While the Colorado and Georgia elections have gotten more national media attention, there are primaries today in Connecticut and Minnesota as well. In the Nutmeg State, the gubernatorial primaries in both parties have turned into very close contests matching candidates with personal wealth with opponents receiving public financing. And while former wrestling executive Linda McMahon seems to have the GOP Senate primary in hand, it will be interesting to see what sort of protest vote her two challengers receive. In Minnesota, two self-financed candidates for governor, including front-runner and former U.S. Senator Mark Dayton, are taking on the officially endorsed DFL candidate in a test of voter turnout strategies.
Speaking of turnout, observers in both CT and MN are speculating about the impact of holding a primary at the peak of vacation time. Even the best-financed campaigns in highly competitive races can wind up throwing resources into the void if voters are checked out.
Both of Connecticut's gubernatorial primaries feature wealthy front-runners who seem to have lost momentum. Among Democrats, 2006 Senate nominee Ned Lamont began the campaign with high name ID, a lot of progressive support, and plenty of personal money (he committed $9 million to this primary), but has actually campaigned as something of a centrist focused on dealing with CT's fiscal problems. Former Stamford mayor Dan Malloy, who narrowly lost the 2006 gubernatorial nomination, has been on the offensive for much of the campaign, and has taken multiple shots at Lamont's links to the financial industry. Down the stretch Lamont has been firing back, drawing attention to an incident in Stamford when Malloy was alleged to have given a no-bid contract to a construction company that did work on his home (an explosive charge in CT, thanks to the scandal that enveloped former Gov. John Rowland).
A subplot in both gubernatorial primaries is Connecticut's public financing system, which is providing both Malloy and Republican Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele with $2.7 million, an amount partially determined by their opponents' personal spending. The system is in trouble in the courts as part of the fallout from the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, but has survived through primary day.
A late Quinnipiac poll showed Malloy closing to within three points (42-45) of Lamont.
On the Republican side, the wealthy frontrunner is former Ambassador to Ireland Tom Foley, who won the state convention endorsement and had a substantial early lead. He hasn't spent as lavishly as Lamont, but has loaned his campaign $3 million. Coming on strong is Fedele, who in the final Quinnipiac poll has closed to within 8 points (30-38), with a lot of instability evident in public opinion on the race (a third candidate, underfinanced businessman Oz Griebel has 17%). The fate of a closed textile mill in Georgia onced owned by Foley's investment firm has become a major issue in the campaign, as a symbol of Foley's alleged indifference to economic suffering.
Both Democrats have double-digit leads over both Republicans in general election polls.
Meanwhile, in the U.S. Senate race, free-spending Linda McMahon, who upset former congressman Rob Simmons to win the state convention endorsement, is expected to beat Simmons (who dropped out of the race, then dropped back in) and Tea Party activist and former Ron Paul advisor Peter Schiff without too much trouble, but her percentage will be watched closely for signs of weakness in her uphill general election battle against Democrat Richard Blumenthal.
In Minnesota, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (the history-laden label for the Democratic Party in this state) gubernatorial primary is a three-way race involving two self-funders who skipped the state convention process for securing a party endorsement, and the endorsee, Margaret Anderson Kelliher. One self-funder, department store heir Mark Dayton, is obviously well-known as a former U.S. Senator and long-time progressive firebrand, while the other, former state legislator Matt Entenza, is known mainly as the founder of a progressive think tank. Each has put about $3 million in personal money into the campaign, while Kelliher has had to get by through raising just under a million.
Polls have shown Dayton holding a steady lead with Kelliher in a steady second place. The most recent poll, from Survey USA, shows Dayton at 43%, Kelliher at 27%, and Entenza at 22%. Dayton and Kelliher have basically split the major labor endorsements. Her chances probably depend on an aggressive ground game aided by low turnout.
With Tom Emmer certain to win the GOP gubernatorial nomination, the other primary to watch is that of the Independence Party (that third-party legacy of Jesse Ventura), where the state-convention-endorsed and better-funded candidate, former Republican staffer Tom Horner, is expected to defeat publisher Rob Hahn. In general election polls, Horner is definitely pulling some significant Republican votes, which is one reason that all three Democrats are leading Emmer by comfortable margins. That's significant; aside from the national political mood, the DFL hasn't won a gubernatorial race in Minnesota since 1986. Retiring governor Tim Pawlenty, who is running for president, would probably prefer not to have a Democratic successor firing shots at him from back home.
8.10.2010
As Liberals Lose Hope, the White House is Losing Its Cool
@ 11:00 AM
Lord knows I've had my share of disagreements with the "professional left", as Press Secretary Robert Gibbs derisively referred to them in a rant to The Hill this morning. And I tend to endorse Jonathan Cohn's view that Obama has had a reasonably accomplished first year-and-a-half in office that perhaps has been taken for granted by some liberals.
But if there is a gulf between what Obama has accomplished and the amount of credit that some liberals are willing to give him for it, it just became much wider today with Gibbs statements like "those people ought to be drug tested" and "they wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president".
One problem that Obama is having -- and not just on the left, although it might be most acute there -- is the dissonance between the grand, poetic narratives of the campaign trail and the prosaic and transactional day-to-day grind of governance. To some extent, this is intrinsic to the nature of the respective activities. Still, for the 70 million who voted for Obama, there was a sense that -- after a difficult eight years for a country challenged by two wars, two recessions, Hurricane Katrina, and the worst act of terrorism in history -- things might finally start to be different. That change had come. That progress was happening. That politics were becoming more elevated. A black man had just received 365 electoral votes, for crying out loud!
The euphoric feeling among liberals in the days between the election and the inauguration seems so quaint now -- like something that happened decades ago -- but it was very tangible at the time. Conservatives, for their part, were willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, with his approval and favoability ratings sometimes soaring into the 70s: such a post-election "bounce" had once been commonplace in the days of Eisenhower and Kennedy, but had rarely been seen in the post-Watergate era.
But Obama was never really able to capitalize on that momentum. Perhaps, in the face of the headwinds of an ever-deepening jobs crisis (far worse than his advisors had anticipated) and unrepentant Republican obstructionism (a canny, even ballsy strategy in retrospect), there was no way he really could have.
Nevertheless, I suspect that for most liberals, any real sense of progress has now been lost. Yes, the left got a good-but-not-great health care bill, a good-but-not-great stimulus package, a good-but-not-great financial reform plan: these are a formidable bounty, and Obama and the Democratic Congress worked hard for them. But they now read as a basically par-for-the-course result from a time when all the stars were aligned for the Democrats -- rather than anything predictive of a new direction, or of a more progressive future. In contrast, as should become emphatically clear on November 2nd, the reversion to the mean has been incredibly swift.
What liberals haven't had, in other words, is very many opportunities to feel good about themselves, or to feel good about the future. While the White House has achieved several wins, they have never been elegant or emphatic, instead coming amidst the small-ball banality of cloture vote after cloture vote, of compromise after compromise.
Meanwhile, the White House has had two incredibly cynical moments in the past several weeks -- Gibbs' rant today and the premature firing of Shirly Sherrod three weeks ago. Both reflected politics at its worst, the clumsiest possible efforts at "triangulation".
I am taking it for granted, of course, that Gibbs's comments today will prove not to be a cagey political strategy: they were so naked and inartful, such a Velveeta attempt at Sister Souljah moment, that I don't see how they possibly could be. They will annoy the left but do nothing to placate Obama's critics on the right or persuade those in the center.
The Sherrod incident, as I wrote at the time, raised questions about the White House's state of mind. Did it not recognize how silly it looked? How incredibly daft a political strategy it was for a Democratic White House to bark for fear of Glenn Beck's command? These same questions can be raised today. But in Sherrod's case, at least, the White House was trying to react to a developing story in real time. Gibbs's comments today, in contrast, were completely unprompted.
I don't know whether Gibbs was going "off-message" out of frustration, or whether the White House has become so jaded that they actually think this was a good strategy. Either way, it speaks to the need for some fresh blood and some fresh ideas in the White House. The famously unflappable Obama is losing his cool.
But if there is a gulf between what Obama has accomplished and the amount of credit that some liberals are willing to give him for it, it just became much wider today with Gibbs statements like "those people ought to be drug tested" and "they wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president".
One problem that Obama is having -- and not just on the left, although it might be most acute there -- is the dissonance between the grand, poetic narratives of the campaign trail and the prosaic and transactional day-to-day grind of governance. To some extent, this is intrinsic to the nature of the respective activities. Still, for the 70 million who voted for Obama, there was a sense that -- after a difficult eight years for a country challenged by two wars, two recessions, Hurricane Katrina, and the worst act of terrorism in history -- things might finally start to be different. That change had come. That progress was happening. That politics were becoming more elevated. A black man had just received 365 electoral votes, for crying out loud!
The euphoric feeling among liberals in the days between the election and the inauguration seems so quaint now -- like something that happened decades ago -- but it was very tangible at the time. Conservatives, for their part, were willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, with his approval and favoability ratings sometimes soaring into the 70s: such a post-election "bounce" had once been commonplace in the days of Eisenhower and Kennedy, but had rarely been seen in the post-Watergate era.
But Obama was never really able to capitalize on that momentum. Perhaps, in the face of the headwinds of an ever-deepening jobs crisis (far worse than his advisors had anticipated) and unrepentant Republican obstructionism (a canny, even ballsy strategy in retrospect), there was no way he really could have.
Nevertheless, I suspect that for most liberals, any real sense of progress has now been lost. Yes, the left got a good-but-not-great health care bill, a good-but-not-great stimulus package, a good-but-not-great financial reform plan: these are a formidable bounty, and Obama and the Democratic Congress worked hard for them. But they now read as a basically par-for-the-course result from a time when all the stars were aligned for the Democrats -- rather than anything predictive of a new direction, or of a more progressive future. In contrast, as should become emphatically clear on November 2nd, the reversion to the mean has been incredibly swift.
