In doing some research on a column for TNR, I ran across a phenomenon that has been underreported in the MSM: the Ron Paul Revolution is rolling on in little-noticed delegate selection contests around the country.

In some cases, Paulites are winning delegate slots whose votes are already pledged to other candidates thanks to earlier primaries. That’s most embarrassingly the case in Massachusetts, where Mitt Romney’s allies got trounced in many district delegate selection conventions, posing the strong possibility that the Revolution will gain a majority of the state’s 41 delegates.

But in other states with complex multi-stage procedures for selecting delegates, Paul’s minions, with their signature ability to pack small rooms, are overturning much-publicized “beauty contest” results that didn’t actually bind delegates. Remember Iowa, where the big controversy was an initial count on Caucus Night showing Romney having won by an eyelash over Rick Santorum? Turns out Santorum “won,” and the quick announcement of a Romney victory led to the resignation of the state party chair. But he was replaced by a Paulite (part of a faction that also controls the state party central committee), and it’s now reasonably clear Paul will win a plurality and perhaps a majority of Iowa’s votes in Tampa. Similar events unfolded in Colorado and may soon be replicated in Minnesota and Louisiana.

As always, it’s not clear what Paul and his acolytes are up to, other than promoting their quirky ideology and settling scores with state and local party folk who have always treated them like bedbugs. There’s some talk of a platform fight (though there hasn’t been one of those in a GOP convention since the 1976 event when equally powerful Ford and Reagan delegate blocs meant nobody completely controlled the convention) or an effort to embarrass Mitt by placing Paul’s name in nomination (he’s within easy striking distance of the five-state-plurality requirement for taking that step if it wants it). Perhaps the Doctor wants something for himself or for his son, who is according to some reports preparing a 2016 presidential run of his own.

The one thing we do know for sure is that the Romney campaign and the RNC will do everything possible to keep the Revolution and its troops as far away from the TV cameras in Tampa as is humanly possible. That won’t be easy without Paul’s close cooperation, particularly since it’s traditional that the nominee’s home state delegation and the ever-preferred Iowa delegation will be prominently seated in the convention hall and will attract lots of interviews from bored reporters. So if Paul wants to extract a promise that he’ll be given the keys to Ben Bernanke’s executive washroom at the Fed, or a gold coin bearing his own likeness, he’ll probably get it.

If there’s a must-read today for political junkies, it’s probably not the stating-the-obvious Balz-Rucker piece I just discussed, but Ron Brownstein’s analysis of Hispanic population growth and voter registration trends at National Journal. He begins by discussing the much-noticed slowdown and even reversal of immigration from Mexico, and notes that this won’t have much of an impact (unless it really intensifies) on the Hispanic percentage of the electorate until about 2050, if then.

The reason is that immigration is no longer the key to the growth of the Mexican-American population overall, and it is even less important to the rise of Hispanics in the electorate. As Pew calculated in 2011, new immigrants accounted for only a little over one-third of the 11.4 million increase in the Mexican-American population from 2000 to 2010. By contrast, Mexican-American children born in the U.S. represented 63 percent of the group’s growing population over that decade….

Brookings Institution demographer William H. Frey calculates that only about two-thirds of the 32.4 million Hispanics older than age 18 are citizens (and thus eligible to vote).

The story is very different, though, with the huge under-18 Hispanic population. Those young people represent over one-third of all Hispanics. And by Frey’s calculation, fully 93 percent of them are citizens. That means they are automatically eligible to register to vote once they turn 18. They don’t need to undertake the intermediate step of pursuing citizenship because they are American citizens by birth.

“The biggest gains in the Hispanic population are coming from young people who are now living here, are born here, and are now turning 18,” Frey says. “And that population is going to continue to shoot up…..”

How much will that population “shoot up”? Mark Hugo Lopez, the Pew Hispanic Center’s associate director, says that from 50,000 to 60,000 young Hispanics born in the U.S. now turn [18] “every month. And we will continue to see that pattern for the next 20 or 30 years.” Leaving aside any additional numbers provided by naturalization, that growth alone would increase the number of Hispanics eligible to vote by at least 600,000 annually for decades.

