women, according to Nielsen.

More than three in four Asian-American women believe that smartphones improve their lives, while just one in four is inclined to say the same thing about the most tried and trusted medium in American politics: Television.

The Obama campaign spent a fortune on traditional advertising, too, some of which also targeted, women and Latinos. The Democrats, though, leavened their communications spending with other media, like any smart marketer today. Which brings us to Republicans and their reliance on television.  Not only did they think the demographic coalition that turned out in 2008 was a fluke, but they were preaching, through the television set, to their own choir. Less than one-in-five adults under 30 watch cable television news, according the Pew Research Center, while over half of people over 65 do.

Many of these insights are drawn from the world of market research, not political campaigns, and they’re fast becoming fairly common knowledge. Market research is actively helping companies embrace, say, the $1 trillion Hispanic market, as opposed to threatening to get people to “self-deport.” In business it’s about addition, not subtraction. In California, Alan Zorfas, the president of the market research firm Motista, found a way to explain how President Obama — on the wrong side of so many traditional polling measures, like right-track-wrong track and the economy — was able to defy gravity. Different cohorts simply liked him, thought he was cooler or believed he truly empathized with them, regardless of his track record. “Obama is an Apple,” Zorfas told me, “while Romney is a Dell.”

All of this suggests not only that a key shift has long since gotten underway in demographics and media, but also that younger voters make decisions differently. They are constantly informed, messaged and reinforced by their deluge of text and Twitter messages — all coming from their friends, families and co-workers — hundreds if not thousands of times a day. While Obama lost a few points off his overall white vote, he still swamped Romney among all people under 30, the first and fastest adopters of social media, by 5 million votes (even though fewer younger voters turned out than in 2008). As if to underscore the Democratic edge, even after the polls closed in Virginia, the Obama campaign was still texting volunteers to make sure everyone in line stayed and voted.

Right now, the Republican Party is talking a lot about immigration, Marco Rubio and copying Obama’s get-out-the-vote effort — all of which suggests a profound misunderstanding of what really happened in 2012 and could set the stage for a repeat in 2016.

Richard Parker is the president of Parker Research in Austin, Tex. His commentary is syndicated by McClatchy-Tribune.

Is the Voting Rights Act Doomed?

By Nathaniel Persily

DOES the re-election of the first black president mean the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is unnecessary and perhaps unconstitutional? The Supreme Court’s decision last week to consider a constitutional challenge to a key section of the act suggests that a perverse outcome of the 2012 campaign may be that President Obama’s victory spells doom for the civil rights law most responsible for African-American enfranchisement.

The central question in the constitutional debate is whether times have changed enough in the nearly five decades since the act’s passage to suggest that the law has outlived its usefulness. The unprecedented flexing of racial minorities’ political muscle on Nov. 6 does make it clear how much times have changed. But a campaign marred by charges of voter suppression and Election Day mishaps also makes the need for federal protection of voting rights clearer than ever.

Who Votes?

A series about the complexities of voters and voting.

The case before the court, coming out of Shelby County, Ala., concerns Section 5 of the act, which requires some states and jurisdictions (mostly in the South) to seek permission from the federal government before they can implement any law related to voting. If a voter-ID law, redistricting plan or other election law is seen as worsening the position of racial minorities, then the Department of Justice or a federal court in Washington will not allow the voting change to go into effect. Earlier this year, for example, a federal court struck down Texas’s recently enacted voter-ID law and Congressional redistricting plan on that basis.

Unless a covered jurisdiction gets itself out from under the act by showing a clean voting rights record for the previous decade, it will be required to seek federal permission for all its voting laws until the law is set to expire in 2031.

The Supreme Court has reaffirmed the constitutionality of Section 5 four times. Congress re-enacted it in 2006 with tremendous bipartisan support. But times have changed at the court. Specifically, the constitutional standard for enforcing civil rights has become more restrictive, requiring such laws to be proportional to the constitutional evil they seek to prevent or remedy. As a result, the court has struck down or narrowed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

Relying on this restrictive standard, challengers to the act argue, with some reason, that the list of covered jurisdictions no longer resembles the “America’s Most Wanted” of voting-rights violators that it did in 1965. In recent years we have witnessed one electoral dysfunction after another in jurisdictions not covered by the act, like Ohio and Miami-Dade County in Florida. (Of course, the covered states have the Department of Justice looking over their shoulders, so maybe the Voting Rights Act is performing its job.)

In a coarse and obvious sense, the re-election of a black president serves as a strong reminder that the historic obstacles to minority voting rights like literacy tests and poll taxes have been eliminated. The much discussed rise in the minority share of the electorate testifies to the decisive electoral power that previously disenfranchised communities now possess. Even if the president received only 15 percent of the white vote in Alabama and 11 percent in Mississippi, according to exit polls, he was able to assemble a diverse winning coalition elsewhere.

President Obama’s re-election, or the circumstances of any presidential race, should be irrelevant to the constitutional question of whether Congress can require certain states to get federal permission for their voting laws. The differences between the average school-board election and a high-profile presidential race are huge. But had Mitt Romney been elected against the backdrop of charges of minority voter suppression, the argument for removing one of the few protections against discrimination in voting would have been a nonstarter.

Defenders of the Voting Rights Act have gained some ammunition from this election, despite the high-water mark it achieved for minority political participation. They will point to the voting laws and redistricting plans like those passed in Texas last year that the act prevented from going into effect as examples of Section 5’s continuing utility. Indeed, since 2005, seven of the nine states fully covered by the act — Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia — have passed voter ID laws or other statutes that have made voting more difficult. Opponents will counter that it is unfair for federal law to allow Kansas to implement voter-ID laws that would be impermissible in Texas.

Civil rights groups and election reformers should begin preparing now for the likelihood that the court will strike down the Voting Rights Act. In a Texas case three years ago, the court warned that the act was living on borrowed time, and by the end of this Supreme Court term, that time may run out.

We saw in this election, as in every one since the debacle in 2000, the system’s potential for a full breakdown. On election night, Mr. Obama mentioned the need to do something, at a minimum, to address the unbearably long wait times that greeted some voters. But the reforms should not stop there.

Congress needs to enact national rules governing voter registration, provisional and absentee ballots, and voter verification and access in a new Voting Rights Act tailored to the problems confronting American democracy today. The Voting Rights Act may have killed off historic barriers to minority political participation, but new challenges emerge with each election cycle.

Nathaniel Persily is a professor of law and political science at Columbia.

Campaign Stops

Notes for Next Time

By Ross Douthat

Thanks to David Petraeus’s adultery and the so-called “fiscal cliff,” it’s almost possible to forget that there was a presidential election just a week ago. (And God knows the Republicans would like to!) But before the campaign disappears into the haze of social life in Tampa and tax reform proposals in Washington, here are four under-the-radar lessons from President Obama’s successful re-election bid.

Even in national races, politics is still local.

While Mitt Romney ran a national campaign — emphasizing the economy and the unemployment rate to voters in Reno, Racine and Raleigh alike — the White House ran a much more regionalized effort. If you lived in Northern Virginia, the president’s pitch focused on abortion and contraception. If you lived in Ohio, the race was a referendum on outsourcing and the auto bailout. If you watched Spanish-language television in Colorado or Nevada, the campaign was all about the president’s backdoor implementation of the DREAM Act.

Some of these regional pitches mostly escaped the national press’s notice. In early October, the Atlantic’s Molly Ball reported on an Obama ad running quietly in rural Ohio, which attacked Romney from the right on coal, turning his environmentalist record in Massachusetts against him. After the election, Obama’s Florida campaign bragged about having used Paul Ryan’s past support for lifting the Cuban embargo to get a foot in the door with Florida’s reliably Republican Cuban community.