What liberals haven't had, in other words, is very many opportunities to feel good about themselves, or to feel good about the future. While the White House has achieved several wins, they have never been elegant or emphatic, instead coming amidst the small-ball banality of cloture vote after cloture vote, of compromise after compromise.
Meanwhile, the White House has had two incredibly cynical moments in the past several weeks -- Gibbs' rant today and the premature firing of Shirly Sherrod three weeks ago. Both reflected politics at its worst, the clumsiest possible efforts at "triangulation".
I am taking it for granted, of course, that Gibbs's comments today will prove not to be a cagey political strategy: they were so naked and inartful, such a Velveeta attempt at Sister Souljah moment, that I don't see how they possibly could be. They will annoy the left but do nothing to placate Obama's critics on the right or persuade those in the center.
The Sherrod incident, as I wrote at the time, raised questions about the White House's state of mind. Did it not recognize how silly it looked? How incredibly daft a political strategy it was for a Democratic White House to bark for fear of Glenn Beck's command? These same questions can be raised today. But in Sherrod's case, at least, the White House was trying to react to a developing story in real time. Gibbs's comments today, in contrast, were completely unprompted.
I don't know whether Gibbs was going "off-message" out of frustration, or whether the White House has become so jaded that they actually think this was a good strategy. Either way, it speaks to the need for some fresh blood and some fresh ideas in the White House. The famously unflappable Obama is losing his cool.
8.09.2010
Cage Match in Georgia
@ 8:15 PM
The primary runoff in Georgia is primarily a Republican affair (the only statewide or congressional Democratic runoff is for the Secretary of State position). And the marquee contest, the gubernatorial runoff, has been a bitter cage match between former Secretary of State Karen Handel, who finished first in the seven-candidate primary with 34%, and former congressman Nathan Deal, who finished second with 23%.
Aside from the very personal shots the two candidates have been taking at each other (spurring Republican fears of a divided party going into a tough race against Democratic nominee Roy Barnes), the contest has developed a national dimension, punctuated in the home stretch when 2008 Georgia presidential primary winner Mike Huckabee campaigned with Deal (Newt Gingrich has also visibly supported Deal) while Palin appeared today with Handel. Although Atlanta-based Handel has a geographical advantage, very close polls and the likelihood of low and erratic turnout indicate anything could happen.
The bitterness of this contest is nothing new. Handel's campaign message from the get-go (strikingly similar to that of another Palin endorsee, Nikki Haley of SC) has been that she's a "conservative reformer" taking on the corrupt, unreliably conservative (and in some cases ex-Democratic) good ol' boy establishment of the GOP. She raised some serious hackles in the ranks of Republican state legislators when she continued the corruption charges without interruption after House Speaker Glenn Richardson was dumped in the wake of a sex-with-a-utility-lobbyist scandal. So it's not surprising that Deal has been endorsed by a majority of Republican state legislators (including Richardson's replacement, Speaker David Ralston, who hails from Deal's North Georgia stomping grounds), along with most of his former colleagues in the congressional delegation. A contributing factor to resentment of Handel's anti-establishment message is her unofficial sponsorship by lame duck Governor Sonny Perdue, who is held in low regard in many elite Republican circles.
While Handel's "conservative reformer" riff has represented her main claim to the much-prized "true conservative" mantle in this race, Deal has gone very specifically ideological, siding with the Georgia Right-to-Life organization's angry attacks on Handel for favoring rape-and-incest exceptions to a hypothetical abortion ban, and for opposing GRTL's proposal to restrict IV fertility clinics (a very personal issue for Handel, who is childless after years of trying to get pregnant). Deal has also invested serious television ad time to attacks on Handel for alleged pro-gay-rights positions taken earlier in her career when she was a local elected official in Atlanta.
With Handel calling Deal a corrupt, superannuated hack, and Deal calling Handel a lying liberal (these are not exaggerations of the rhetoric), it seems reasonably obvious that Handel's trying to boost turnout with some populist heat and a special appeal to women, while Deal's hoping to appeal to hard-core conservatives who are sure to vote, particularly supporters of the losing candidates in the primary. Polls indicate that Deal's doing a pretty good job of attracting such supporters in middle and south Georgia, outside his own North Georgia base and Handel's metro Atlanta base (though he did not receive a much-hoped-for endorsement from third-place finisher Eric Johnson of Savannah).
Only 52,000 early votes had been cast in the runoff as of one day before the deadline, possibly indicating a very low turnout (though the early voting period for the three-week runoff campaign was unusually short). So the late fireworks--including a full-throated attack on the "good ol' boys" generally and GRTL specifically by Palin--could matter.
The other factor influencing the size and shape of the statewide runoff vote is where other runoff races are occurring. It's very helpful to Deal that there's a runoff in his old 9th district congressional seat; it's the fourth time in just three months that Deal's successor, Tom Graves, has faced former state senator Lee Hawkins (in a special election when Deal resigned, in a special election runoff, and then in the regular primary and runoff). Graves has struggled with reports of legal and financial issues involving his business, but is benefitting now from help from the GOP congressional leadership, along with the Club for Growth and his longstanding ties with the Tea Party movement. Hawkins main hope is probably that he's from Hall County, as is Nathan Deal, so a very big home-town vote for the gubernatorial candidate could help the congressional underdog as well.
But another competitive Republican congressional primary is in Handel's political wheelhouse of metro Atlanta, the 7th district runoff to succeed John Linder. The first-place finisher, former Linder chief of staff, Rob Woodall, is expected to defeat the surprise second-place finisher, Christian Right activist and radio talk show host Jody Hice, if only because Woodall's been endorsed by Linder and is from vote-heavy Gwinnett County. Hice, a Southern Baptist minister famous for defying IRS regulations restricting electioneering from the pulpit, drew attention this year with billboards reading: "Had Enough of Obama's Change?" with a hammer-and-sickle replacing the "C" in "Change."
The third GOP congressional runoff, in Blue Dog Democrat John Barrow's 12th district, which runs from Augusta down to Savannah and was narrowly carried by Barack Obama, is harder to predict, with two candidates claiming the Tea Party and "true conservative" mantle engaged in an increasingly nasty contest. Unsuccessful 2008 candidate Ray McKinney, who finished first in the primary, is expected to defeat volunteer fire chief Carl Smith, mainly because of solid self-financing and a more visible district-wide campaign. The winner will be an underdog against Barrow, who's been busily raising money and voting against the Democratic leadership on many high-profile issues (he carried less than 60% against underfunded liberal primary opponent Regina Thomas).
One other runoff that could have an impact on the overall turnout pattern is the Republican Attorney General's race, where the former chief executive of the large metro Atlanta suburb of Cobb County, Sam Olens, is competing, and could draw a strong vote from the home folks. Cobb, like Gwinett, was handily carried by Karen Handel in the primary.
As noted above, the polls in the gubernatorial runoff show a close contest. Georgia-based Insider Advantage, polling on August 5, showed a 46-46 tie, with Deal running surprisingly well in metro Atlanta. A three-day poll by Mason-Dixon released about the same time showed Handel up 47-42, with a significant gender gap helping her among women. And then at the last minute, the Republican firm of Landmark Communications, which had an earlier survey showing Handel up 46-37, released a new poll showing Deal pulling ahead 44-42, with virtually no gender gap.
It should be an interesting election night. Polls close at 7:00 EDT.
Aside from the very personal shots the two candidates have been taking at each other (spurring Republican fears of a divided party going into a tough race against Democratic nominee Roy Barnes), the contest has developed a national dimension, punctuated in the home stretch when 2008 Georgia presidential primary winner Mike Huckabee campaigned with Deal (Newt Gingrich has also visibly supported Deal) while Palin appeared today with Handel. Although Atlanta-based Handel has a geographical advantage, very close polls and the likelihood of low and erratic turnout indicate anything could happen.
The bitterness of this contest is nothing new. Handel's campaign message from the get-go (strikingly similar to that of another Palin endorsee, Nikki Haley of SC) has been that she's a "conservative reformer" taking on the corrupt, unreliably conservative (and in some cases ex-Democratic) good ol' boy establishment of the GOP. She raised some serious hackles in the ranks of Republican state legislators when she continued the corruption charges without interruption after House Speaker Glenn Richardson was dumped in the wake of a sex-with-a-utility-lobbyist scandal. So it's not surprising that Deal has been endorsed by a majority of Republican state legislators (including Richardson's replacement, Speaker David Ralston, who hails from Deal's North Georgia stomping grounds), along with most of his former colleagues in the congressional delegation. A contributing factor to resentment of Handel's anti-establishment message is her unofficial sponsorship by lame duck Governor Sonny Perdue, who is held in low regard in many elite Republican circles.
While Handel's "conservative reformer" riff has represented her main claim to the much-prized "true conservative" mantle in this race, Deal has gone very specifically ideological, siding with the Georgia Right-to-Life organization's angry attacks on Handel for favoring rape-and-incest exceptions to a hypothetical abortion ban, and for opposing GRTL's proposal to restrict IV fertility clinics (a very personal issue for Handel, who is childless after years of trying to get pregnant). Deal has also invested serious television ad time to attacks on Handel for alleged pro-gay-rights positions taken earlier in her career when she was a local elected official in Atlanta.
With Handel calling Deal a corrupt, superannuated hack, and Deal calling Handel a lying liberal (these are not exaggerations of the rhetoric), it seems reasonably obvious that Handel's trying to boost turnout with some populist heat and a special appeal to women, while Deal's hoping to appeal to hard-core conservatives who are sure to vote, particularly supporters of the losing candidates in the primary. Polls indicate that Deal's doing a pretty good job of attracting such supporters in middle and south Georgia, outside his own North Georgia base and Handel's metro Atlanta base (though he did not receive a much-hoped-for endorsement from third-place finisher Eric Johnson of Savannah).
Only 52,000 early votes had been cast in the runoff as of one day before the deadline, possibly indicating a very low turnout (though the early voting period for the three-week runoff campaign was unusually short). So the late fireworks--including a full-throated attack on the "good ol' boys" generally and GRTL specifically by Palin--could matter.
