Aug. 4: Likely No New Blue States in November

Saturday was a light day for polling, with only the national tracking polls and a South Dakota poll out; our forecast was essentially unchanged.

The South Dakota numbers were not bad for Mr. Obama — putting him down by 6 points, closer than the margin by which he lost the state in 2008 — but look like something of a fluke. In North Dakota, which has been more heavily polled because of the competitive Senate race there, Mr. Obama has consistently trailed by double digits.

Indeed, with the presidential election likely to be much closer than it was in 2008, Mr. Obama is unlikely to paint any new state blue this year. The forecast model gives him a 15 percent chance of carrying Montana, which has been sparsely polled; a 14 percent chance of winning Missouri; and an 8 percent chance of winning Arizona. Fourth on the list is South Dakota, where the model gives Mr. Obama about a 4 percent chance after the new survey, followed by Georgia at 2 percent.

Mr. Obama is an underdog in two states that he won in 2008, Indiana and North Carolina.

An earlier post in this space about poll oversampling was published in error and will be updated and published later this week.

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Democrats, Republicans each aim to woo support of women voters in November - Post-Crescent

WASHINGTON ? Is the 2012 election shaping up to be all about women?

President Barack Obama is working hard to woo this pivotal constituency in his re-election race. His Democratic allies are even accusing the GOP of launching a "war against women" after the Republicans reignited a new national debate over cultural issues, including birth control.

But now the Republicans ? including Ann Romney and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski ? are striking back with a promise: Their party will win women by focusing on the real No. 1 issue, the economy.

Not that Obama is ready to give up that issue.

"I believe that the Democrats have a better story to tell to women about how we're going to solidify the middle class and grow this economy, make sure everybody has a fair shot, everybody's doing their fair share, and we got a fair set of rules of the road that everybody has to follow," Obama said Tuesday as Republican presidential contenders competed in Super Tuesday primaries.

Hours later, Ann Romney ? the wife of GOP front-runner Mitt Romney ? answered him.

"Do you know what women care about? Women care about jobs," she declared on national television, as her husband waited nearby to speak. "They're angry, and they're furious about the entitlement debt that we're leaving for our children."

"I'm right along with Ann Romney," Murkowski said on Wednesday.

The Alaska Republican has been critical of her party's focus on birth control policy when people remain worried about economic stability. In a telephone interview, Murkowski added: "There is clearly a direction that we can take as Republicans that gives confidence and assurance that we are focused on the issues that matter to women."

Eight months before Election Day, women have become arguably the most sought-after voting group in an election year where the presidency and control of Congress are at stake. Females comprise a majority of voters in a typical presidential election year.

Women are a crucial voting group for Obama, particularly in the suburbs of big cities like Denver and Detroit. He would not be president today had he not beaten Republican John McCain by 13 points among women four years ago.

The importance of winning the women's vote may be magnified this year given that the fragile economy may weigh down the support of other groups that supported Obama strongly in 2008, such as Latinos and college-age voters.

Recent polling suggests Obama is gaining among women. An Associated Press-GfK poll conducted last month showed his approval rating had risen 10 percentage points among women since December. The poll also showed that women approve more strongly of the way the president is handling the economy.

For Republicans, conservative women represent a loyal sector of the party's base, and female independents offer an opportunity to eat into Obama's support. Independent women broke for Obama by a 10-point margin four years ago, according to exit polling, while among independent men he managed just a 5-point edge.

Both parties have viewed the furor over Obama's policy on access to contraception as an opportunity to curry favor with women. Republicans protested Obama's mandate that birth control be covered by insurance, even for employers whose faiths forbid contraception. The policy, Republicans insisted, was a violation of the Constitution's guarantee of religious freedom, and they forced a vote on it in the Senate. The GOP measure to overturn Obama's policy lost, 51-48, with one Republican, Sen. Olympia Snowe, helping Democrats kill it.

Recent exit polls in the GOP nomination contest suggest some groups of women within the GOP are turned off by the focus on social issues. In Ohio, for example, married women broke for Santorum, while unmarried women favored Romney, a marriage gap that did not exist among men. Women who said abortion should be legal in most or all cases broke for Romney, while those who thought it should be illegal in most or all cases leaned toward Santorum.

Democrats called the Senate vote the latest attempt to roll back long-established women's rights. House Republicans, they also pointed out, had barred a young law student from testifying in favor of Obama's policy but allowed five men to testify against it. And then radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh called the woman a "slut" and a "prostitute" for arguing that her school, Georgetown University, should cover her contraception.

Obama made sure reporters knew he had telephoned the young woman, Sandra Fluke, to offer support. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, called Limbaugh's remarks "inappropriate." And Limbaugh, losing advertisers, apologized.

The Democrats' pitch ? that Republicans were launching a "war on women" was born. Coast to coast, Democrats hawked the theme. Women senators used it to raise money, wives of candidates included it in pleas for support, and surrogates ? from Sen. Claire McCaskill's mother to former tennis star Billie Jean King ? ran with it.

"Stop the GOP's War on Women!" read an email sent to Democrats by the party's House campaign committee.

The drumbeat has frustrated Republicans, pushed onto the defensive as polls showed a majority of Americans favored the president's contraception policy.

But the notion that Republicans are out to strip women of their rights "is just a lie," said Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. "It's not a war on women. It's an effort to protect religious liberty."

But Ann Romney's rebuttal moves the response further, said veteran GOP pollster Ed Goeas.

Polling, he said, shows that different subgroups of women assess economic questions differently ? and that white women in particular respond well to the Republicans' economic message.