On paper, some of these pitches seemed to conflict with one another. The White House’s leftward pivot on abortion risked alienating socially conservative Hispanics. The raw economic nationalism of Obama’s Midwest strategy made an uneasy fit with his liberalizing push on immigration. His pro-coal and anti-Cuba pitches could have prompted pushback from liberal activists.

But because the Romney campaign never found a way to exploit these tensions within the Democratic coalition, Obama was able to narrowcast successfully. He won the states he needed, not with a single unifying message, but with a series of appeals carefully calibrated to the realities on the ground.

It’s easier to fight public-sector unions than it is to fight Medicare.

The Republican Party’s overconfidence throughout the campaign season was partially inspired by the party’s recent experience at the state-house level, where Scott Walker and Chris Christie had taken on entrenched liberal interest groups and survived the predictable backlash. The Walker recall election in Wisconsin, in particular, loomed large in Republican hopes for tipping that state into Romney’s column: It was a case where the Democratic coalition was out-mobilized in a state that Democrats usually win, and it seemed to many conservatives to be a sign that even voters in blue states understood that what Walter Russell Mead calls the “blue social model” needed reform.

This optimistic theory tended to downplay recent counter-examples, from Ohio to California, where the blue social model proved more popular than the Republican governors attempting to reform it. But what overconfident Republicans really missed was the fact that the blue social model looks different at the state and national levels, and what works in a state-level debate may not resonate as much in a national campaign.

In many blue states, what makes the current fiscal picture unsustainable are mostly the promises that legislators have made to public-sector unions — a powerful and influential constituency, to be sure, but ultimately just one constituency, which can be successfully isolated and cast as an enemy of the common good.

At the national level, by contrast, our fiscal problems are almost all bound up in entitlement spending — and while there are specific interest groups that benefit from that spending, the ultimate beneficiaries are, well, all of us. This makes the conservative pitch on reforming Medicare and Social Security a harder sell to voters than the pitch that Republican governors have been making on union benefits and pensions. And it helps explain why, conservative optimism about the state’s tilt notwithstanding, the same Wisconsin electorate that kept Walker in office last year delivered the state to the Democratic ticket pretty easily last week.

A poll worker fills out provisional ballot paperwork for the  2012 presidential election in Atlanta.Erik S. Lesser/European Pressphoto AgencyA poll worker in Atlanta fills out provisional ballot paperwork for the  2012 presidential election.

The black vote still matters. So does the white vote.

In the days immediately following Mitt Romney’s defeat, it seemed like the only demographic issue anyone wanted to talk about was the Republican Party’s problem with the Hispanic vote. But, as The New Republic’s Nate Cohn has pointed out in two important post-election pieces, Romney’s defeat owed as much to how African-Americans and whites voted as it did to his underperformance with Latinos.

Nationally, the black vote held at around its 2008 levels and Romney slightly exceeded John McCain’s low, low, low percentages. But in the South and Midwest, black turnout was up from 2008, which helped deliver key states like Virginia and Ohio to the incumbent. For example, Cohn notes that “Obama’s margin of victory in Ohio was almost entirely attributable to historic levels of black turnout in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Toledo.” Meanwhile, while Romney won a record-high share of the white vote, that share was padded by huge margins across the South. In crucial states like Iowa and New Hampshire, he actually ran behind George W. Bush’s 2004 totals with white voters. And there’s evidence that in battlegrounds like Ohio, many Republican-leaning white voters just decided to stay home – which was all Obama really needed them to do.

The bad news for Republicans in these numbers is that their party’s problems are pan-ethnic, and can’t just be solved by pandering on immigration. The good news is that they have multiple places where they could plausibly improve their performance post-Obama. Just winning 12 percent of the black vote instead of Romney’s 6 percent, say, or matching or exceeding Bush’s performance with Midwestern whites, would go a long way toward rebuilding a Republican majority.

The advantages of incumbency keep going up.

The get-out-the-vote edge has shifted to the Democrats over the last eight years for a variety of reasons, from the tech community’s leftward tilt to the particular talents of Obama campaign advisers like Jim Messina. But in part, like Karl Rove and George W. Bush in 2004, team Obama reaped the benefits of incumbency, parlaying their experience running a national campaign once before and the advantage of not having to go through a primary campaign into a financial and organizational edge that any rival would have had difficulty overcoming.

Such advantages have long existed in our politics, which is why so few incumbent presidents taste defeat. But with the pace of digital change so swift, and the get-out-the-vote toolkits so complex and cutting edge, the advantages of incumbency may be steadily increasing. Especially in campaigns that come down to turnout in a few key states, having four full years to hire, recruit, innovate and organize – and, of course, to carpet the swing states with field offices – can make all the difference in world.

There won’t be an incumbent on the ballot in 2016. But Obama does have a debt to the Clintons to pay off, and bequeathing Hillary his campaign operation might settle it. That possibility alone should inspire any Republican who hopes to improve on Romney’s showing to internalize the lessons of this campaign as early as possible, leaving plenty of time to get ready for whatever surprises await.

Campaign Stops

Red Versus Blue in a New Light

By Andrew Gelman and Avi Feller

The basic question driving the 2012 campaign was always clear: could Mitt Romney gain enough of the vote among older, upper-income white Americans to overcome President Obama’s overwhelming advantage among young, low-income and minority voters?

As in previous elections, richer voters leaned Republican while lower-income voters came out strong as Democrats.

Fig. 1Fig. 1

But there’s much more to this story. The maps we have made show that the election was not just about red and blue states. What’s actually going on is that the division between red and blue America is mostly about a split among richer voters.

To picture this, imagine two alternative universes for the 2012 election. In the first, only individuals making less than $50,000 a year can vote; in the second, only those making more than $100,000 a year can. Based on exit polls from Election Day, we have a decent idea of how these scenarios would play out.

In the first universe, Barack Obama wins in a 1984-style landslide, with a near sweep of the Electoral College and around 60 percent of the popular vote.

In the second universe, Mitt Romney wins with a healthy 54 percent of the popular vote. Though he still carries the red states, a landslide remains out of his grasp — wealthy voters in blue states like New York and California still support Obama by comfortable margins. We’ll come back to this thought in a moment.

The maps in fig. 2 show the election results for four income groups as measured by exit polls (with blanks for the states that were not polled):

Fig. 2

Remarkably, this same pattern has occurred in every presidential contest over the past twenty years. Lower-income voters consistently support the Democratic candidate in nearly every state. Upper-income voters, on the other hand, are more mixed in their political views: wealthy voters in Mississippi are strongly Republican while wealthy voters in Massachusetts are strongly Democratic. Extensive analyses of survey information from these elections show that this relationship holds even when controlling for age, race, sex and education.

In other words, contrary to what you have heard, there’s only a strong red America-blue America split toward the top of the income distribution. Toward the bottom, the electoral map is a sea of blue.

Why does this happen? Our research on opinion poll data from earlier elections finds that lower-income Americans tend to vote based on economic issues, while richer voters consider social issues as well as economics in their voting decisions. This is sometimes called post-materialism: the idea that, as individuals or groups become more comfortable, they can afford to think beyond their immediate needs.

The so-called culture war between red and blue America is concentrated in the upper half of the income distribution, and voting patterns reflect this.

We can break down the electorate by age similarly. Among young voters, Obama won a sizable 60 percent of the vote, with a solid majority in nearly all states included in the exit polls. In contrast, Romney won a solid 56 percent among senior citizens, with a strong showing in the red states (including two-thirds of elderly Arizonans), but with a sizable majority supporting the president in blue states like New York and Massachusetts.