But in terms of Democrats who are counting on this steady growth in the Hispanic vote as a trump card (or at least as a counter-weight to a Republican “base” among high-participation older white voters), there’s a short-term “hiccup” that is worth watching closely in 2012:

The number of Hispanics registered to vote grew from 9.3 to 11.6 million from 2004 to 2008. But in 2010, Hispanic registrations declined to 10.9 million, according to Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute, which studies Hispanic political participation.

Gonzalez says that decline is most likely rooted in “the crushing weight of unemployment and home loss” that has compelled many Hispanics to move or otherwise disrupted their lives. “There’s musical chairs in the Hispanic community,” he says. “That’s crushing. None of us foresaw it. It should have occurred to us that there are political consequences to policy failure even in voter registration.”

At one point, Gonzalez predicted that 12 million Hispanics would vote in 2012, up from just under 10 million in 2008 and about 7.6 million in 2004. Now he thinks it unlikely to reach such a peak.

read more »

At WaPo today, Dan Balz and Philip Rucker offer a baseline general election story on Romney’s electoral college strategy. From beginning to end, they emphasize that Mitt has a “narrow path to victory,” without a lot of room for maneuvering or feints. That path is basically what Karl Rove, with his knack for making every straight line look crooked, calls a “3-2-1” plan, based on winning three traditionally Republican states Obama grabbed in 2008 (IN, NC and VA), then the two classic “tossup” states (FL and OH), and then one out of a grab-bag of other battleground states, including IA, NH, NV and CO (with many GOPers adding MI and PA based on their party’s recent down-ballot performance, though neither state has gone Republican in a presidential election since 1988).

The bottom line is that Romney has little margin for error, and even if he wins back Obama’s “breakthrough” states along with the two big tossups, he’s going to have to win somewhere in the northeast, in Rust Belt Land or in the Western states where his weak standing with Latinos is a really big problem (offset partially, at least in NV and AZ, by his exceptional strength among LDS voters).

Interestingly, the Balz/Rucker piece appears the same day WaPo has released a new poll of VA, one of those must-win Romney states, showing Obama up there among RVs by a 51-44 margin.

If this sort of battleground maneuvering fascinates you, check out one of the many interactive Electoral Vote mapping sites available on the web, where you can play at being Grand Strategist. It becomes pretty apparent very quickly that whatever strategery Team Mitt deploys, it’s going to need a significant national shift from where we are now to get safely to 270.

At Ten Miles Square today, Georgetown University’s Paul Pillar reviews Steve Coll’s new book, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, a major study of the quintessential modern multinational corporation and its interaction with the United States government and national interests at home and abroad.

Coll’s book deploys classic old-school reporting to deal with a highly complex new type of corporation operating in a volatile and politically sensitive global energy market where its interests and that of usually-friendly U.S. diplomats sometimes overlap, but sometimes collide. Pillar provides a thorough tour of Coll’s investigations and findings, including those touching on ExxonMobil’s responsibility for the birth and growth of the now-rampant climate change denial industry. It’s a strong review of an important book. Check it out.

It’s official: another “disappointing” jobs report for April, but nothing that can be spun as a catastrophe; “slowing growth” could be accurate, though we’ll hear “sputtering recovery” from conservative outlets, and maybe be played some scary tapes of the wolf of “double-dip recession” howling nearby.

Net new jobs up 115,000, with the unemployment rate down a tick at 8.1% (but with slighly lower workforce participation, which makes it a wash). A lot of indicators basically flat. The best news is upward revisions of the March net new jobs number from 120k to 154k, and of the February number from 240k to 259k. I would note that the “disappointing” March jobs figure now comes in at above the “magic number” of 150k that Nate Silver has suggested would be necessary monthly to put the president in a strong position for re-election.

We’ll be hearing lots of spin and counter-spin on the April jobs number all day and through the weekend. Expect conservatives to cut quite a few capers even as they try to appear somber. They know what struggling workers need: Tax cuts for job creators! Austerity for everyone else!

Today’s wakeup call is Bob Dylan performing “One Too Many Mornings,” in Fort Collins, Colorado, during the Rolling Thunder tour in 1976. Personally, I think the Japanese subtitles add a nice surreal touch. Enjoy!

Resolution to wrap up blogging by 6:00 p.m. EDT fails, once again. But there are some scraps still on the table:

* Quoth T. Boone Pickens: “The biggest deterrent to an energy plan in America is Koch Industries.”