The other factor influencing the size and shape of the statewide runoff vote is where other runoff races are occurring. It's very helpful to Deal that there's a runoff in his old 9th district congressional seat; it's the fourth time in just three months that Deal's successor, Tom Graves, has faced former state senator Lee Hawkins (in a special election when Deal resigned, in a special election runoff, and then in the regular primary and runoff). Graves has struggled with reports of legal and financial issues involving his business, but is benefitting now from help from the GOP congressional leadership, along with the Club for Growth and his longstanding ties with the Tea Party movement. Hawkins main hope is probably that he's from Hall County, as is Nathan Deal, so a very big home-town vote for the gubernatorial candidate could help the congressional underdog as well.
But another competitive Republican congressional primary is in Handel's political wheelhouse of metro Atlanta, the 7th district runoff to succeed John Linder. The first-place finisher, former Linder chief of staff, Rob Woodall, is expected to defeat the surprise second-place finisher, Christian Right activist and radio talk show host Jody Hice, if only because Woodall's been endorsed by Linder and is from vote-heavy Gwinnett County. Hice, a Southern Baptist minister famous for defying IRS regulations restricting electioneering from the pulpit, drew attention this year with billboards reading: "Had Enough of Obama's Change?" with a hammer-and-sickle replacing the "C" in "Change."
The third GOP congressional runoff, in Blue Dog Democrat John Barrow's 12th district, which runs from Augusta down to Savannah and was narrowly carried by Barack Obama, is harder to predict, with two candidates claiming the Tea Party and "true conservative" mantle engaged in an increasingly nasty contest. Unsuccessful 2008 candidate Ray McKinney, who finished first in the primary, is expected to defeat volunteer fire chief Carl Smith, mainly because of solid self-financing and a more visible district-wide campaign. The winner will be an underdog against Barrow, who's been busily raising money and voting against the Democratic leadership on many high-profile issues (he carried less than 60% against underfunded liberal primary opponent Regina Thomas).
One other runoff that could have an impact on the overall turnout pattern is the Republican Attorney General's race, where the former chief executive of the large metro Atlanta suburb of Cobb County, Sam Olens, is competing, and could draw a strong vote from the home folks. Cobb, like Gwinett, was handily carried by Karen Handel in the primary.
As noted above, the polls in the gubernatorial runoff show a close contest. Georgia-based Insider Advantage, polling on August 5, showed a 46-46 tie, with Deal running surprisingly well in metro Atlanta. A three-day poll by Mason-Dixon released about the same time showed Handel up 47-42, with a significant gender gap helping her among women. And then at the last minute, the Republican firm of Landmark Communications, which had an earlier survey showing Handel up 46-37, released a new poll showing Deal pulling ahead 44-42, with virtually no gender gap.
It should be an interesting election night. Polls close at 7:00 EDT.
Chaos in Colorado
@ 6:30 PM
Four states will hold primaries tomorrow, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia (a runoff) and Minnesota. And while all four have significant contests, the two that have garnered the most national attention are Colorado, which features competitive Senate primaries in both parties and a very strange gubernatorial contest; and Georgia, where Karen Handel and Nathan Deal are concluding an exceptionally nasty runoff campaign with implications not only for November, but for 2012. So I'll cover Colorado and Georgia separately, and deal with Connecticut and Minnesota together later on.
To put it simply, Colorado's appointed Democratic senator, Michael Bennet, is in danger of losing tomorrow, while Colorado Republicans are looking at a close Senate primary while struggling to make the best of a bad gubernatorial landscape.
Despite a large financial advantage (about 3-1 in spending as of the beginning of August) and the support of the White House, Bennet has been visibly slipping in the runup to his primary with former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff. And his stretch run was interrupted by a negative story broken by The New York Times about his handling of investments for the Denver school system that quickly became fodder for a Romanoff attack ad, reinforcing his general argument that the incumbent is a self-profiting ally of Wall Street. Both candidates have had to dip into personal funds to pay for last-minute ads, with Romanoff actually selling his house.
You could argue that the perception of ideological differences between Bennet and Romanoff is largely an illusion; Romanoff was generally considered a bipartisan-oriented "centrist" in the legislature (and supported Hillary Clinton for president, a favor that Bill Clinton returned with a well-timed endorsement in this race), while Bennet pleased many progressives with a vocal stance in favor of a public option during the latter stages of the health reform debate. But Romanoff easily won the state party convention endorsement, generally dominated by liberal activists, and is definitely appealling to progressive unhappiness with the perceived coziness of the Democratic "establishment" with Wall Street.
The last-minute dynamics in this and every other Colorado race is affected by the fact that most of the state's counties (including all the big population centers other than El Paso County, which includes Colorado Springs) opted for an all-mail-ballot system this year, boosting the likelihood of early voting and probably increasing turnout generally. (As of mid-afternoon today, 34% of registered Democrats and 37% of registered Republicans had returned ballots; Colorado is a closed primary state). A Survey USA poll taken July 27-29 showed just over half of likely voters in the Democratic Senate primary as having already cast ballots, with Romanoff doing very well among early voters, and leading overall 48-45. A more recent PPP survey showed Bennet still holding onto a 49-43 lead.
On the Republican side of the Senate contest, the race between former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton and district attorney Ken Buck has also become very contentious and competitive. The early front-runner and NRSC pick, Norton began the race dangerously associated with "the DC Republican establishment," typified by her brother-in-law, big-time lobbyist and campaign strategist Charlie Black. She was also very close to John McCain, a mixed blessing in a state where McCain was trounced by Mitt Romney in the 2008 caucuses. Building a strong base in the Tea Party movement, and also earning the support of out-of-state conservative validators like Jim DeMint and RedState's Erick Erickson, Buck won the state convention endorsement (which Norton did not even contest), and by mid-June had moved well ahead of Norton in the polls. A particularly embarassing moment for Norton occurred when Sarah Palin came into the state for a rally, and instead of endorsing her, as was expected by many observers, didn't even mention the race.
But two highly visible gaffes by Buck helped Norton get her mojo back. First, clearly rattled by Norton taunts that he interpreted as questioning his masculinity, he answered a question at a public event by saying: "Why should you vote for me? Because I do not wear high heels." Norton's campaign sprang immediately upon the comment with ads, and with suggestions that it represented a "Macaca Moment" for Buck. Second, a tape recording came out of an earlier moment when Buck said to a Democratic tracker: “Please tell those dumbasses at the Tea Party to stop asking questions about birth certificates while I'm on the camera.”
While Norton had a significant financial advantage early in the campaign, the candidates been relatively even in the ability to run ads down the stretch, and both have benefitted from "independent expenditure" attacks on their opponent. During the last week, Norton made the surprising decision to invite John McCain to campaign with her in Colorado, supposedly to draw attention to her hawkish views on Afghanistan and Iraq.
It's unclear who's ahead. The end-of-July Survey USA poll for the Denver Post showed Buck still maintaining a 50-41 lead, while the later PPP survey showed Norton back up 45-43.
The outcome is equally unclear in the GOP gubernatorial race, but if Norton and Buck are trying to overcome occasional misteps, the candidates for governor are more accurately trying to show who's less determined to lose.
The Democratic gubernatorial nomination was secured by Denver mayor John Hickenlooper the moment he announced. At one point, the GOP nomination seemed similarly nailed down by former congressman Scott McInnis, who benefitted from a field cleared of major candidates. Yes, little-known businessman Dan Maes won a Tea Party-dominated state party convention endorsement in an upset, but quickly squandered that advantage with a series of amateurish campaign finance law violations, with the fines dissipating his meager funds.
Then, beginning on July 13, the Denver Post very nearly drove McInnis out of the race with a series of revelations about extensive plagiarism in a wonky, serialized paper on water policy that had appeared several years earlier over McInnis' byline, earning him a hefty $300,000 stipend from a local foundation. To make a very long story short, McInnis didn't handle the scandal very well, but decided to gut it out, probably because of considerable misgivings among Republicans about Maes, who subsequently got his own very bad press after claiming that a popular private-non-profit bike-sharing program aimed at reducing Denver traffic was actually part of a United Nations plot to take over the city.
While Republicans quietly talked about the possibility of convincing the winner of the primary to withdraw and let the state party choose a more presentable nominee, former congressman Tom Tancredo crashed into the scene, threatening to run on the ticket of the far-right Constitution Party if Maes and McInnis didn't immediately promise to get out after the primary. When the two candidates didn't meet his ultimatum deadline, The Tank duly announced his candidacy; a Rasmussen poll subsequently showed him splitting the Republican vote right down the middle and ensuring an easy win for Hickenlooper.
Survey USA's final poll showed Maes leading McInnis 43-39, while PPP's had McInnis up 41-40. But it wasn't clear if Republican voters were choosing the strongest gubernatorial candidate, or the one most likely to drop out after the primary and give the state party a fighting chance to find a unity candidate and convince Tancredo to stand down (a prospect not exactly enhanced when state party chairman Dick Wadhams got into a wild, extended screaming match with Tancredo on a Denver radio show).
With all this drama, downballot candidates in Colorado have struggled to get attention, but there are two competitive GOP primaries to choose opponents for potentially vulnerable Democratic congressmen John Salazar (3d district) and Ed Perlmutter (7th district). In the 3d, state rep. Scott Tipton has been the front-runner, but a surprise endorsement of Bob McConnell by Sarah Palin has given the fiery Tea Party activist hopes of an upset. And in the 7th, Aurora city councilman Ryan Frazier has had a big financial advantage over former McCain Campaign Veterans Coordinator Lang Sias, but the underdog probably benefitted from an attention-grabbing personal appearance with his old boss.
Polls close at (or in mail-ballot-only counties, ballots must be dropped off at "service centers" by) 7:00 MDT.