Fig. 3

Similar patterns show up if you break up the state-by-state vote by sex or race.

Fig. 4

In all these cases, the red-state, blue-state division is sharper in categories that tend to vote Republican. Put another way: Obama’s voting blocs look about the same everywhere in the country, while Romney’s vary more from state to state.

This is not a story about the Obama campaign’s strategy or Mitt Romney’s failures as a presidential candidate — the demographic maps for 2004 and 2008 look very similar. The red-blue electoral map that we’re used to poring over is mainly the result of a political and geographic divide among American voters at the older, richer and whiter end of the socioeconomic spectrum.

Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia and the author of “Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do.” Avi Feller is a graduate student in statistics at Harvard and worked from 2010 to 2011 in the Office of Management and Budget in Washington.

Campaign Stops

The Culture War and the Jobs Crisis

By Thomas B. Edsall

Struggling to remain optimistic the day after the election, the anti-abortion activist Charles A. Donovan, president of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, argued that the moral collapse he sees in the re-election of President Obama and in Democratic Senate victories is only a temporary setback.

On the National Review web site, Donovan declared:

We may be on the verge of a new Babylonian captivity for religious conservatives. As we know, the story does not end there.

Actually, Donovan and his fellow right-wingers can expect to be living in a Babylonian captivity for quite some time. The right has lost the culture war.

On Nov. 6, voters in three states (Maine, Maryland and Washington) approved same-sex marriage; two states  (Colorado and Washington) passed ballot initiatives allowing the recreational use of marijuana; Wisconsin elected the first openly gay Senator, Tammy Baldwin; and Florida voters rejected a ballot initiative prohibiting the use of public funds for abortions by ten points.

In the next Congress, women and minorities will hold a majority of the Democratic Party’s House seats  — white men, in other words, for the first time in history, will not make up a majority of a party’s delegation to the House. Every member of the House and Senate from New Hampshire will be a woman and the total number of female senators will jump from 15 to 20 in 2013.

To the dismay of the conservative movement, on virtually every burning issue that preoccupies the right, the country has moved steadily leftward. Election Day exit polling found, by a margin of 49 to 46, that a plurality of voters supported same-sex marriage. The same survey found that 59 percent of voters believe abortion should be legal in all (29 percent) or most (30 percent) cases, while only 36 percent believe it should be illegal in most (23 percent) or all (13 percent) cases.

The chart, Fig. 1, from Gallup on the “morality” of same-sex “relations” reflects the leftward cultural trend with the percentage of respondents saying that homosexual relations are morally acceptable growing from 40 percent in 2001 to 54 percent in 2012:

GallupFig. 1. CLICK TO ENLARGE

Similarly, researchers at American National Election Studies have found continuing growth, Fig. 2, in the level of support for the equality of women:

Fig. 2.

Republicans and conservatives are clearly struggling to come to terms with the changing character of the nation.

From the hard right, Erick Erickson calls for purging the Republican party of moderates in order to achieve ideological purity:

We must lay the groundwork now with fresh ideas embedded with timeless principles sold by voices who understand people forget and must be reminded why America is great and why conservatism helped make it that way. We must continue, as a conservative movement, challenging and ending the political careers of Republicans who carry the banner of conservatism while selling it out.

It is unlikely, however, that bloodletting within the Republican Party will solve its current problems. The roots of the party’s dilemma run deeper, with two parallel and mutually reinforcing developments structuring political change

The first is the coalescing of “issue clusters” – particularly on the left.

Throughout much of the period of conservative domination of presidential elections from 1968 to 1988 — and in terms of Congressional power from 1994 to 2006 — the Republican Party had a major election-day edge: there was far more ideological cohesion and less divisive conflict on the right than on the left. Conservatives, from white evangelicals to corporate C.E.O.s, found common ground in their support for an aggressive national defense and in their opposition to what they saw as a coercive, redistributive tax collecting and intrusively regulatory domestic government.

The left was often split: between environmentalists and pro-development unions; between proponents and opponents of affirmative action; between law-and-order whites and liberal advocates of criminal defendants’ rights. As a result, the Democratic Party was vulnerable to Republican wedge issue strategies that produced such famous political commercials as Jesse Helms’s “Hands” — a k a. “White Hands” — and Ronald Reagan’s “Bear”

More recently, there has been a steady diminution of conflict and a growing consensus on the left culminating in the 2008 and 2012 election victories. Issues now linked – clustered — in the minds of many Democratic voters include not only traditional socio-cultural, moral and racial issues like women’s, minority and gay rights, abortion and contraception, non-marital child-bearing, and the obligation of government to provide a safety net, but also to matters pertaining to the overarching role of government in generating greater social justice.

In this view, the achievement of a just society requires a government active in pursuing a progressive distribution of income (through the tax code, for example), and the reduction of armed conflict, as well as the active regulation of matters as diverse as sustainable development, environmental protection and consumer-friendly reform of the finance and banking sectors.

Essentially, the new core of the party – minorities, unmarried men and women, young voters and whites with advanced degrees – is in general agreement on this broader spectrum of issues, forming a coalition of shared ideas.

The aggregation of a broad set of issues in forming a left or right political orientation marks a major change in American politics. Philip Converse, of the University of Michigan, studied data from the 1956 and 1960 elections and found that only a small minority of highly educated and well-informed voters viewed politics through what might be called an ideological lens.

But things have really changed since then.

Alan Abramowitz of Emory University has documented a major shift as voters have made decisions based on a collection of variables that once would have been seen as unrelated. In a study based on 2008 polling, Abramowitz found majorities or solid pluralities of voters formed consistently liberal or conservative views – not centrist positions – on a continuum of issues including gay rights and abortion; off-shore oil drilling; the Iraq war; health care; financial regulation; climate change and mortgage assistance to low-income homeowners.

In effect, Abramowitz writes, the historical dependence of the Democratic Party on moderate-to-conservative whites

has decreased considerably while the contribution of liberal whites and especially nonwhites has increased. While moderate-to-conservative whites made up a majority of those who voted for Carter, they comprised barely a quarter of those who voted for Obama.

Demographic groups that favor social justice dispute the even-handedness of the marketplace; they often view business and corporations with suspicion; and they believe that the state has an obligation to provide for those struggling in a free market system. These demographic constituencies have grown in numbers, and today form a relatively robust coalition: the Democratic Party.

Single voters are more amenable than are their married counterparts to a government focused on social justice. Unmarried voters are substantially more vulnerable to economic downturns and the loss of a job; they look more favorably on such safety net programs as unemployment benefits, government-sponsored health insurance, and government initiatives to ensure food security. Married couples, on the other hand, are more focused on minimizing their tax burden.

The share of the electorate made up of single voters has been growing steadily. In 1992, 34 percent of voters were unmarried; in 2012, it was 40 percent. In the population as a whole, 72 percent of adults were married in 1972; in 2010, it was just 51 percent.

On a larger scale, the Pew Research Center has produced an analysis, Fig. 3, that shows that minority voters, who backed Obama by an 8-2 margin, will be an absolute majority of the population in 38 years, growing from 15.1 percent in 1960 to 34 percent in 2011 to 51 percent in 2050. Minority voters hold policy and ideological views very similar to those of unmarried men and women – they are in fact an overlapping population because a much lower percentage of African American (at 31 percent) and Hispanic adults (at 48 percent) are married than whites (at 55 percent). Minority voters are noticeably more supportive of activist government policies than the average white voter.