* No surprise, but interesting to know for sure: Weslyan Media Project study shows political ads this cycle astronomically more negative than in 2008, with Super PACs leading the way in bile.

* United Methodist convention approves resolution denouncing Israeli occupation and settlements in West Bank, but votes down resolutions calling for disinvestment in companies selling equipment used to enforce occupation.

* At TAP, Gershom Gorenberg reports Netanyahu government casually sanctions three settlements in West Bank that broke 1992 freeze-on-new-settlements agreement.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer notes student loan debt becoming significant bar to Catholic religious vocations.

And in non-political news:

* Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” sells for $120 million.

I’m battening down the hatches for tomorrow morning’s April Jobs Report. See you then.

Selah.

When Barack Obama won Virginia in 2008 (by a healthy six percentage points, nearly his national margin), alarm bells went off in many Republican strategic circles. After all, the Old Dominion had not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964, spurning southerners like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton even in good years for the Donkey Party. Since Democrats also held both U.S. Senate seats and had won the previous two gubernatorial races, it was obviously time to revisit the assumption the state was part of a Solid Republican South (except, of course, for Florida and also North Carolina, where Obama’s victory was even more of a shock).

So there were many sighs of Republican relief when Bob McDonnell handily won the governorship back for the GOP easily in 2009, and then Republicans picked off three U.S. House seats in 2010. Things, it seemed were returning to normal.

Or maybe not. The RealClearPolitics average of recent general election polls in Virginia shows Obama with a 2.4% lead in the state; the most recent survey, by PPP, has Obama up by eight points. The Senate race between former Gov. and DNC chairman Tim Kaine and former Sen. George Allen is, and has been, dead even. And looking ahead, an early PPP poll of the 2013 governor’s race in Virginia shows Democratic Sen. Mark Warner stomping everyone in sight if he chooses to return to Richmond.

If Mark Warner wants to be the next Governor of Virginia…he’s probably going to be the next Governor of Virginia. PPP’s newest poll finds him blowing away the Republican field of candidates with a 53-33 lead over Ken Cuccinelli, a 53-32 advantage over Bill Bolling, and a 58-19 edge over Tareq Salahi.

Warner continues to be the state’s most popular politician with a 52% approval rating to only 26% of voters who disapprove of him. He takes 13-29% of the Republican vote in these three match ups while losing only 2-4% of the Democratic vote, and he has a persistent double digit lead with independents as well. At this point the office looks to be Warner’s for the taking.

Even more worrisome for the GOP is the fact that in the PPP survey conservative darling Cuccinnelli has a large lead over the potential primary field, yet looks exceptionally weak for a general election even if Warner doesn’t run. Cucinelli trails Terry McAuliffe by five points and Tom Perriello by three, despite a gigantic name ID advantage.

So any way you slice it, Virginia remains a battleground state, and a big vulnerability in the southern fortress the GOP had supposedly built for itself. Obama can definitely win in November without Virginia, but it’s not at all clear Mitt Romney can do so as well.

You may remember a lot of excited talk earlier this year about the Obama’s administration’s “war on religion” generating a major Catholic backlash that would cost him the election. Matter of fact, you still hear the talk, as evidenced by an April 24 Alexander Bolton piece in The Hill with this ledge:

President Obama has seen his standing among Catholic voters, a crucial segment of the electorate, slip in recent weeks, and a looming confrontation with Catholic activists could make it worse.

Democrats want voters this year to focus on what they have branded a war on women, but the flip side of the debate — the so-called war on religion — is not going away anytime soon.

Bolton reached this conclusion, as it happens, by talking to virtually every blatantly pro-Republican self-styled representative of Catholics he could find, and the “slippage” for Obama he reported was actually just a boost in the minority percentage of Catholics perceiving the Democratic Party as hostile to religion—a response to all the polarizing conservative messaging among Catholics already in the GOP column.

But the latest Gallup report on Catholic voters, out just yesterday, shows that they are, as they have generally been recently, an almost perfect mirror of national opinion on the two parties’ presidential candidates, with no “wedge” in sight:

Obama led Romney by one percentage point, 46% to 45%, among the more than 8,000 registered voters interviewed as part of Gallup Daily tracking conducted April 11-30. Among the 1,915 Catholics interviewed during that time, support for Obama and Romney was almost the same, with 46% support for Obama and 46% for Romney.