To put it simply, Colorado's appointed Democratic senator, Michael Bennet, is in danger of losing tomorrow, while Colorado Republicans are looking at a close Senate primary while struggling to make the best of a bad gubernatorial landscape.
Despite a large financial advantage (about 3-1 in spending as of the beginning of August) and the support of the White House, Bennet has been visibly slipping in the runup to his primary with former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff. And his stretch run was interrupted by a negative story broken by The New York Times about his handling of investments for the Denver school system that quickly became fodder for a Romanoff attack ad, reinforcing his general argument that the incumbent is a self-profiting ally of Wall Street. Both candidates have had to dip into personal funds to pay for last-minute ads, with Romanoff actually selling his house.
You could argue that the perception of ideological differences between Bennet and Romanoff is largely an illusion; Romanoff was generally considered a bipartisan-oriented "centrist" in the legislature (and supported Hillary Clinton for president, a favor that Bill Clinton returned with a well-timed endorsement in this race), while Bennet pleased many progressives with a vocal stance in favor of a public option during the latter stages of the health reform debate. But Romanoff easily won the state party convention endorsement, generally dominated by liberal activists, and is definitely appealling to progressive unhappiness with the perceived coziness of the Democratic "establishment" with Wall Street.
The last-minute dynamics in this and every other Colorado race is affected by the fact that most of the state's counties (including all the big population centers other than El Paso County, which includes Colorado Springs) opted for an all-mail-ballot system this year, boosting the likelihood of early voting and probably increasing turnout generally. (As of mid-afternoon today, 34% of registered Democrats and 37% of registered Republicans had returned ballots; Colorado is a closed primary state). A Survey USA poll taken July 27-29 showed just over half of likely voters in the Democratic Senate primary as having already cast ballots, with Romanoff doing very well among early voters, and leading overall 48-45. A more recent PPP survey showed Bennet still holding onto a 49-43 lead.
On the Republican side of the Senate contest, the race between former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton and district attorney Ken Buck has also become very contentious and competitive. The early front-runner and NRSC pick, Norton began the race dangerously associated with "the DC Republican establishment," typified by her brother-in-law, big-time lobbyist and campaign strategist Charlie Black. She was also very close to John McCain, a mixed blessing in a state where McCain was trounced by Mitt Romney in the 2008 caucuses. Building a strong base in the Tea Party movement, and also earning the support of out-of-state conservative validators like Jim DeMint and RedState's Erick Erickson, Buck won the state convention endorsement (which Norton did not even contest), and by mid-June had moved well ahead of Norton in the polls. A particularly embarassing moment for Norton occurred when Sarah Palin came into the state for a rally, and instead of endorsing her, as was expected by many observers, didn't even mention the race.
But two highly visible gaffes by Buck helped Norton get her mojo back. First, clearly rattled by Norton taunts that he interpreted as questioning his masculinity, he answered a question at a public event by saying: "Why should you vote for me? Because I do not wear high heels." Norton's campaign sprang immediately upon the comment with ads, and with suggestions that it represented a "Macaca Moment" for Buck. Second, a tape recording came out of an earlier moment when Buck said to a Democratic tracker: “Please tell those dumbasses at the Tea Party to stop asking questions about birth certificates while I'm on the camera.”
While Norton had a significant financial advantage early in the campaign, the candidates been relatively even in the ability to run ads down the stretch, and both have benefitted from "independent expenditure" attacks on their opponent. During the last week, Norton made the surprising decision to invite John McCain to campaign with her in Colorado, supposedly to draw attention to her hawkish views on Afghanistan and Iraq.
It's unclear who's ahead. The end-of-July Survey USA poll for the Denver Post showed Buck still maintaining a 50-41 lead, while the later PPP survey showed Norton back up 45-43.
The outcome is equally unclear in the GOP gubernatorial race, but if Norton and Buck are trying to overcome occasional misteps, the candidates for governor are more accurately trying to show who's less determined to lose.
The Democratic gubernatorial nomination was secured by Denver mayor John Hickenlooper the moment he announced. At one point, the GOP nomination seemed similarly nailed down by former congressman Scott McInnis, who benefitted from a field cleared of major candidates. Yes, little-known businessman Dan Maes won a Tea Party-dominated state party convention endorsement in an upset, but quickly squandered that advantage with a series of amateurish campaign finance law violations, with the fines dissipating his meager funds.
Then, beginning on July 13, the Denver Post very nearly drove McInnis out of the race with a series of revelations about extensive plagiarism in a wonky, serialized paper on water policy that had appeared several years earlier over McInnis' byline, earning him a hefty $300,000 stipend from a local foundation. To make a very long story short, McInnis didn't handle the scandal very well, but decided to gut it out, probably because of considerable misgivings among Republicans about Maes, who subsequently got his own very bad press after claiming that a popular private-non-profit bike-sharing program aimed at reducing Denver traffic was actually part of a United Nations plot to take over the city.
While Republicans quietly talked about the possibility of convincing the winner of the primary to withdraw and let the state party choose a more presentable nominee, former congressman Tom Tancredo crashed into the scene, threatening to run on the ticket of the far-right Constitution Party if Maes and McInnis didn't immediately promise to get out after the primary. When the two candidates didn't meet his ultimatum deadline, The Tank duly announced his candidacy; a Rasmussen poll subsequently showed him splitting the Republican vote right down the middle and ensuring an easy win for Hickenlooper.
Survey USA's final poll showed Maes leading McInnis 43-39, while PPP's had McInnis up 41-40. But it wasn't clear if Republican voters were choosing the strongest gubernatorial candidate, or the one most likely to drop out after the primary and give the state party a fighting chance to find a unity candidate and convince Tancredo to stand down (a prospect not exactly enhanced when state party chairman Dick Wadhams got into a wild, extended screaming match with Tancredo on a Denver radio show).
With all this drama, downballot candidates in Colorado have struggled to get attention, but there are two competitive GOP primaries to choose opponents for potentially vulnerable Democratic congressmen John Salazar (3d district) and Ed Perlmutter (7th district). In the 3d, state rep. Scott Tipton has been the front-runner, but a surprise endorsement of Bob McConnell by Sarah Palin has given the fiery Tea Party activist hopes of an upset. And in the 7th, Aurora city councilman Ryan Frazier has had a big financial advantage over former McCain Campaign Veterans Coordinator Lang Sias, but the underdog probably benefitted from an attention-grabbing personal appearance with his old boss.
Polls close at (or in mail-ballot-only counties, ballots must be dropped off at "service centers" by) 7:00 MDT.
Don't Overlook The States
@ 4:21 PM
I’m not even going to pretend to have a handle on what’s going on in every state legislature as November approaches. But I have done some reading and poking around, and 2010 is apparently shaping up to be quite a battle for control of the state legislative chambers. And, of course, this cycle matters more than others each decade because in most states the legislature plays a role, if not the primary role, in drawing the districts both for their own seats as well as the US House seats in the 43 states with two or more representatives.
Beyond redistricting, there are other reasons to keep tabs on state legislative elections. The results offer a bigger sample size of competitive races and chambers than just the Congress. I mean, 2010 is considered a loose, wide open year for congressional elections--and yet that still only means about 60 or 70 House seats in play and 7 or 8 in the Senate. Also, state legislative races are the electoral version of offshore warning buoys: They tell us the true size of a national wave and maybe even provide early warning of its arrival.
Consider 2004, which beyond George W. Bush's re-election was not actually that great of a cycle for Republicans. One of the factoids I stressed in Whistling Past Dixie, and presentations about it, was that Republicans had probably failed to cause a full-scale and enduring realignment that year, and not only because the GOP's net congressional gains that year could be more than accounted for by the re-redistricting of the Texas House seats and the pickup of southern Senate seats vacated by retiring Democrats. No, to me the confirming evidence that Karl Rove had ruined his realignment dreams was found in the state legislative results, where Democrats made net gains, foreshadowing what was to come in 2006 and 2008.
In any case, let me cut to a money quote, courtesy of the venerable elections analyst Lou Jacobson in this recent write-up of his state legislatures forecast:
By the way, Tim Storey's name should ring a bell with regular 538 readers. A year ago this week, back when the situation for Democrats looked far rosier, I wrote a post, based on NCSL data Storey shared with 538, about the historical control of state legislative seats. In that post I noted that the last time the Democrats has this high a share of total state legislative seats nationwide was during 1992-93, on the eve of their 1994 slaughter.
I reached Jacobson by email to ask him if he had any additional perspective to add. He wrote back to say the following:
Beyond redistricting, there are other reasons to keep tabs on state legislative elections. The results offer a bigger sample size of competitive races and chambers than just the Congress. I mean, 2010 is considered a loose, wide open year for congressional elections--and yet that still only means about 60 or 70 House seats in play and 7 or 8 in the Senate. Also, state legislative races are the electoral version of offshore warning buoys: They tell us the true size of a national wave and maybe even provide early warning of its arrival.
Consider 2004, which beyond George W. Bush's re-election was not actually that great of a cycle for Republicans. One of the factoids I stressed in Whistling Past Dixie, and presentations about it, was that Republicans had probably failed to cause a full-scale and enduring realignment that year, and not only because the GOP's net congressional gains that year could be more than accounted for by the re-redistricting of the Texas House seats and the pickup of southern Senate seats vacated by retiring Democrats. No, to me the confirming evidence that Karl Rove had ruined his realignment dreams was found in the state legislative results, where Democrats made net gains, foreshadowing what was to come in 2006 and 2008.