Fig. 3

The contrasting issue priorities of Democrats and Republicans ­— marital status aside — were evident in the answer to a particular question the 2012 exit polls asked. When voters were prompted to pick the most important issue facing the country – foreign policy, the federal deficit, the economy or health care – only 15 percent chose the deficit, but those who chose the deficit were overwhelmingly Romney voters by a 2-1 margin, 66-32. A slightly higher percentage, 18 percent, chose health care, and these voters supported Obama voters by a 3-1 margin, 75-24.

An illuminating chart that tracks demographic shifts from 2004 to 2008 to 2012, appropriately headlined “Obama Was Not as Strong as in 2008, but Strong Enough,” and a similar graphic presentation by the Washington Post, show that demographic shifts have reached a point at which Democrats have a decisive advantage.

Compared to 2008, Obama’s major gains this year were limited to Hispanics, who went from 67-31 Democratic in 2008 to 71-27 in 2008; and Asian-Americans, who went from 62-35 Democratic to 73-26. Those gains were adequate to produce victory by off-setting enough of the decline in support for Obama from many other groups, including men, who went from 48-49 to 45-52; whites, down from 43-55 to 39-59; voters with incomes above $100,000, from 49-49 to 44-54; Jewish voters, from 78-21 to 69-30; independents, from 52-44 to 45-50; and young voters below the age of 30, from 66-32 to 60-37.

In a setback to conservatives, the Nov. 6 exit polls gave strong support to liberalized immigration reform, which is likely to become a top priority for the Obama administration, with 65 percent of respondents agreeing that illegal immigrants should be “offered a chance to apply for legal status,” while only 28 percent of those surveyed opposed such reform. Since the election, a number of conservative pundits, including Sean Hannity of Fox News and Charles Krauthammer, a Washington Post columnist, have called on the Republican Party to reevaluate its opposition to comprehensive immigration reform.

Voters gave a more modest boost to the administration’s call to raise taxes on those making over $250,000, with a 47 percent plurality backing the proposal, another 13 percent supporting raising everyone’s taxes, and 35 percent opposed to any tax hike.

On a more sobering note for Democrats, a slight majority (51 percent) of voters agreed with the statement “Government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals” compared to 43 percent saying “Government should do more to solve problems.” This despite the fact that, as The New York Times reported in a Feb. 11, 2012 story, “Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It”:

The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement. The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007.

The story points out that many people

say they want to reduce the role of government in their own lives. They are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it and resent the government for providing it. They say they want less help for themselves; less help in caring for relatives; less assistance when they reach old age.

In many respects, the growing liberalization of America on social issues has made the culture war an attractive battleground for Democrats – perhaps dangerously attractive. At the moment, in almost every region of the country except the South, the liberal stance is gaining adherents.

Social, cultural and moral issues have become favorable terrain for the Democratic Party, in the way that they once were for the Republicans, but there are economic trends that do not bode so well for core Democratic constituencies, given their disproportionately low income and high-unemployment rates.  The issue of mounting salience – unaddressed so far by Democrats and Republicans – is the hollowing out of the job market.

A growing body of evidence demonstrates that jobs that provide mid-range incomes are disappearing, but just as important, the kinds of jobs that have long served as stepping-stones up the ladder of opportunity are disappearing too. One recent contribution to this literature, “Jobless Recoveries and the Disappearance of Routine Occupations” by Henry Siu, an economist at the University of British Columbia, and Nir Jaimovich, an economist at Duke, reports that there is job growth at the top and bottom of the payscale, but declining employment throughout the mid-pay range. The technical term is job polarization:

The fact that polarization is occurring should not surprise anyone who understands the influence of robotics and automation on machinists and machine operators in manufacturing. Indeed, the influence of robotics is increasingly being felt on routine occupations in transportation and warehousing. Of equal importance is the disappearance of routine employment in “white-collar” occupations — think bank tellers being replaced by ATMs, or secretarial work being replaced by personal computers and Siri, Apple’s iPhone-integrated “intelligent personal assistant.”

In the authors’ view, past trends suggest a worsening future:

Thus, all of the per capita employment growth of the past 30 years has either been in ‘non-routine’ occupations located at the high-end of the wage distribution, such as software engineers and economists, or in low-paying jobs, such as service occupations like restaurant waiters and janitors. For this last set of occupations, this has been especially true in the past decade.

Siu and Jaimovich find that the decline in routine middle-income jobs that lend themselves to mechanization and automation occurs during recessions, and, most importantly, does not reverse itself in periods of subsequent recovery. This chart, Fig. 4, in which the pink areas represent economic recessions, demonstrates how, starting during the recession of 1991, recoveries do not lead to revived job markets:

VoxEU.ORGFig. 4: “Jobless recoveries and the disappearance of routine occupations” by Henry Siu, an economist at the University of British Columbia, and Nir Jaimovich, an economist at Duke. CLICK TO ENLARGE

The conclusions reached by Siu and Jaimovich are pessimistic:

Automation and the adoption of computing technology are leading to the decline of middle-wage jobs of many stripes, both blue-collar jobs in production and maintenance occupations and white-collar jobs in office and administrative support. It is affecting both male- and female-dominated professions and it is happening broadly across industries –manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, financial services, and even public administration.

The authors offer scant hope for the future.

The pace of job polarization was greatly accelerated in this last recession, and the pace of automation and progress in robotics and computing technology is not slowing down either. If the past 30 years is any guide, we should expect future recessions to continue to spur job polarization. Jobless recoveries may be the new norm.

Should it continue, lack of economic opportunity is likely to undermine the workings of American democratic capitalism: the willingness of the have-nots and have-lesses to tolerate high levels of inequality in the belief that everyone has a shot at making it into the middle class.

The forces driving the evisceration of middle-income jobs — global production and automation — threaten the newly acquired rights of recently enfranchised populations. The “perennial gale of creative destruction” may be so powerful and inexorable that the political system cannot provide a remedy. Even so, if the Democrats fail to take on the issue, they will leave their party open to challenge as discontent over employment stagnation mounts.

An alternative strategy would be for Democrats to unilaterally declare victory in the culture war — allowing Republicans to waste time on futile rear guard actions — and to shift the political agenda to the jobs crisis. The question is: Does the new and enlarged Democratic coalition have the capacity to re-engineer capitalism to produce sustained economic growth while working toward social justice?

An earlier version of this column gave the correct figures for the percentage of whites, Hispanics and African-Americans who are married, but by reversing the terms lower and higher and single and married made it sound like the numbers referred to the percentage of singles in those groups.

Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics,” which was published earlier this year.

More Women, but Not Nearly Enough

By Tali Mendelberg and Christopher F. Karpowitz
Ping Zhu

THE Congress that convenes in January will include a record number of women: 20 senators and at least 81 representatives. Female candidates broke other barriers on Tuesday. New Hampshire will be the first state to send an all-female delegation to Congress. A woman was elected to the South Carolina Senate, currently the only all-male state legislative chamber.

Does this mean the next Congress will be more attentive to the needs of children, single mothers and Americans who are vulnerable because of low income, poor health and other disadvantages? Sadly, no. Our research shows that female lawmakers significantly reshape policies only when they have true parity with men. In other words, while Tuesday’s electoral gains should be celebrated, we’ve got a very long way to go.

We recently conducted a study of women’s participation in political decision-making groups. It is in these settings — committees, caucuses and delegate meetings — that women’s presence matters, often profoundly.

Our experiment assembled 94 five-person groups and asked them to decide whether and how much to tax the more fortunate so as to provide for those with less means. We ran the study in two states: conservative Utah and liberal New Jersey.

Surveys have demonstrated that women of both parties are more likely than men to mention the needs of vulnerable populations when asked about the nation’s problems. Women more frequently choose “caring” occupations and, within households, shift resources toward children more than fathers do. The most commonly accepted explanation is that women are more socialized than men to care for others.