Predictably, Obama has a sizable advantage among Hispanic Catholics and a smaller disadvantage among white Catholics (magnified by their larger numbers). Nothing’s changed much at all since 2008 other than the slight decline in Obama’s support levels that’s evident in all voter groups:

The overall Catholic vote so far this year is similar to what it was in 2008, when Gallup’s final survey before the election found that Catholics’ slim support for Obama over Republican candidate John McCain almost identically matched the overall national vote.

Sometimes you’ll read stuff on this subject that tries to make it out that “real” Catholics (i.e., those who attend church more often or who agree with the Vatican on controversial issues) or alternatively “swing vote” Catholics (code for white Catholics, who are presumed to be free of those messy ethnic prejudices that incline Hispanics to vote Democratic) are on the march into the GOP column. But even Republicans haven’t devised a way to give extra weight to the votes of people whose religious authenticity they deem superior, so at this point the Catholic “wedge vote” in 2012 remains a fantasy.

This will probably be cold comfort for marriage equality advocates if North Carolina voters approve Amendment One next Tuesday, but there are growing signs that even as conservatives in this country are emboldened to think they can reverse Roe v. Wade or unravel the constitutional underpinnings of the New Deal and the Great Society—some of them are reading the signs and calculating that the battle against LGBT equality is a lost cause.

There is a long, strange, anger-inducing, but ultimately compelling article up at the paleocon site The American Conservative, by its editor, Daniel McCarthy, that argues the case for discrimination against gays and lesbians on marriage rights—or for that matter, much of anything else—was doomed the moment conservatives began accepting them as, well, human beings:

That’s the pot in which social conservatives are being boiled. They have made enough concessions to the reality of political life in 21st-century America—to the principle of legal equality and the need for some nondiscrimination law—that they’re left making largely unsympathetic and unconvincing arguments for exceptions. Over time they may feel compelled throw their full electoral weight behind the libertarian principle of tolerance even for intolerance as the only viable alternative to a futile authoritarianism or outright surrender to liberalism.

“The libertarian principle of tolerance even for intolerance” is, I suppose, McCarthy’s way of referring to the “religious liberty” argument of conservatives that even if they cannot impose their general view of divine or natural law on the rest of society, they should be allowed to carve out large zones of immunity from the “liberal” laws that govern the rest of us.

The piece is worth a read in terms of the internal dynamics of the Right. And if you can stomach it, check out the comments thread for some real anger at both the author and at the godless hordes who have destroyed the idyllic partriarchal family structure of the past.

It’s becoming clear that Mitt Romney’s campaign is going a fine job of turning an internal staff issue into a real problem that just won’t go away easily. I’m referring to the Ric Grenell saga, which is in the process of complicating (to use one term for it) Team Mitt’s relationship with what’s left of gay Republicans, with moderates and libertarians who put up with the Christian Right only when it stays in its place, and with the news media, including its very favorite blogger, Jennifer Rubin, who occupies some valuable online real estate at WaPo. All this is happening at a key transitional moment where the Romney campaign should be executing a smooth pivot to its general election staffing and message.

The latest turn in the story is the revelation (first via Andrew Sullivan, and then the New York Times) that the Romney campaign was, well, kinda lying when it put out the word that Grenell quit before he was really on board, and might have been playing his own “gay politics” game at poor Mitt’s expense.

Grenell was in fact on board, if not on the payroll, and actually organized a key conference call of foreign policy reporters on April 26 but was forbidden to speak on it. So he was “under wraps” after all in the midst of the general election campaign’s first big week of foreign policy controversy, because the Romney campaign was fearful of more social conservative blowback over his hiring. They figured it would eventually blow over, but weren’t giving Grenell any assurances of when he could, so to speak, come out of the closet.

Any way you look at it, the Romney campaign screwed this up royally, either when they hired Grenell, or when they refused to defend him from homophobes, or when they told him to keep his mouth shut, or when they lied about why he quit, or maybe on all these occasions.

To those who object that this whole kerfuffle is classic “inside baseball” that actual voters don’t know about and wouldn’t care about, I’d say I agree, with this qualification: it’s a hell of a lot more relevant to the presidential election than Hilaryrosengate, which did not involve the Obama campaign at all, but which the Romney campaign itself has just held out as a model for coordinated conservative gabbing between now and November. Hence the title of this post.