In any case, let me cut to a money quote, courtesy of the venerable elections analyst Lou Jacobson in this recent write-up of his state legislatures forecast:
Even though we're still months away from the election, this cycle appears likely to become an especially volatile one. Just under one-third (31 percent) of the legislative chambers that are up this fall are considered "in play" -- that is, rated tossup, lean Democratic or lean Republican. (Chambers that are likely Democratic/likely Republican and safe Democratic/safe Republican are not considered to be "in play," at least for now.) That rate is several percentage points higher than any rating in this handicapping series going back to the fall of 2002, which also topped out at 31 percent. And in most recent cycles, the number of competitive chambers has risen as Election Day nears, putting 2010 on a course to be the most turbulent of the past decade..Jacobson, who is staff writer for PolitiFact and the state legislative handicapper for Governing magazine, forecasts that 18 states are in play, with 21 Democratic chambers at risk compared to just four for the Republicans. (21 + 4 > 18 because in some states both chambers are in play.) Jacobson quotes National Conference of State Legislature's analyst Tim Storey as saying: "This is going to be an extremely challenging year for Democrats for a variety of reasons. History is not on their side. Since 1900, the party in the White House loses seats in the legislature in every midterm except for 1934 and 2002. That's a 2-25 losing streak for the party in the White House -- a tough trend to break. Add to that the fact that Democrats are riding high right now at over 55 percent of all seats, and it shapes up to be possibly the worst election for Democrats since 1994."
By the way, Tim Storey's name should ring a bell with regular 538 readers. A year ago this week, back when the situation for Democrats looked far rosier, I wrote a post, based on NCSL data Storey shared with 538, about the historical control of state legislative seats. In that post I noted that the last time the Democrats has this high a share of total state legislative seats nationwide was during 1992-93, on the eve of their 1994 slaughter.
I reached Jacobson by email to ask him if he had any additional perspective to add. He wrote back to say the following:
Not sure I have too much to say beyond what's in my overview piece (which I assume you've seen), but in the five cycles I've been handicapping these this is the worst shape that any party has been in, especially at this early point in the cycle. Worse than the 2006 and 2008 wave elections, worse than the 2002 anti-incumbent year. The worst recent comparison year is 1994, where the Dems took a big licking, but (1) I wasn't handicapping then, so I can't compare directly, and (2) my hunch is that 1994 developed more slowly, so at this point in the cycle it might not have looked quite so bad. None of this means that the Dems are destined for disaster, but it doesn't look good.So there is an eerie (and for many state-level Democrats, downright frightening) historical parallel here--yet another reason not to overlook the states this autumn.
How Much Revenue Would a Millionaires' Tax Raise?
@ 9:48 AM
Writing for the New Yorker, James Surowiecki floats an idea that we've discussed here before: instituting a new tax bracket on earnings in excess of $1 million. Clusterstock's Joe Weisenthal isn't entirely disagreed, but is skeptical that it would "move the needle" much in terms of revenue.
Fortunately, it only takes a few minutes to come up with some good working estimates, using data from IRS Tax Stats.
In 2007, essentially the last non-recession year (although technically the recession began in December that year), there was $1,244 billion ($1.24 trillion) in taxable income reported from 390,820 filers earning $1 million or more. However, a millionaires' tax bracket would affect marginal income only, so we have to subtract out the income below $1 million earned by these filers, which is $391 billion. That leaves a pool of $853 billion per year from which to draw taxes. If you taxed it at 3 percent, you'd bring in $26 billion per year, or $256 billion over ten years. If you taxed income above $1 million at 5 percent, you'd produce $43 billion per year, or $427 billion every ten years.
If you were interested in instituting a further tax bracket above and beyond this at say $5 million in income, you'd have a basis of $436 billion in marginal taxable income from which to draw. A 3 percent levy there would produce $13 billion per year, or $131 billion per ten years, in revenue. A 5 percent levy would raise $22 billion per year, or $218 billion per decade.
Let's say we go with the plan of taxing marginal income above $1 million at 3 percent, and marginal income above $5 million at an additional 3 percent. That would produce a theoretical $39 billion per year. However, there would be some productivity losses, and perhaps some additional offsets resulting from people finding ways to transfer their income into more tax-advantageous activities, so perhaps revenues on the order of $35 billion per year, or $350 billion per decade, are more realistic.
Is that a "lot" of money? Perhaps it doesn't seem like it in comparison to some of the major spending programs of the past 24 months. But obviously it isn't trivial either. This may be a helpful comparison: it would bring in slightly more money than if we were to increase taxes by 1 percent on incomes above $50,000, which would raise $28 billion per year before productivity losses.
Squeezing the super-rich is not a panacea. Although the inequity in the income distribution is pretty stark in America today, there just aren't that many people earning over $1 million, or over $5 million, and you probably can't squeeze them that much further before you start to run into some serious issues with productivity losses, particularly if the Bush tax cuts for high-income earners indeed get rolled back and the tax increases that we've seen at the state and local level over the past couple of years tend to stick, which I think is likely.
Nevertheless, at least based on this back-of-the-envelope sketch, creating one or more tax brackets at $1 million and up, and levying taxes upon them at a 3-5 percent marginal rate, could fairly easily offset a 1 percent or perhaps 1.5 percent tax increase on the middle class. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't eventually need to consider middle-class tax increases as well, although my preference would be to achieve them by means of a carbon tax, which would fall fairly heavily on the middle class if it weren't offset, rather than an increase in marginal tax rates. But it can certainly be a part of the solution and it seems irresponsible not to discuss it along with other ideas.
Fortunately, it only takes a few minutes to come up with some good working estimates, using data from IRS Tax Stats.
In 2007, essentially the last non-recession year (although technically the recession began in December that year), there was $1,244 billion ($1.24 trillion) in taxable income reported from 390,820 filers earning $1 million or more. However, a millionaires' tax bracket would affect marginal income only, so we have to subtract out the income below $1 million earned by these filers, which is $391 billion. That leaves a pool of $853 billion per year from which to draw taxes. If you taxed it at 3 percent, you'd bring in $26 billion per year, or $256 billion over ten years. If you taxed income above $1 million at 5 percent, you'd produce $43 billion per year, or $427 billion every ten years.
If you were interested in instituting a further tax bracket above and beyond this at say $5 million in income, you'd have a basis of $436 billion in marginal taxable income from which to draw. A 3 percent levy there would produce $13 billion per year, or $131 billion per ten years, in revenue. A 5 percent levy would raise $22 billion per year, or $218 billion per decade.
Let's say we go with the plan of taxing marginal income above $1 million at 3 percent, and marginal income above $5 million at an additional 3 percent. That would produce a theoretical $39 billion per year. However, there would be some productivity losses, and perhaps some additional offsets resulting from people finding ways to transfer their income into more tax-advantageous activities, so perhaps revenues on the order of $35 billion per year, or $350 billion per decade, are more realistic.
Is that a "lot" of money? Perhaps it doesn't seem like it in comparison to some of the major spending programs of the past 24 months. But obviously it isn't trivial either. This may be a helpful comparison: it would bring in slightly more money than if we were to increase taxes by 1 percent on incomes above $50,000, which would raise $28 billion per year before productivity losses.
Squeezing the super-rich is not a panacea. Although the inequity in the income distribution is pretty stark in America today, there just aren't that many people earning over $1 million, or over $5 million, and you probably can't squeeze them that much further before you start to run into some serious issues with productivity losses, particularly if the Bush tax cuts for high-income earners indeed get rolled back and the tax increases that we've seen at the state and local level over the past couple of years tend to stick, which I think is likely.
Nevertheless, at least based on this back-of-the-envelope sketch, creating one or more tax brackets at $1 million and up, and levying taxes upon them at a 3-5 percent marginal rate, could fairly easily offset a 1 percent or perhaps 1.5 percent tax increase on the middle class. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't eventually need to consider middle-class tax increases as well, although my preference would be to achieve them by means of a carbon tax, which would fall fairly heavily on the middle class if it weren't offset, rather than an increase in marginal tax rates. But it can certainly be a part of the solution and it seems irresponsible not to discuss it along with other ideas.
8.08.2010
Did Democrats Nominate Rick Snyder?
@ 8:20 PM
In open primary states, one of the most common fears of partisans is that voters from the other party will "invade" their nominating contests, by hostile action or by invitation of a candidate, and dictate the outcome. In the July 14 Alabama Republican gubernatorial runoff, some analysts suggested that winning candidate Dr. Robert Bentley was the beneficiary of a deliberate Democratic crossover effort. At the time, I examined the returns and concluded that there wasn't a lot of evidence for that hypothesis.
In the wake of last week's Michigan Republican gubernatorial primary, there was an even stronger conviction than in Alabama that Rick Synder's victory was attributable in no small part to Democratic voters, partly because his campaign deliberately encouraged crossover votes. Some of Snyder's best counties, moreover, were by tradition strongly Democratic. Finally, turnout was nearly twice as high in the Republican as in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, which is an odd occurrence in a state that hasn't gone Republican in a presidential race since 1988.
But since this issue affects not only a sense of grievance among some Republicans, but general election strategy for both Snyder and for Democratic nominee Virg Bernero, it's worth a closer look.
First, however, a couple of disclaimers. This is not a hypothesis that is easy to test in the absence of precinct-level returns. Moreover, in the case of Michigan, there's no directly analogous recent election with which to measure "normal" partisan turnout.
So I'm going to try to get at this question rather indirectly. If Snyder did produce a large and decisive Democratic crossover vote, one of the "symptoms" we'd expect to see is that heavily Democratic counties would produce a significantly higher share of the Republican primary vote than in prior elections.
The most recent competitive non-presidential statewide Republican primary in Michigan was the U.S. Senate primary in 2006. So a comparison with 2010 should show the latter results skewed towards Democratic strongholds.
The bar chart below shows the percentage of the total Republican primary vote in these two elections produced by the top ten Democratic counties (by percentage of the two-party vote, as established in the last competitive non-presidential statewide general election, the 2006 governor's contest). The counties are arrayed from least heavily Democratic (Oakland) to most (Wayne).
As you can see, there's no pattern of Democratic counties producing a higher share of the Republican primary vote in 2010; if anything, the pattern is in the other direction, particularly in the two largest counties of the ten, Wayne and Oakland.
The two exceptions, Muskegon and Ingham (Lansing) Counties, don't prove a whole lot, since Synder finished a relatively weak second in the former, and Democratic turnout in the latter (Bernero's home county) was up as well, as compared to the county's share of the vote in the last competitive Democratic statewide primary back in 2002.