To observe how and when women voice this “caring” — and when their voice matters — we randomly assigned 470 individuals to groups in which women made up zero, 20, 40, 60, 80 or 100 percent of participants. We assessed each member’s views before and after the meetings, and recorded who said what.

On average, women make up about 20 percent of lawmakers in the United States and abroad. We found that when women constituted 20 percent of a decision-making body that operates by majority rule, the average woman took up only about 60 percent of the floor time used by the average man. Women were perceived — by themselves and their peers — as more quiescent and less effective. They were more likely to be rudely interrupted; they were less likely to strongly advocate their policy preferences; and they seldom mentioned the vulnerable. These gender dynamics held even when adjusting for political ideology (beliefs about liberalism and egalitarianism) and income.

In contrast, the men in our experiment did not speak up less or appear to lose influence when they were in the minority.

In our experiment, groups with few women set a minimum income of about $21,600 per year for a family of four — which is close to the federal poverty level for a family of four. But once women made up 60 to 80 percent or more of a group, they spoke as much as men, raised the needs of the vulnerable and argued for redistribution (and influenced the rhetoric of their male counterparts). They also encountered fewer hostile interruptions.

Significantly, they elevated the safety net to as much as $31,000. The most talkative participants in these majority-female groups advocated for even more government generosity: $36,000, enough to catapult many poor families into the ranks of the lower middle class.

In another study, we pored through a sample of minutes from more than 14,000 local school boards and found that the pronounced gender gap in participation shrank sharply when women’s numbers reached parity — a real-world confirmation of our experimental findings.

When legislators vote, parties and constituencies matter most — but gender ratios matter too. For example, analyzing the 1990 confirmation hearings of the Supreme Court justice David H. Souter, the political scientist Laura R. Winsky Mattei found that the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee, regardless of party, was twice as aggressive in questioning female witnesses as male ones.

Some scholars, like Mona Lena Krook and Beth Reingold, have argued that increasing female legislative representation does not consistently lead to better policies for women and the vulnerable. But they did not examine, as we did, the potential effects when women are half or more of the decision makers.

It’s hard to know when, if ever, Congress will be half-female. But Professors Krook and Reingold and others have found that institutional reforms, like female caucuses, can help integrate women into decision making. We also found that committees that vote by consensus give female minorities a greater voice.

We haven’t examined the impact of female executives on foreign policy and national security. As leaders like Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher have shown, women in the vanguard sometimes act even more “masculine” than their male counterparts.

But when there are more women in legislatures, city councils and school boards, they speak more and voice the needs of the poor, the vulnerable, children and families — and men listen. At a time of soaring inequality, electing vastly more women might be the best hope for addressing the needs of the 99 percent.

Tali Mendelberg, an associate professor of politics at Princeton University, is the author of “The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality.” Christopher F. Karpowitz is an assistant professor of political science at Brigham Young University.

A Second Chance on Human Rights

By Eric L. Lewis

WASHINGTON

PRESIDENT OBAMA has been re-elected. He must now decide how to balance his commitment to human rights against the political risks of appearing “soft on terrorism.”

The president’s critics on the left must accept that he has fundamentally altered the George W. Bush-era human rights landscape: he ended torture and released the torture memos. He closed the C.I.A.’s secret prisons. He has constrained his own authority, accepting the binding effect of international law and rejecting his predecessor’s overly broad theory of executive power. And he tried to close the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay and move trials from military tribunals into civilian courts.

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Yet when it comes to human rights and security, Mr. Obama has become trapped by his instinctive distaste for political combat. He backed off, under pressure, from his pledge to close Guantánamo. He allowed Congress to obstruct his plans to move detainees to the United States, even when their innocence was beyond doubt. He reversed himself on trying terror suspects in civilian courts. He embraced the principle of indefinite detention without trial, albeit with enhanced procedural safeguards. And he expanded the use of drone strikes, including the targeted killing of American citizens, without accountability or oversight.

This is not “Bush Lite,” but nor is it consistent with the ideals that inspired so much idealism in 2008. If Mr. Obama is serious about demonstrating that “the choice between our safety and our ideals” is a false one, as he declared in his 2009 inaugural address, he needs to move forcefully in four critical areas.

First, he must release certain Guantánamo detainees, who have never been charged or tried. Of the 166 detainees still incarcerated there, 86 have been cleared for release because they clearly pose no threat to America. Congress has passed laws to stop the admission of Guantánamo detainees to the United States. But the executive branch has the power to admit individuals to the country and to transfer suspects for trial. And the Department of Justice controls sufficient portions of its own budget that could be used if Congress refused to pay for transfers. It’s time for Mr. Obama to stare down the fearmongers and release these people into the United States or other countries that will accept them.

Second, the United States should try the remaining Guantánamo detainees in civilian courts. There are undoubtedly some bad people at Guantánamo, and we should marshal all legally obtained evidence and put them on trial. The Bush administration fouled its own legal nest through torture, but there is admissible evidence in most cases, and civilian courts have ample experience and tested procedures in prosecuting terrorists. The panic and pandering that caused Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to reverse his decision to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in New York should not be tolerated in Mr. Obama’s second term.

Third, the United States should end indefinite detention without trial. Under the laws of war, the right to detain enemy combatants ends when the war ends. The Iraq war ended last year and the Afghan war will likely end in 2014. Unless Mr. Obama wants to assert the untenable position that the war on terror or the war on Al Qaeda continue everywhere and indefinitely, then the legal basis for further indefinite detention will end. Detainees must be tried or released. There is a risk that released detainees could plot against us after returning home. But America has mind-boggling technological, military and diplomatic resources to monitor and intercept the communications of those who threaten us. We simply can’t hold people indefinitely without charge under a theory of permanent war.

Finally, Mr. Obama must bring drones under the rule of law. The problem isn’t that he can’t be trusted to make careful decisions. By all accounts, he conducts painstaking reviews to ensure that the targets pose genuine threats and the risks of collateral damage are low. But it is unacceptable that these decisions are made without public accountability or oversight and that American citizens, like the Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, have been deprived of their lives without being afforded due process.

The president should apply for authority to a secure United States District Court for a warrant before undertaking any attacks on American citizens, articulate clear criteria for ordering drone strikes that can be debated and challenged by Congress or courts, and disclose strikes after they occur (while protecting key national security sources).

On Jan. 20, 2017, Mr. Obama will leave office. Will there still be men at Guantánamo detained without charge, or will that stain on our democracy have been lifted? Will terrorism prosecutions be conducted in federal courts before life-tenured judges or in an untested system staffed by military officers? Will American citizens know what military operations are being conducted in their name, or will drone strikes remain shrouded in unaccountable secrecy?

Mr. Obama now has the power and the ability to keep this country safe without fundamentally threatening the rule of law. He must demonstrate that he also has the political will to do so.

Eric L. Lewis is a partner at the law firm Lewis Baach.

Campaign Stops

Picket Fence Apocalypse

By Charles M. Blow

No, you cannot have your country back. America is moving forward.

That’s the message voters sent the Republican Party and its Tea Party wing Tuesday night when they re-elected President Obama and strengthened the Democrats’ control of the Senate.

No amount of outside money or voter suppression or fear mongering or lying — and there was a ton of each — was enough to blunt that message.

President Obama and his formidable campaign machine out-performed the Republicans, holding together a winning coalition that is the face of America’s tomorrow: young voters, urban voters, racially and ethnically diverse voters and women voters.