"Everybody's responding to this as if women vote as a monolith," Goeas said. "They don't."

Or, suggested Murkowski, they shouldn't.

In the interview, she said she regrets her vote for the GOP amendment to overturn Obama's contraception policy. If she had it to do over again, she would join Snowe in voting against it.

"Women in Alaska are worried about what they're paying for energy costs. They're worried about whether or not they're going to be able to put their kids through college, whether their savings are secure," Murkowski said.

Even Obama acknowledged that female voters are going to want questions answered on the economy.

"I'm not somebody who believes that women are going to be single-issue voters. They never have been," he said.

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GO BIG OR GO HOME: THE CHOICE FOR THE DEMOCRATS IN NOVEMBER - American Reporter

by Randolph T. Holhut
Chief of AR Correspondents
Dummerston, Vt. Back to home page Printable version of this story

DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Politics is all about salesmanship and getting your message across to voters.

In this regard, President Obama and the Democrats have failed miserably.

According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, about one-third of voters believe that the Obama Administration has raised taxes for most Americans, compared to only 8 percent who believe - correctly! - that he has lowered them.

Mr. Obama's stimulus package lowered taxes for most working Americans and put an extra $400 into their pockets. But you'd never know that fact from reading or listening to the news.

That's why allowing the Bush Administration's tax cuts to expire for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans, while extending them for those who earn less than $250,000 a year is the ultimate political no-brainer for Democrats.

It's also an economic no-brainer. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office looked at 11 different policy options for stimulating the economy. The CBO found that the least effective option was cutting taxes for the wealthy, since they are likely to save their money than spend it.

As the CBO put it, "tax cuts, though difficult for politicians to resist in an election season, have limited ability to bolster the flagging economy because they are essentially a supply-side remedy for a problem caused by a lack of demand."

That was echoed by Moody's, which found that when the top tax rate on the wealthy was increased from 31 to 39 percent by President Clinton in 1993, the saving rate dropped while the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index increased. By comparison, when President Bush cut the top tax rate to 35 percent in 2001, the saving rate increased while the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index decreased.

Study after study shows that increases in the top marginal tax rate for the wealthiest in our society does not weaken the economy or significantly decrease consumption. At the same time, when more money is put into workers' pockets, it creates more spending, which creates more demand, which creates more jobs, which creates prosperity.

And forget this week's proclamation that the recession is officially ended last year. For most Americans, times are still hard. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty rate surged to 14.3 percent in 2009, up from 13.2 percent in 2008. There are now 43.6 million Americans living in poverty, the highest number in the five decades that the Census Bureau has been keeping those statistics.

The official federal poverty level for a family of four is $21,756 a year, which is not nearly enough to pay for food, shelter, transportation or health care. Even at 200 percent of the poverty level - roughly $43,000 a year -it's difficult. Yet the Census Bureau found 1 in 3 Americans not even earning that level of income, and that ratio is steadily rising.

Many Democrats are afraid to make the following statements out of fear of being branded as engaging in "class warfare." But these numbers say it all. The share of income going to the wealthiest 10 percent of American households - those earning more than $100,000 - has risen from 34.6 percent in 1980 to 48.2 percent in 2008, while incomes for those who earn under $40,000 a year have been essentially flat for nearly 40 years.

Even before the current recession, working Americans had been squeezed hard. Now, with 29 million Americans either out of work or forced into part-time work, we're seeing class warfare waged by the wealthy and powerful against the rest of us - and the rich are winning big time. The disparity between rich and poor has reached the levels of the late 1920s, just before the Great Depression, while the number of long-term jobless is the highest its been since the 1930s.

So where are the Democrats? Why aren't they defending the interests of working Americans? Because the party sold them out long ago. They allowed the financial sector to be deregulated and let the markets become one giant casino. They allowed our manufacturing sector to wither and allowed jobs to be shipped overseas. They allowed labor unions to be destroyed and the social safety net to be slashed. They allowed corporate power to grow unchecked, and for more wealth to be concentrated into fewer hands.

Yes, Republicans have also been responsible for all this. But we expect Republicans to behave like this. That's what their party stands for, and we'll get a lot more of it if Republicans regain control of Congress in November.

But Democrats once stood for the opposite of these policies, and the result was a fair, just economy and a prosperous nation in the 1950s and 1960s. But the Democrats slowly backed away from these principles, and are now as much blame for the death spiral that our nation is in as the Republicans.

Being less worse than the crazy Tea Partiers who have taken over the Republican Party is not enough for the Democrats. They need to regain the trust of working Americans, and to do that, the Democrats need to stand again for the common good and fight against the expansion of corporate power into every aspect of our lives.

Unfortunately, the Democrats won't do this. Yes, President Obama has nibbled around the edges of the many problems facing our nation. Yes, he inherited a mess the Bush Administration that will take many more years to clean up. But even with a robust majority in Congress and a groundswell of popular support, he squandered so many chances to make his presidency a truly transformative one.

In an economy with near double-digit unemployment, it is imperative that we create jobs. We also know there's also no shortage of public infrastructure that needs rebuilding. A revival of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps could solve both problems.

In the longer term, we need to shift our economy to a cleaner and more energy-efficient path, we need to really overhaul our health care system and we need to re-regulate the financial markets to prevent a replay of the recklessness and fraud that brought our economy to the brink of collapse.

In other words, the Democrats need to go big or go home. In the six weeks left before Election Day, they must either offer a positive and ambitious agenda that will help create an economy that works for all of us, or get thumped at the polls in November.

Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for more than 30 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com.

Copyright 2011 Joe Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.

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