If anything, the counties that really seemed to kick out the jams in 2010 Republican turnout were those like Kent and Ottawa, with red-hot Republican House primaries.
Again, "proof" is elusive in cases like this, in states with no party registration, and in a year like this one, when Republican turnout was up for a variety of reasons (including the aforementioned House primaries). But it sure looks like whatever Rick Snyder's appeal to Democrats and independents might have been, he won (by 100,000 votes above second-place finisher Pete Hoekstra) because of his popularity among people--and places--prone to participation in Republican primaries. Conservatives unhappy with that result should probably focus less on crossover votes and more on the sometimes-savage competition among the three more vocally conservative candidates who split their votes. Rick Snyder had more than enough money to exploit that landscape, with or without an unusual amount of Democratic help.
In the wake of last week's Michigan Republican gubernatorial primary, there was an even stronger conviction than in Alabama that Rick Synder's victory was attributable in no small part to Democratic voters, partly because his campaign deliberately encouraged crossover votes. Some of Snyder's best counties, moreover, were by tradition strongly Democratic. Finally, turnout was nearly twice as high in the Republican as in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, which is an odd occurrence in a state that hasn't gone Republican in a presidential race since 1988.
But since this issue affects not only a sense of grievance among some Republicans, but general election strategy for both Snyder and for Democratic nominee Virg Bernero, it's worth a closer look.
First, however, a couple of disclaimers. This is not a hypothesis that is easy to test in the absence of precinct-level returns. Moreover, in the case of Michigan, there's no directly analogous recent election with which to measure "normal" partisan turnout.
So I'm going to try to get at this question rather indirectly. If Snyder did produce a large and decisive Democratic crossover vote, one of the "symptoms" we'd expect to see is that heavily Democratic counties would produce a significantly higher share of the Republican primary vote than in prior elections.
The most recent competitive non-presidential statewide Republican primary in Michigan was the U.S. Senate primary in 2006. So a comparison with 2010 should show the latter results skewed towards Democratic strongholds.
The bar chart below shows the percentage of the total Republican primary vote in these two elections produced by the top ten Democratic counties (by percentage of the two-party vote, as established in the last competitive non-presidential statewide general election, the 2006 governor's contest). The counties are arrayed from least heavily Democratic (Oakland) to most (Wayne).
As you can see, there's no pattern of Democratic counties producing a higher share of the Republican primary vote in 2010; if anything, the pattern is in the other direction, particularly in the two largest counties of the ten, Wayne and Oakland.
The two exceptions, Muskegon and Ingham (Lansing) Counties, don't prove a whole lot, since Synder finished a relatively weak second in the former, and Democratic turnout in the latter (Bernero's home county) was up as well, as compared to the county's share of the vote in the last competitive Democratic statewide primary back in 2002.
If anything, the counties that really seemed to kick out the jams in 2010 Republican turnout were those like Kent and Ottawa, with red-hot Republican House primaries.
Again, "proof" is elusive in cases like this, in states with no party registration, and in a year like this one, when Republican turnout was up for a variety of reasons (including the aforementioned House primaries). But it sure looks like whatever Rick Snyder's appeal to Democrats and independents might have been, he won (by 100,000 votes above second-place finisher Pete Hoekstra) because of his popularity among people--and places--prone to participation in Republican primaries. Conservatives unhappy with that result should probably focus less on crossover votes and more on the sometimes-savage competition among the three more vocally conservative candidates who split their votes. Rick Snyder had more than enough money to exploit that landscape, with or without an unusual amount of Democratic help.
Labor Market Realignment, Conclusion
@ 9:00 AM
This article was written before Friday's employment report. However, that report added no information to change the conclusions of this article.
I wanted to finish with my thoughts on the labor market. First, this started with an analysis of the other two jobless recoveries. I started the analysis because this is not the first "jobless recovery" we've seen; it is, in fact, our third. The analysis revealed that a drop durable goods employment was the primary reason for the unemployment rate remaining at high levels for at least a year after each of the last two recessions ended. Let's take a look at the current labor market.
Like the last two recoveries, initial unemployment claims have remained elevated moving into the recovery. As a result,
The unemployment rate has remained elevated.
Above is a chart of total establishment jobs for the last five years. Simply estimating the total jobs lost from peak to the current level we get about 7.6 million (roughly 138 million to 130.4 million).
Total durable goods jobs lost are equal to about 1.8 million. So while these jobs were a primary driver for the long-term employment issues in the last two recoveries, they are only part of the reason for the problems in the current recovery. These account for about 23% of all lost jobs.
Construction jobs (obviously related to the problems in the housing market) are down about 2 million, accounting for about 26% of the lost jobs.
Non-durable goods manufacturing has lost about 775,000,, or about 10 % of all jobs lost.
Before we move forward, remember the pattern from the previous expansions with durable goods employment. Output increased thanks to an increase in productivity. If that trend still holds (and it probably will) there is no reason to think that trend won't continue. That trend will also extend into non-durable goods employment. In addition, considering how overbuilt the housing and commercial real estate market is right now, it's doubtful construction employment will return to previous highs either. In other words, at least 60% to the jobs lost will take a long time to come back.
Something I don't know the answer to but would be very curious to find out is 1.) how many of the jobs lost are moving into early retirement and 2.) the average age of the manufacturing population for both durable and non-durable goods manufacturing. My thought here is we've seen manufacturing employment drop for nearly two decades. That kind of drop will lead to fewer and fewer newer hires as the trend to lower employment continues. So, are the job losses we're seeing really a case of accelerated attrition (companies simply getting rid of jobs they intended to get rid of at a faster pace) or is there another trend in place?
Professional and business services have lost about 1.7 million from peak to their current level, but this area of the economy has been adding jobs since the end of the third quarter/beginning of the fourth quarter of 2009. These jobs account for about 22% of all jobs lost.
Financial activities are still losing jobs, and have lost about 700,000 or 9% if jobs lost.
The biggest problem we face is the job losses in "blue collar" industries, which account for about 60% of all job losses. With the exception of financial activities, the other service sectors have either bottomed or are rebounding somewhat. However, it's the blue collar area that will cause the most trouble.
I wanted to finish with my thoughts on the labor market. First, this started with an analysis of the other two jobless recoveries. I started the analysis because this is not the first "jobless recovery" we've seen; it is, in fact, our third. The analysis revealed that a drop durable goods employment was the primary reason for the unemployment rate remaining at high levels for at least a year after each of the last two recessions ended. Let's take a look at the current labor market.
Like the last two recoveries, initial unemployment claims have remained elevated moving into the recovery. As a result,
The unemployment rate has remained elevated.
Above is a chart of total establishment jobs for the last five years. Simply estimating the total jobs lost from peak to the current level we get about 7.6 million (roughly 138 million to 130.4 million).
Total durable goods jobs lost are equal to about 1.8 million. So while these jobs were a primary driver for the long-term employment issues in the last two recoveries, they are only part of the reason for the problems in the current recovery. These account for about 23% of all lost jobs.
Construction jobs (obviously related to the problems in the housing market) are down about 2 million, accounting for about 26% of the lost jobs.
Non-durable goods manufacturing has lost about 775,000,, or about 10 % of all jobs lost.
Before we move forward, remember the pattern from the previous expansions with durable goods employment. Output increased thanks to an increase in productivity. If that trend still holds (and it probably will) there is no reason to think that trend won't continue. That trend will also extend into non-durable goods employment. In addition, considering how overbuilt the housing and commercial real estate market is right now, it's doubtful construction employment will return to previous highs either. In other words, at least 60% to the jobs lost will take a long time to come back.
Something I don't know the answer to but would be very curious to find out is 1.) how many of the jobs lost are moving into early retirement and 2.) the average age of the manufacturing population for both durable and non-durable goods manufacturing. My thought here is we've seen manufacturing employment drop for nearly two decades. That kind of drop will lead to fewer and fewer newer hires as the trend to lower employment continues. So, are the job losses we're seeing really a case of accelerated attrition (companies simply getting rid of jobs they intended to get rid of at a faster pace) or is there another trend in place?
Professional and business services have lost about 1.7 million from peak to their current level, but this area of the economy has been adding jobs since the end of the third quarter/beginning of the fourth quarter of 2009. These jobs account for about 22% of all jobs lost.
Financial activities are still losing jobs, and have lost about 700,000 or 9% if jobs lost.
The biggest problem we face is the job losses in "blue collar" industries, which account for about 60% of all job losses. With the exception of financial activities, the other service sectors have either bottomed or are rebounding somewhat. However, it's the blue collar area that will cause the most trouble.
8.07.2010
Washington's Muteness on Prop 8 a Sign of Cynicism, Not Progress
@ 4:57 PM
Peter King, an idiosyncratic and bellicose Republican Congressmen from Long Island, has been one of the few politicians in either party willing to speak on the record about gay marriage in the wake of Judge Vaughn Walker's ruling on Proposition 8 this Wednesday. As he revealed in an interview with Politico, King thinks his party no longer has any need to use gay rights as a wedge issue -- not when they have immigrants to pick on instead:
***
Of course, cynicism over gay rights is nothing new in Washington. Did the Bush administration, for example, which arguably used gay marriage ballot initiatives to propel themselves to victory in Ohio and other key swing states in 2004, ever really have a deep ideological commitment to the issue? It seems unlikely, now that the admirable Laura Bush has spoken in support of gay rights, and Dick Cheney has, more or less, as well.
But Republicans hardly have a monopoly on cynicism over the issue. Barack Obama's stance against gay marriage, which he re-affirmed this week, has become utterly incoherent. Hillary Clinton, who was generally prefered to Obama by gays and lesbians in the 2008 Democratic primaries, has taken an equally ambiguous position. The same went for John Edwards, who was purportedly running to both candidates' left. The Democrats' 2004 nominee John Kerry, among the most liberal senators from perhaps the nation's most liberal state, supported an amendment to his state's constitution to ban gay marriage, which had been authorized by Massachusetts courts in 2003. But, as in the case of the Bushies, Democrats who have retired from office have suddenly found it in them to support gay marriage. Al Gore did so in 2008; Bill Clinton, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, did so last year.