According to exit polls, Obama won 60 percent of the 18 to 29 year old vote and 52 percent of the 30-40 vote. He won 69 percent of the vote in big cities and 58 percent of the vote in mid-sized cities. He won 93 percent of the black vote and more than 70 percent of both the Asian vote and the Hispanic vote. He won over half of the female vote. And he won 76 percent of the gay, lesbian and bisexual vote.

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Mitt Romney won the white vote, the male vote, the elderly vote, the small cities vote and the high-income vote.

The base of Democratic support in this country is expanding. The Republican base is shrinking, becoming more racially homogenous, more rural and older.

Reality made for a great rending of garments and gnashing of teeth among conservatives.

On election night, Bill O’Reilly said :

It’s a changing country, the demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.

O’Reilly continued: “The white establishment is now the minority.”

Ann Coulter, who activates my gag reflex whenever I type her name, said Wednesday:

If Mitt Romney cannot win in this economy, then the tipping point has been reached. We have more takers than makers and it’s over. There is no hope.

Rush Limbaugh took to the air to say that “Mitt Romney and his family would have been the essence of exactly what this country needs” and that Romney “did offer a vision of traditional America.” Limbaugh went on:

I went to bed last night thinking we’re outnumbered. I went to bed last night thinking all this discussion we’d had about this election being the election that will tell us whether or not we’ve lost the country. I went to bed last night thinking we’ve lost the country.

You would think that the world came to an end Tuesday night. And depending on your worldview, it might have. If your idea of America’s power structure is rooted in a 1950s or even a 1920s sensibility, here’s an update: that America is no more.

Republicans are trying to hold back a storm surge of demographic change with a white picket fence. Good luck with that.

Campaign Stops

The Obama Realignment

By Ross Douthat
President Obama addressed supporters in Chicago on Tuesday night. Damon Winter/The New York Times

When you do it once, it’s just a victory. When you do it twice, it’s a realignment.

The coalition that Barack Obama put together to win the presidency handily in 2008 looked a lot like the emerging Democratic majority that optimistic liberals had been discerning on the political horizon since the 1990s. It was the late George McGovern’s losing coalition from 1972 finally come of age: Young voters, the unmarried, African-Americans, Hispanics, the liberal professional class – and then more than enough of the party’s old blue collar base to hold the Rust Belt for the Democrats.

But 2008 was also a unique political moment, when George W. Bush’s immense unpopularity was compounded by a financial collapse, and when the possibility of electing the country’s first black president fired the imagination of the nation (and the nation’s press corps). So it was still possible to regard the Obama majority of ’08 as more flukish than transformative – or at the very least, to see it as a fragile thing, easily shattered by poor choices and adverse developments.

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There were plenty of both during the president’s first term. The Obama White House underestimated the depth of the recession, it overreached politically on the health care bill and the failed push for cap and trade and it reaped a backlash at the polls in 2010. The Republican Party, left for dead after 2008, revived itself, and at many points across the 2012 campaign season Obama’s majority coalition looked vulnerable. Its policy victories seemed to teeter on the edge.

And the Obama coalition was vulnerable. I believed that at the beginning of the campaign season; I believed it in mid-October, when I thought Mitt Romney might just pull the election out; and I believe it even now that the president has won a narrow (in the popular vote) but electorally decisive victory.

But the lesson of the election is that the Obama coalition was truly vulnerable only to a Republican Party that took Obama seriously as an opponent – that understood how his majority had been built, why voters had joined it and why the conservative majority of the Reagan and Bush eras had unraveled.

Such understanding eluded the Republicans this year. In part, that failure can be blamed on their standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, who mostly ran as a kind of vanilla Republican instead of showing the imagination necessary to reinvent his party for a new era. Romney’s final month of campaigning was nearly flawless, though. His debate performances were the best by any Republican since Reagan and he will go down in history as one of the few losing challengers to claim a late lead in the polls. A weak nominee in many ways, he was ultimately defeated less by his own limitations as a leader, and more by the fact that his party didn’t particularly want to be reinvented, preferring to believe that the rhetoric and positioning of 1980 and 1984 could win again in the America of 2012.

You could see this belief at work in the confidence with which many conservatives insisted that the Obama presidency was not only embattled but self-evidently disastrous, in the way so many voices on the right sought to raise the ideological stakes at every opportunity, in the widespread conviction that the starker conservatives made the choice between left and right, the more votes they would win.

You could also see this conviction shaping the punditry and predictions that issued from conservatives in the days leading up this election. It was remarkable how many analysts not normally known for their boosterism (I’m thinking of Michael Barone and George Will in particular) were willing to predict that Romney would not only win but win sweepingly, capturing states that haven’t gone Republican since Reagan. But even less starry-eyed conservatives — like, well, myself — were willing to embrace models of the electorate that overstated the Republican base of support and downplayed the Democrats’ mounting demographic advantage.

Those models were wrong about 2012, and they aren’t likely to be right about 2016 or 2020. Republicans can console themselves that they came close in the popular vote. They can look ahead to a favorable Senate map in 2014 and they do still have their House majority to fall back on.

But Tuesday’s result ratifies much of the leftward shift in public policy that President Obama achieved during his first term. It paves the way for the White House to raise at least some of the tax revenue required to pay for a more activist government and it means that the Republicans let a golden chance to claim a governing coalition of their own slip away.

In this sense, just as Reagan Republicanism dominated the 1980s even though the Democrats controlled the House, our own era now clearly belongs to the Obama Democrats even though John Boehner is still speaker of the House.

That era will not last forever; it may not even last more than another four years. The current Democratic majority has its share of internal contradictions, and as it expands demographically it will become vulnerable to attack on many fronts. Parties are more adaptable than they seem in their moments of defeat, and there will come a day when a Republican presidential candidate will succeed where Mitt Romney just failed.

But getting there requires that conservatives face reality: The age of Reagan is officially over, and the Obama majority is the only majority we have.

Campaign Stops

E-Day

By The Editors

Campaign Stops editors invited contributors to react to the elections. Check here for updates.

Nov. 7, 3:20 p.m. | Updated

Alexander Keyssar: Something Has Changed About Election Night
Timothy Egan: The Boss Delivers the White House
Thomas B. Edsall: Obamacare No Albatross?
Ann Beeson: Texas Could Become a Swing State Sooner Than You Think
Thomas B. Edsall: Memo to Candidates: Don’t Bring Up Rape
Timothy Egan: Revenge of the Polling Nerds
Lee Siegel: The Oscar Wilde Strategy
Timothy Egan: Sunrise Surprises
Ann Beeson: Latino Building Blocs

5:54 p.m. Alexander Keyssar |Something Has Changed About Election Night

I’m old enough to remember when the drama of election night was just about who won the election. We paid close attention to see who won the early-reporting eastern states and stayed up late enough to make sure nothing too surprising had happened on the West Coast. Often there wasn’t much drama about the outcome. I campaigned and voted for the late George McGovern in 1972, but no one thought that he would win. Long before election day in 1984, Walter Mondale – and everyone else in the United States – knew that Ronald Reagan would have a second term in the White House. Even when there was drama, as in 1976 or 1992, the spotlight was focused entirely on the election’s outcome – with a presumption that the popular vote and the electoral vote would roughly match one another.

Examining a challenged vote in Broward County, Fla., in 2000. Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press

Now there are so many other, subsidiary dramas to pay attention to, many of them not about the preferences of voters but about the act of voting and the counting of votes. What happened to those people who were standing in line to cast early ballots in Florida? Will the provisional ballots in Ohio matter, and if so, who is going to count them – and when? Are people being turned away from the polls because they do not have required ID documents? Whose lawyers are going to court and where? Will there be a split between the electoral vote and the popular vote? The subplots thicken with each election cycle; occurrences that seemed strange and anomalous in 2000 have now become routine.