If the Romney campaign is going to play silly games with news coverage of the campaign and keep making mountains out of molehills, it’s in a poor position to complain when other people notice the mountains it’s made out of its very own molehills: particularly when said molehill covers up its tangled positions on issues of sexual orientation and its unsavory relationship with the Christian Right.

Other than beginning to run out of old rock videos with “morning” themes faster than I had imagined possible, I’m having a pretty good day. Here’s some tasty news treats:

* Whoa! Michelle Malkin goes medieval on Juan Williams for suggesting there’s racism in Tea Party. You have to wonder how long Williams can last on Fox.

* AP survey of economists yields prediction that unemployment rate will slowly drift below 8% by Election Day.

* WSJ reports Dems struggling to finance convention because they’ve banned contributions from corporations and lobbyists and unions are unhappy with site.

* Romney shirking Spanish-language media. A sign he expects running-mate to handle that chore?

* Least surprising news of the day: Courtesy visit with Roger Ailes now routine for GOPers traveling to NY to shake money tree.

And in non-political news:

* USAToday reports all blue-eyed people may be distant cousins. Hilariously, AOL video discusses which celebrities might be related.

Back within the hour with regular blogging.

So the RNC hosted a briefing and getting-to-know-you session for the Online Right yesterday, attended by party chieftain Reince Priebus and (at least for a while) the Big Man himself, Mitt Romney. It’s unclear from the BuzzFeed report on the event who exactly ran it, but GOP online communications guru Patrick Hynes apparently organized it, and it was obviously intended to get the Star Wars Bar Scene of the wingnutosphere comfortable with taking orders from a candidate and campaign that a lot of them have considered RINO sellouts.

Interestingly enough, the main feel-good moment of the meeting appears to have been celebration of a Twitter traffic graph showing how much godless liberal butt was kicked by right-wing tweeters during the great national debate over Hilaryrosengate. That would appear to be a bad omen for those hoping this sort of idiocy does not become a regular feature of the general election campaign.

According to HuffPost’s Michael Calderone, some 60 of the chatterers at this RNC gathering were invited to a private mixer with Mitt and Ann Romney at the nearby Capitol Hill Club, lasting two hours, which is an awful lot of face time with a presumptive presidential nominee. It seems some of the discussion involved concerns that the Romney campaign was not sufficiently interested in big “stories” like the wingnutosphere belief that the ATF’s “Fast and Furious” fiasco wasn’t just a botched operation against Mexican drug lords and gun-runners, but part of a plot to confiscate all U.S. firearms. I betcha at that point Mitt was reaching in his pocket for the hand sanitizer.

In any event, sounds like everyone had a grand old time. Remember this development next time you hear some conservative shrieking about liberal new media folk conspiring with the Obama campaign to influence news coverage.

Tomorrow’s April Jobs Report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is going to get a ridiculous amount of attention, particularly if, as some economists predict and virtually all Republicans hope, it’s less positive than last month’s, which was less positive than February’s.

The problem is, as Jonathan Bernstein reminds us at WaPo’s Plum Line, single-month economic indicators are rarely all that significant. Aside from the fact that this spring’s numbers may have been distorted by unusually mild winter weather that pushed up some seasonal activity from its usual timing, it’s all about the context and the trends:

Barring some unexpected major event, nothing will matter more to the outcome of the November election than how the economy is perceived.

But here’s what you should keep in mind when making sense of each new bit of economic news: It doesn’t matter who wins each individual news cycle over the economy. Instead, each economic report should be seen in the context of all the economic reports. And remember that economic data is subject to major revisions, often large enough to completely change the initial interpretation.

What to do? There’s no general index of economic conditions out there to refer to, the way that we can use the various polling averages as a reality check against which to judge individual polls that seem like outliers. But at least try to see overall trends, and try not to be distracted by isolated data.

Jonathan points to Brother Steve Benen’s useful charts on the trend-lines for unemployment claims as the kind of data that ought to be commanding more attention than monthly reports.

But get ready for Jobageddon in conservative medialand if tomorrow’s numbers fall, say, under 100,000 in net new jobs. Just keep reminding yourselves and everyone else that as Devo once said facetiously about evolution, it’s mostly “wind in sails.”