Being in contact with gay people as friends, co-workers or family members is a major predictor of support for gay rights. And Washington, D.C. is teeming with gay people. If it were a state, it would be the gayest in the country, according to statistics inferred from Census Bureau data. As a city, it trails only San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Sacramento (?!?), Portland and Denver. There are innumerable gay chiefs-of-staff, press secretaries, lobbyists, strategists, spokespeople, party leaders, television bookers, social coordinators, ambassadors, journalists, activists, thinktankers, and pretty much everything else -- the sort of people who grease the wheels of official and unofficial Washington. There are, of course, a fair number of gay Congressmen and Senators, some of them "out" and many of them not.
Most politicians, moreover, are well-to-do and highly educated -- and few are terribly religious, whatever pretense they might make for the cameras. Most of them have spent their careers in large, urban areas, and many have traveled abroad. All of these variables also correlate with support for gay marriage. Does anyone really believe, in a country that is becoming close to evenly-divided on gay marriage, that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Kerry are among the half who oppose it? Does anyone really believe that of Carly Fiorina or Meg Whitman, who ran progressive technology companies in gay-friendly Silicon Valley?
The muted reaction to Wednesday's Proposition 8 verdict is understandable, for Machiavellian political reasons. If the country is divided about 55/45 on gay marriage, as it now appears to be, the negative intangibles attendant to going after the issue -- voters from the far right end of the political spectrum to the far left regard it as a distraction from more pressing matters like the economy -- might well outweigh any narrow political gain. Perhaps in a way this is a sign of progress: if the divide were more like 65/35, as it was a few years ago, the calculus might well be different.
But if this does reflect progress of sorts, it is progress which has come entirely in spite of Washington. On the one hand, gay rights are but one of any number of peripheral "values" issues -- flag-burning, English-only education, drug legalization, labor organizing rights, the Second Amendment -- that circulate like unclaimed luggage on the airport baggage carousel, usually blending in with the scenery, but always there for the picking for a politician who is sufficiently bored or opportunistic.
On the other hand, as compared with most of these issues, it allows for very little middle ground. Gay marriage is either immoral or it is a civil right; that's, in essence, what Judge Walker's decision concluded. Even abortion permits considerably more room for ambiguity; about one in five Americans under the age of 30 is now pro-life and pro-gay marriage.
Gay marriage is just the sort of issue, in other words, on which politicians ought to be able to articulate clear and honest positions. But few of them bother to do so, and little is more revealing of the callousness of their enterprise. Forget "San Francisco values"; it is Washington's which are most in question.
King, the Long Island congressman, said that in terms of social issues, the raging controversy over the Arizona border laws is providing more than enough ammunition for Republicans in key districts.Congratulations, gays! You're no longer the dweebiest kid on the playground. Republicans will be beating up on Manuel, whose parents just moved here from Mexico, instead. And when they get done with him, there's Faisal, whose father wants to build a mosque. At best, you're third in the pecking order. You're not even on the short list any more, frankly. But don't get too full of yourselves. If the economy improves, you could be facing another round of noogies and swirlies all over again.
“The Arizona immigration law is there, there’s no reason to be raising an issue of gay rights” as a wedge, he said.
***
Of course, cynicism over gay rights is nothing new in Washington. Did the Bush administration, for example, which arguably used gay marriage ballot initiatives to propel themselves to victory in Ohio and other key swing states in 2004, ever really have a deep ideological commitment to the issue? It seems unlikely, now that the admirable Laura Bush has spoken in support of gay rights, and Dick Cheney has, more or less, as well.
But Republicans hardly have a monopoly on cynicism over the issue. Barack Obama's stance against gay marriage, which he re-affirmed this week, has become utterly incoherent. Hillary Clinton, who was generally prefered to Obama by gays and lesbians in the 2008 Democratic primaries, has taken an equally ambiguous position. The same went for John Edwards, who was purportedly running to both candidates' left. The Democrats' 2004 nominee John Kerry, among the most liberal senators from perhaps the nation's most liberal state, supported an amendment to his state's constitution to ban gay marriage, which had been authorized by Massachusetts courts in 2003. But, as in the case of the Bushies, Democrats who have retired from office have suddenly found it in them to support gay marriage. Al Gore did so in 2008; Bill Clinton, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, did so last year.
Being in contact with gay people as friends, co-workers or family members is a major predictor of support for gay rights. And Washington, D.C. is teeming with gay people. If it were a state, it would be the gayest in the country, according to statistics inferred from Census Bureau data. As a city, it trails only San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Sacramento (?!?), Portland and Denver. There are innumerable gay chiefs-of-staff, press secretaries, lobbyists, strategists, spokespeople, party leaders, television bookers, social coordinators, ambassadors, journalists, activists, thinktankers, and pretty much everything else -- the sort of people who grease the wheels of official and unofficial Washington. There are, of course, a fair number of gay Congressmen and Senators, some of them "out" and many of them not.
Most politicians, moreover, are well-to-do and highly educated -- and few are terribly religious, whatever pretense they might make for the cameras. Most of them have spent their careers in large, urban areas, and many have traveled abroad. All of these variables also correlate with support for gay marriage. Does anyone really believe, in a country that is becoming close to evenly-divided on gay marriage, that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Kerry are among the half who oppose it? Does anyone really believe that of Carly Fiorina or Meg Whitman, who ran progressive technology companies in gay-friendly Silicon Valley?
The muted reaction to Wednesday's Proposition 8 verdict is understandable, for Machiavellian political reasons. If the country is divided about 55/45 on gay marriage, as it now appears to be, the negative intangibles attendant to going after the issue -- voters from the far right end of the political spectrum to the far left regard it as a distraction from more pressing matters like the economy -- might well outweigh any narrow political gain. Perhaps in a way this is a sign of progress: if the divide were more like 65/35, as it was a few years ago, the calculus might well be different.
But if this does reflect progress of sorts, it is progress which has come entirely in spite of Washington. On the one hand, gay rights are but one of any number of peripheral "values" issues -- flag-burning, English-only education, drug legalization, labor organizing rights, the Second Amendment -- that circulate like unclaimed luggage on the airport baggage carousel, usually blending in with the scenery, but always there for the picking for a politician who is sufficiently bored or opportunistic.
On the other hand, as compared with most of these issues, it allows for very little middle ground. Gay marriage is either immoral or it is a civil right; that's, in essence, what Judge Walker's decision concluded. Even abortion permits considerably more room for ambiguity; about one in five Americans under the age of 30 is now pro-life and pro-gay marriage.
Gay marriage is just the sort of issue, in other words, on which politicians ought to be able to articulate clear and honest positions. But few of them bother to do so, and little is more revealing of the callousness of their enterprise. Forget "San Francisco values"; it is Washington's which are most in question.
8.06.2010
Roadmap to Nowhere
@ 6:00 PM
I weighed in a little bit on Twitter today on Paul Krugman's critique of Paul Ryan's "Roadmap to America's Future" plan. It was probably a mistake do that 140 characters at a time, and so here is a (much) longer exposition.
Krugman comes to the conclusion that "The Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future." Some writers, including Ted Gayer at the Tax Policy Center, a thinktank whose work Krugman cited, take issue with the use of the term "fraud". Fraud can mean different things, but usually implies some intentionality: deception on purpose, rather than on accident. I don't know if Ryan's budget plan is deliberately intended to be deceitful: people in Ryan's circle seem to vouch for his seriousness, and there's much to be said for that. With that said, it has had the effect of deceiving some people, and I don't see how it has improved the quality of the budget discussion.
Ryan's budget consists of a series of proposals that would cut spending on entitlement programs in a very serious way, coupled with an equally serious restructuring of the tax code that would have the effect of lowering taxes on most individuals and businesses. On the spending side, one can debate whether or not the cuts that Ryan proposes would be (a) wise and (b) politically tenable, but they would certainly reduce the debt in a very substantial way; nobody really doubts that.
The problem is on the government revenues side, which Ryan's tax cuts would reduce, thereby counteracting the effect of his ambitious spending cuts. I'm not going to spend 200 words qualifying this: yes, tax increases have deleterious effects on productivity, which means that you're giving back some number of pennies on the dollar -- and tax cuts have beneficial ones, thereby making the opposite true. But, given that current levels of taxation are low-ish by modern standards, and that Ryan's budget would make them lower, we are nowhere near the point on the Laffer Curve where tax cuts would have a net positive effect on government revenues. (In the long run, at least: tax cuts are more beneficial during a recession when a multiplier may be in play.)
Where the deceptiveness comes in is in the CBO's scoring of Ryan's proposal, which makes it appear as though Ryan's plan would substantially reduce the debt over current projections. The problem, as a separate Krugman blog post points out, is that the CBO actually only scored half the bill: they gave Ryan credit for the spending cuts, but did not deduct any points for the revenue reductions resulting from his changes to the tax code.
This is for a somewhat peculiar reason. The CBO does not like to model the impacts of tax policy, which is usually in the purview of another agency, the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). Ryan's office has said that they asked the CBO to score the revenue side of the bill and were rebuffed; I have no reason to doubt this. The problem is in what happened next.
Ryan's office had several options. They could have said: "Screw you, CBO, you work for us." (This is literally true; the CBO is the Congressional Budget Office.) "Score the damned tax cuts." I know nowhere near enough about intra-agency politics to know whether any amount of cajoling, threatening, or persuasion would have made the difference here, nor how much of it Ryan's office attempted.
The second and most obvious alternative would have been ask the JCT for an estimate instead. Ryan's office says that "JCT, however, does not have the capability at this time to provide longer-term revenue estimates". I don't know whether that means that JCT was too busy right at that moment, in which case Ryan was irresponsible not to wait for its workload to lighten up, or whether it means that very-long-term (beyond 10 years) budgetary estimates are not a current operational capability of the JCT.