It is indeed the normalization of these issues and conflicts that is a cause for worry. The years before 2000, to be sure, were no golden age of democracy, and many of the electoral problems that now loom so visible were present, if largely unseen, 30 years ago. But we, as a nation, do seem to have turned a corner: our polity now seems divided into two tribes, one of which voices the fear that elections will be stolen by fraudulent voters, the other convinced that legitimate votes will be suppressed. All of us now expect elections to be not only competitions between candidates and parties but also conflicts over voting rights and electoral procedures; we expect the legal and procedural wrangling to begin weeks before election day, and we fear that it will go on for weeks afterward. It is hard not to think that such expectations, over time, will undermine the legitimacy of electoral outcomes and corrode our confidence in democratic processes. Surely we can do better.

Alexander Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at Harvard, is the author of “The Right to Vote: the Contested History of Democracy in the United States.”

8:42 p.m. Timothy Egan |The Boss Delivers the White House

The kingmaker in the 2012 presidential election? Why, the Boss, of course. In the way that the first flutters of a butterfly’s wing in Africa can set loose a chain of events that leads to a hurricane, Gov. Chris Christie’s long odyssey to meet his idol, Bruce Springsteen, may turn out to be the thing that decided the race.

Stay with me here: Christie worships Springsteen, and has been to 130 concerts, but his fan love has never been returned. As a lifelong pilgrim in the Church of Bruuuuuce, he cites lyrics at the oddest of public occasions, does air guitar riffs in his down time, and swaps fetishist stories of bootleg tapes.

Gov. Chris Christie sorted through his Bruce Springsteen concert tickets in 2009. Juan Arredondo for The New Tork Times

When he was elected governor in 2009, he so wanted the Springsteen soundtrack to be a part of his triumph – but he was spurned.

When Christie, to the surprise of right-wing absolutists, embraced and praised President Obama for his quick response to the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, many conspiracy theorists thought he was playing for 2016. The idea was, it would be better to have an open race for president than to wait out the second term of the man for whom he has been a chief surrogate, Mitt Romney.

And yet, there seems to have been another more complex (and more obvious) motive in play.

I told my friends, only half in jest, that Christie was really after a chance to meet Springsteen. That he would do anything, even kill the momentum of his party’s nominee, for a bromance with Jersey’s favorite son. This would explain why he was playing nice. Sure enough, on Monday, during his now-daily call to Christie, the president handed the phone off to Springsteen. The governor may never clean that ear again.

A few days earlier, he had met Springsteen at the benefit concert in New York. Afterward, Christie went home and wept.

“We hugged,” Christie said at a news conference on Monday. “He told me it’s official: we’re friends.”

So the Boss loves the new Big Man. “I’ll treasure it forever,” Christie added.

Now: the exit polls show the hurricane had only a minor effect on voter attitudes. But if, as many believe, the chance for Obama to appear bipartisan and presidential in the last week of the campaign with one of his most strident critics was just enough to tip independent voters in swing states — well, I rest my case.

In that case, it wasn’t Sandy that determined the election. It was the man who wrote “Sandy.”

Of course, this embrace may doom Christie among the party base; those elephants never forget. Rush Limbaugh, the most mean-spirited among the knuckle-draggers, called Christie “fat” and “a fool” last week. I have a feeling Christie would say that’s a small price to pay for the chance to meet Springsteen.

Timothy Egan is an Opinionator columnist.12:40 a.m. | Updated More From Timothy Egan below

9:48 p.m. Thomas B. Edsall |Obamacare No Albatross?

The early exit polls provide some findings that will warm the heart of Democrats.

One surprise: the survey of voters as they leave polling places around the country suggests that Obamacare was not the albatross for Democrats that many thought it would be. Forty-seven percent of voters said they would like to see the law remain as is on the books or expanded, two percentage points more than the 45 percent who said the law should be fully or partially repealed.

Less surprising: Voters think that Romney favors the rich. Asked who would benefit from Romney policies, 52 percent said the rich and 36 percent said the middle class. Only 2 percent said Romney policies would benefit the poor. For Obama, a plurality, 43 percent, said the president’s policies favor the middle class. Just 10 percent said Obama favors the rich, and 31 percent said he favors the poor.

Meanwhile, in the actual vote counting, the Virginia Board of Elections gave both Mitt Romney and George Allen, the Republican Senate nominee, leads over Barack Obama and Tim Kaine.

A close examination of the local results suggest that many more votes were yet to be counted in populous counties strongly backing the Democrats. Arlington County, for example, backed Obama over Romney 35,689 to 18,411 for Romney, but only 36 of 53 precincts had reported by 9:30. Similarly, in Fairfax County, Obama led Romney 65,283 to 45,872, with 71 out of 244 precincts reporting. The same pattern applied to the count in the Senate contest. Update 12:03 a.m. | More From Thomas Edsall below

Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics,” which was published earlier this year.

10:23 p.m. Ann Beeson |Texas Could Become a Swing State Sooner Than You Think

What’s at stake today in Austin, Tex.? The sky is clear, the temperature reached 80 degrees, the Ladybird Lake trail is full of people, and lines were long all day at the polls. Thirty-seven percent of registered voters in Travis County cast their ballot during early voting, and voter turnout may inch towards 50 percent by the end of the day.

Out-of-staters assume that Austin, with its legions of music-loving and tech-savvy young people, is a liberal outpost in a sea of red. That’s misguided for a couple of reasons. It’s clear that Texas isn’t a swing state (yet), and that our 38 electoral votes will go to Romney. But residents of the state’s largest cities, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Austin – three of them among the top ten largest cities in the country – will collectively cast more votes for Obama than Romney. It’s rural Texas and the suburbs that Romney is counting on.

Students at the University of Texas at Austin campaigned on election day. Tamir Kalifa/Associated Press

And though a clear majority of Austinites will vote for Obama, the city’s surface progressivism masks serious structural barriers that continue to disenfranchise voters here, particularly Latinos and African-Americans. Austin residents will decide today whether to end one of those barriers – the at-large election of Austin City Council members.

Austin is the fastest growing city in the country, and the population is increasingly young and diverse. Yet most Latinos and people of color still live on the east side of Austin, the legacy of a 1928 City Master Plan that institutionalized racial segregation. That legacy, coupled with the at-large method for electing the city council, has meant that residents in Central and West Austin have dominated the City Council and the Mayor’s Office for the past several decades.

At a recent community forum, Carmen Llanes, an east Austin resident and activist, encouraged more people to get involved in local issues. But she noted that many feel their voice doesn’t count because “Austin is the largest city in the country without geographic representation.”

It’s no wonder that so many residents of east Austin are disconnected from politics, particularly if they’re progressive. Their vote for Obama won’t count because the state’s electoral votes will go to Romney, and no one from their neighborhood represents their interests on the City Council. Darrion Borders, a young African-American hip hop artist and student at Austin Community College, told it straight, “Coming out of East Austin, I’ve never seen elected officials. Not even running into somebody at the library or at the grocery store. They aren’t around.”

After literally decades of organizing and failed attempts, a consortium of grassroots community groups finally succeeded in getting Proposition 3 on today’s ballot. Prop 3 would create 10 geographic district seats along with the citywide mayor. Proposition 4, an alternative proposal favored by Mayor Lee Leffingwell and council insiders, would create eight districts, with two seats and the mayor remaining at-large.

If either proposition receives a majority of “yes” votes, east Austin residents – and all those in communities outside of Central and West Austin – will finally have a voice in City Hall. That should be a boon to civic engagement and voter turnout in Austin, which has lagged behind state and national averages.