If the latter, the third option would have been to utilize an estimate provided by nongovernmental agency, ideally one with a reputation for being de facto non-partisan (not just de jure non-partisan, like the Heritage Foundation). Something like the Tax Policy Center probably qualifies, as would a few other Beltway thinktanks.
But Ryan bypassed this option as well; instead, he decided to wing it. And he winged it by assuming that, in fact, his tax cuts would result in no net decrease in revenues: they'd magically be offset by improved economic growth. Ryan then instructed the CBO to score the bill with this dubious assumption, which it did.
The Tax Policy Center found that Ryan's assumption had in fact been rather favorable to the cause: it had overestimated revenues by a mere 4 trillion dollars in revenues over 10 years -- the equivalent of several health care bills.
This is all there in the CBO's report if you read the fine print. But a lot of people, including Perry Bacon, a very fine reporter for the Washington Post, didn't read the fine print, and instead wrote largely favorable pieces that took the CBO's projections too much at face value and did not adequately notate that they'd really only scored half the bill.
Whether or not Ryan is to be blamed for this probably boils down to whether or not he was smart enough to know that this is how the story was liable to be conveyed. Ryan is smart: smart enough to know that if it the details of the budget slipped past Perry Bacon, they were probably going to slip past a lot of people. On the other hand, this would hardly be the first time that a politician used the idiosyncrasies of CBO scoring to his advantage.
What seems less ambiguous is the second clause of Krugman's conclusion: that Ryan's budget "makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future." If Ryan's goal were to inform the electorate, he could have done one of two things: found another way to get an independent estimate of the revenue effects, or explicitly declaimed that his goal was merely to perform a thought-experiment to see how much spending would have to be reduced before the budget were balanced (this could most easily have achieved by not proposing any changes to tax policy). He elected neither of those options.
Instead, his budget has had the effect of perpetuating the notion that tax cuts would tend to reduce the deficit. That's wrong; they would tend to increase it. Peter Sunderman, in a piece defending Ryan, points out that "forecasting the vagaries of the economy five or 10 years in advance is incredibly difficult"; this is inarguably true, but it is all the more reason to stick to Ockham's Razory assumptions rather than Ryan's magic realism: you cut taxes, and all else being equal, and the government brings in less money, and the debt increases. (It's also why there is no particular value-add from merely scoring the expenditures side, which is probably easier.) Of course, you theoretically could cut spending enough to afford a tax cut too, but you'd have to cut it more -- a lot more -- than Ryan has proposed: about $400 billion a year more.
To his credit, Ryan has conveyed a willingness to work with alternative assumptions about the revenue side of the bill. The proof, however, will be in the pudding: his spending cuts are already fairly draconian, and now it's his burden to come up with $400 billion per year more.
Or he could admit the obvious: that a responsible long-term budget is one which proposes both to cut spending and to increase taxes. I'm kind of a stick-in-the-mud about this, but I really think it does need to be both as the starting point: it's not like Congress is going to find in its heart to raise taxes more than suggested, or cut spending more than needed, in order to achieve long-run fiscal parity.
This particularly holds if a proposal is conveyed as a "roadmap" -- that is, as a sort of thought-experiment deliberately ignorant of political contingencies -- rather than as a a pragmatic "how-to" guide. Increasingly, I'm coming to the position that the latter is more likely to come from someone outside the two major political parties (perhaps a third-party contender for the Presidency at some point between 2012 and 2020). It certainly hasn't come from Ryan. What service has he performed by proposing a number of haphazard (and politically difficult) cuts, and still leaving the budget imbalanced?
Krugman comes to the conclusion that "The Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future." Some writers, including Ted Gayer at the Tax Policy Center, a thinktank whose work Krugman cited, take issue with the use of the term "fraud". Fraud can mean different things, but usually implies some intentionality: deception on purpose, rather than on accident. I don't know if Ryan's budget plan is deliberately intended to be deceitful: people in Ryan's circle seem to vouch for his seriousness, and there's much to be said for that. With that said, it has had the effect of deceiving some people, and I don't see how it has improved the quality of the budget discussion.
Ryan's budget consists of a series of proposals that would cut spending on entitlement programs in a very serious way, coupled with an equally serious restructuring of the tax code that would have the effect of lowering taxes on most individuals and businesses. On the spending side, one can debate whether or not the cuts that Ryan proposes would be (a) wise and (b) politically tenable, but they would certainly reduce the debt in a very substantial way; nobody really doubts that.
The problem is on the government revenues side, which Ryan's tax cuts would reduce, thereby counteracting the effect of his ambitious spending cuts. I'm not going to spend 200 words qualifying this: yes, tax increases have deleterious effects on productivity, which means that you're giving back some number of pennies on the dollar -- and tax cuts have beneficial ones, thereby making the opposite true. But, given that current levels of taxation are low-ish by modern standards, and that Ryan's budget would make them lower, we are nowhere near the point on the Laffer Curve where tax cuts would have a net positive effect on government revenues. (In the long run, at least: tax cuts are more beneficial during a recession when a multiplier may be in play.)
Where the deceptiveness comes in is in the CBO's scoring of Ryan's proposal, which makes it appear as though Ryan's plan would substantially reduce the debt over current projections. The problem, as a separate Krugman blog post points out, is that the CBO actually only scored half the bill: they gave Ryan credit for the spending cuts, but did not deduct any points for the revenue reductions resulting from his changes to the tax code.
This is for a somewhat peculiar reason. The CBO does not like to model the impacts of tax policy, which is usually in the purview of another agency, the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). Ryan's office has said that they asked the CBO to score the revenue side of the bill and were rebuffed; I have no reason to doubt this. The problem is in what happened next.
Ryan's office had several options. They could have said: "Screw you, CBO, you work for us." (This is literally true; the CBO is the Congressional Budget Office.) "Score the damned tax cuts." I know nowhere near enough about intra-agency politics to know whether any amount of cajoling, threatening, or persuasion would have made the difference here, nor how much of it Ryan's office attempted.
The second and most obvious alternative would have been ask the JCT for an estimate instead. Ryan's office says that "JCT, however, does not have the capability at this time to provide longer-term revenue estimates". I don't know whether that means that JCT was too busy right at that moment, in which case Ryan was irresponsible not to wait for its workload to lighten up, or whether it means that very-long-term (beyond 10 years) budgetary estimates are not a current operational capability of the JCT.
If the latter, the third option would have been to utilize an estimate provided by nongovernmental agency, ideally one with a reputation for being de facto non-partisan (not just de jure non-partisan, like the Heritage Foundation). Something like the Tax Policy Center probably qualifies, as would a few other Beltway thinktanks.
But Ryan bypassed this option as well; instead, he decided to wing it. And he winged it by assuming that, in fact, his tax cuts would result in no net decrease in revenues: they'd magically be offset by improved economic growth. Ryan then instructed the CBO to score the bill with this dubious assumption, which it did.
The Tax Policy Center found that Ryan's assumption had in fact been rather favorable to the cause: it had overestimated revenues by a mere 4 trillion dollars in revenues over 10 years -- the equivalent of several health care bills.
This is all there in the CBO's report if you read the fine print. But a lot of people, including Perry Bacon, a very fine reporter for the Washington Post, didn't read the fine print, and instead wrote largely favorable pieces that took the CBO's projections too much at face value and did not adequately notate that they'd really only scored half the bill.
Whether or not Ryan is to be blamed for this probably boils down to whether or not he was smart enough to know that this is how the story was liable to be conveyed. Ryan is smart: smart enough to know that if it the details of the budget slipped past Perry Bacon, they were probably going to slip past a lot of people. On the other hand, this would hardly be the first time that a politician used the idiosyncrasies of CBO scoring to his advantage.
What seems less ambiguous is the second clause of Krugman's conclusion: that Ryan's budget "makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future." If Ryan's goal were to inform the electorate, he could have done one of two things: found another way to get an independent estimate of the revenue effects, or explicitly declaimed that his goal was merely to perform a thought-experiment to see how much spending would have to be reduced before the budget were balanced (this could most easily have achieved by not proposing any changes to tax policy). He elected neither of those options.
Instead, his budget has had the effect of perpetuating the notion that tax cuts would tend to reduce the deficit. That's wrong; they would tend to increase it. Peter Sunderman, in a piece defending Ryan, points out that "forecasting the vagaries of the economy five or 10 years in advance is incredibly difficult"; this is inarguably true, but it is all the more reason to stick to Ockham's Razory assumptions rather than Ryan's magic realism: you cut taxes, and all else being equal, and the government brings in less money, and the debt increases. (It's also why there is no particular value-add from merely scoring the expenditures side, which is probably easier.) Of course, you theoretically could cut spending enough to afford a tax cut too, but you'd have to cut it more -- a lot more -- than Ryan has proposed: about $400 billion a year more.
To his credit, Ryan has conveyed a willingness to work with alternative assumptions about the revenue side of the bill. The proof, however, will be in the pudding: his spending cuts are already fairly draconian, and now it's his burden to come up with $400 billion per year more.
Or he could admit the obvious: that a responsible long-term budget is one which proposes both to cut spending and to increase taxes. I'm kind of a stick-in-the-mud about this, but I really think it does need to be both as the starting point: it's not like Congress is going to find in its heart to raise taxes more than suggested, or cut spending more than needed, in order to achieve long-run fiscal parity.
This particularly holds if a proposal is conveyed as a "roadmap" -- that is, as a sort of thought-experiment deliberately ignorant of political contingencies -- rather than as a a pragmatic "how-to" guide. Increasingly, I'm coming to the position that the latter is more likely to come from someone outside the two major political parties (perhaps a third-party contender for the Presidency at some point between 2012 and 2020). It certainly hasn't come from Ryan. What service has he performed by proposing a number of haphazard (and politically difficult) cuts, and still leaving the budget imbalanced?
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