Peck Young, the director of Austin Community College’s Center for Public Policy and Political Studies, says that the outcome of the ballot measure has clear implications for fair representation in Austin. “If Proposition 3 wins we will have provided Hispanics with 2-3 Council seats immediately and ended the paternalistic Gentleman’s Agreement that allows Anglos to select which Hispanics are allowed on the Austin City Council. If it fails then we will have proved that minority representation cannot be left to majority vote in Austin.”

What will a win on Prop 3 mean for Texas and the nation? It will strengthen the Latino engagement that could, one day, make Texas a swing state.

Ann Beeson is a senior fellow and lecturer at the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life at the University of Texas.

Nov. 7, 12:04 a.m. Thomas B. Edsall |Memo to Candidates: Don’t Bring Up Rape

It would not be at all surprising if the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent out a memo next year to all prospective candidates warning them: “Any time you are about to say the word ‘rape,’ stop, take two deep breaths, and change the subject.”

Strange ideas about rape appear to have doomed chances of a Republican take-over of the Senate, fatally wounding two of the party’s Senate candidates, both of whom had appeared to be on track to win: Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana.

Akin, who lost to Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill, was first, declaring on television in August that pregnancy as a result of rape is rare because: “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Mourdock, who was running for an open seat against Democratic nominee Joe Donnelly, called and raised Akin, declaring last month, “I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that’s something God intended to happen.”

The big question arising out of the defeat of Mourdock and Akin is whether this will take the wind out of the sails of the Tea Party, factions of which strongly backed their candidacies. The outcome in these two contests is a repetition of key Senate fights in 2010, when Tea Party backed Republican nominees lost to highly vulnerable Democrats in three states, Nevada, Delaware and Colorado.

In the House, the Republican caucus is likely to shift further to the right with the retirement of some of the older, most centrist members and their replacement by younger, more radical freshmen.

Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics,” which was published earlier this year.

Nov. 7, 12:40 a.m. Timothy Egan |Revenge of the Polling Nerds

In the last days of the election, Peggy Noonan had a “feel” that things were moving Mitt Romney’s way. George Will was more cerebral: his brain told him it would be Romney in a rout. And Michael Barone, who used to have a good divining rod to go along with an encyclopedic knowledge for all numbers political, also predicted a Romney landslide.

What they had in common, aside from putting up a brick Tuesday that completely missed the electoral net, was a last-hurrah push for the old-fashioned prediction by gut.

This was the year the meta-analyst shoved aside the old-school pundit. Simon Jackman of Stanford, Sam Wang at the Princeton Election Consortium and, of course, our colleague Nate Silver, all perfected math-based, non-subjective models that produced predictions that closely matched the outcomes.

People who are surprised by the election – and Sarah Palin looked like she was close to tears as the obvious became obvious even to those who live in the Fox bubble – were probably listening to people who are paid to fantasize.

Karl Rove is Exhibit A. Until the very end, he confidently predicted a Romney victory, though he seemed to give himself some weasel room in bringing up Hurricane Sandy at the end as an excuse. But Rove, who collected millions from deep pockets for his independent expenditure groups, had to predict a Romney victory. Otherwise, why continue to give him money? These donors would have been better off reading the In-trade prediction model – based on real money bet on the outcome. They put the odds of an Obama win at 72 percent on election eve.

Newt Gingrich, who has a preternatural ability to slide out of whatever he said in the past, said without blinking or blushing that Romney would win the popular vote by six percentage points and rack up more than 300 electoral votes. “I base that on just years and years of experience,” he said. And it’s taught him – what?

And we have to mention Dick Morris, who has been assuring Fox listeners for months that Obama was a one-term president. He said Romney would end the night with 325 electoral votes, a number about equal to Glenn Beck’s stellar forecast. “It will be the biggest surprise in recent American political history,” Morris said.

The surprise is that people like Morris – Jon Stewart called him “The King of Wrong Mountain” – continue to find work.

Little wonder then, that so many people turned to the math-based prediction models this year. Moneyball has finally beaten down the old scouts. Not romantic, by any stretch, but more reliable. Now, if only the Republican Party would follow suit, on the major issues of the day, into the reality-based community.

Timothy Egan is an Opinionator columnist.

Nov. 7, 12:05 p.m. Lee Siegel |The Oscar Wilde Strategy

Someone once said that upon reaching 60, you have two thoughts. The first is, “This is going to work out.” The second is, “This is not going to work out.”

Many of those who voted, as I did, for Barack Obama must have experienced a similar simultaneous sense of relief and despair last night, as jubilation gave way to the grim realization that the political paralysis of the past four years will become, if anything, worse and more bitter.

It was startling to hear, on CNN, the assembled pundits almost unanimously agree that President Obama had to find the “middle ground,” move to “the center” and “build relationships” with Republicans. Where have they been for four years? Mr. Obama had been trying desperately to find the political center for his entire first term, only to be stymied by Republicans trying to recapture the White House by rejecting his every attempt at compromise and then blaming him for being unwilling to compromise.

What to do in such a situation, with the country split right down the middle, and a Republican opposition driven by a hardcore faction that believes the country has been stolen from them by treacherous and unpatriotic forces? There is only one thing to do: one half of the country must leave the other half behind.

In a way, it’s not a new idea. That was clearly Mitt Romney’s intention, as he spoke of dismantling or radically cutting New Deal and Great Society entitlements programs, and as he vowed to roll back the tax code a century. Compromise was not part of his platform. Read more…

Campaign Stops

The ’80s Want Their Politics Back – the 1880s

By Joshua Spivak

Many Americans may feel that on their lifetime the country has never been more closely divided. And they would be right, at least on the national electoral front. Our politics are now going back to the ’80s — the 1880s.

There hasn’t been a string of elections this close since the end of the 19th century.

Our presidential elections are frequently both Electoral College and popular vote blowouts. Of the 21 races from 1900 to 1984, 11 saw one candidate win by more than a 10 percent margin of the popular vote. In nearly half of those victories, candidates great and small, like Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, won by more than 20 percent. Read more…

Campaign Stops

The Man or the Platform?

By Gil Troy
Mitt Romney, left; Barack Obama Tony Dejak/Associated Press

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama appear to agree about at least one thing on this tense Election Day: They are standing on mutually exclusive party platforms, offering Americans what Obama called “the clearest choice of any time in a generation.” The candidates – and their partisans – insist voters are deciding today between a country that will be prospering or bankrupt, with a foreign policy that is firm or flaccid, and with abortion either remaining legal or abruptly outlawed. Nevertheless, after Inauguration Day, the challenges of governance, unexpected events, and the strong, confining American center will probably blur these differences.

The president, whoever he is, will frequently disregard party principles. These White House deviations will occur despite the black-and-white rhetoric inflaming our blue-vs.-red politics, in which shades of gray — once the big tent party pol’s favorite color — only seem welcome on best-seller lists.

The president, whoever he is, will frequently disregard party principles.

Successful presidents must be nimble not doctrinaire. They should prefer center-seeking to partisan drum-beating, respecting many Americans’ historic desire for consensus and the office’s constitutionally limited powers. Most foreign crises are unpredictable. Many social issues are beyond presidential reach. Five Republican presidents, from Richard Nixon through George W. Bush, failed to shake the American consensus that abortions should be safe, legal and rare — half the population  might embrace the “pro-life” label but three-quarters want most abortions legal. And many of the chief executive’s economic, diplomatic and military decisions and maneuvers are so complex and so constrained by other forces, that presidents sometimes even enact policies they campaigned against to become president. Read more…