Will Rogers famously said, “I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.” But James Fallows, musing on the election, writes:

For the first time in my conscious life, the Democratic party is now more organized and coherent, and less fractious and back-biting, than the Republicans. It is almost stupefying to imagine that.

But think about the facts: We’ve now had four of the past six presidential elections won by Democrats. In five of the past six, the Democrat has won the popular vote. The most effective advocate for the current Democratic incumbent was the previous Democratic president. The current president’s toughest rival in the primaries is now his Secretary of State, and another former rival is his vice president. Meanwhile, on the Republican side, the nominee dared not even mention the existence of the previous Republican president. His rivals in the primary were tepid at best in shows of support. Democrats now disagree about a lot, from their relationship with Wall Street to the ethics of drone wars. But they are a more coherent whole than through most of their recent history — and much more coherent than the Republicans.

This is a staggering thought, especially for the party that choked away Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat as recently as 2010. But on balance I think it’s true. Even the feared Republican propaganda machine was blowing fuses right and left on election night. Most tellingly in my view, much of the huge money dumped into the race on the Republican side appears to have been not just ineffective but outright looted by corrupt campaign operatives and consultants.

It would be easy to take this too far—remember how quick the GOP came back from being crushed into the dirt in 2008—but for now, their vaunted organizational edge is very much dulled.

@ryanlcooper

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I was watching some Up with Chris this morning (update: posted above) and Hayes about came unglued making the point that few in Washington seems to get—that the problem with the fiscal slope (the set of tax increases and spending cuts set to take effect automatically next year) is that it will make the federal deficit too small. And yet we have the same parade of rattling deficit scolds who have been gravely intoning about how immoral it is to leave such a debt load to our children suddenly up in arms about this fiscal slope.

Consider this throwaway line from Andrew Sullivan:

We are facing automatic massive tax hikes and huge, crude spending cuts starting January 1 if we cannot get a bipartisan deal on Bowles-Simpson lines (of course there is room for tweaking and bargaining). A failure to get that kind of deal would tip the US and the world into a new global depression.

Every single thing about this is wrong or misleading. First, it’s true that the fiscal slope’s massive dose of austerity would probably cause a recession, but they will take effect only gradually. There is plenty of time to get a deal before the cumulative impact on aggregate demand would be noticeable, and the extra taxes collected could even be rebated to restore consumer spending. Sullivan’s implication that there are bone-crunching effects starting January 1 is wrong.

But more importantly, Bowles-Simpson is in no universe a solution to the problem of the fiscal slope. We could simply return to the status quo ante, ignoring this Ahab quest for a Grand Bipartisan Bargain altogether, and the problem would be averted. Proposing Bowles-Simpson (remember, allegedly a deficit reduction plan) as a solution for the fiscal slope is like saying, “There will be a famine, so therefore we must stop growing so much food.” The only conceivable reason for it would be to entice Republicans—but remember, the president holds all the cards after January 1st.

As Matt Yglesias points out, the GOP has no leverage here and things will likely play out as Obama desires. Dems get a bit more revenue, and the House gets to vote for tax cuts after they’ve gone up. In fact, the NYT today has a story about how John Boehner has been bluntly warning his caucus they’re going to have to swallow some painful votes.

But this moment has starkly revealed the fiscal scolds for what they are: a bunch of frauds. Not Sullivan, I think, he seems more just muddled by a weird crush on the Bowles-Simpson plan, but nearly all of the rest. Read this incredibly duplicitous letter from a bunch of CEOs sounding the alarm about this issue. What’s their recommended solution? Why, tax reform which just coincidentally includes lower rates for everyone.

Nobody cares about the deficit, least of all the people who whine about it constantly. Their preferences have been revealed.

UPDATE: Paul Krugman has more, including an amazing catch from a deficit scold org saying we should only cut “low priority” spending. Wonder what that means…

@ryanlcooper

The military and foreign policy isn’t normally my wheelhouse, but this David Petraeus thing is just irresistible. Today the Washington Post reports with some new, truly wretched details:

The collapse of the impressive career of CIA Director David H. Petraeus was triggered when a woman with whom he was having an affair sent threatening e-mails to another woman close to him, according to three senior law enforcement officials with know­ledge of the episode.

The recipient of the e-mails was so frightened that she went to the FBI for protection and help tracking down the sender, according to the officials. The FBI investigation traced the threats to Paula Broadwell, a former military officer and a Petraeus biographer, and uncovered explicit e-mails between Broadwell and Petraeus, the officials said.

Petraeus was worshiped in Washington like perhaps no one else in the country. But with his shine definitely tarnished, it’s worth wondering what his legacy will be once the hagiography fades. After all, as Michael Hastings pointed out on MSNBC, he was responsible for a lot of questionable things:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Let’s review Petraeus’ recent record: the surge in Iraq, which failed in most of its stated goals; the surge in Afghanistan, which also looks to have failed; and turning the CIA into a paramilitary organization which has assassinated American citizens (even a child) with no due process.

Now the two presidents are undoubtedly responsible for some of this as well, but to the extent that David Petraeus gets credit or blame for that record, he may not have such a great reputation in twenty years’ time, and I don’t think it will have much to do with his sordid affair.

UPDATE: Spencer Ackerman has a great piece about he got sucked into the cult of Petraeus.

@ryanlcooper

For today a track off the Bastion soundtrack, a game I finished last night:

It’s a great title if you’re into that sort of thing. Excellent story.

@ryanlcooper

Like most liberals, I had some fairly grim thoughts about the shadowy bunch of conservative SuperPACs that were supposedly going to deluge the 2012 race in a sea of money and finally make it clear that this country has evolved into an out-and-out plutocracy, a country for sale to the highest bidder. I thought perhaps Obama would win, but only by paying fealty to the big dollar people in his own party.

Now, the president did raise an enormous amount of money. But one thing I did not expect was that Republican operatives might see those enormous wads of cash, and start thinking more about lining their own pockets than making their man win. On RedState, of all places, there’s a damning investigation of why Romney’s vaunted ground game smartphone app was a big airball:

So what caused the breakdown and why didn’t it get fixed in time? Well according to sources who worked closely with the program, the blame is at the feet of consultants.

Specifically Targeted Victory, FLS Connect, and The Stevens and Schriefer Group. While the Romney campaign did work with other consultants, they were apparently not part of the problem.

They say that the truth is the consultants essentially used the Romney campaign as a money making scheme, forcing employees to spin false data as truth in order to paint a rosy picture of a successful campaign as a form of job security.

Josh Marshall compiled reports right before the election of big ad buys in non swing states, possibly from SuperPACs spending money on their friends’ TV station, while Karl Rove is “scrambling” to defend himself from his big donors who want a scalp for donating $300 million and getting nothing.

We live an an age of inequality and concentrated wealth not seen since the Gilded Age. Perhaps I’m romanticizing the past, but those days a lot more of that wealth was the result of actual building and business, not just financial parasitism. Sure, there was the stock-watering Jay Gould, but there was also Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt. Seems plausible that Romney-style Wall Street titans who made billions (and aquired egos to match) on debt-fueled looting would more easily get suckered like this.

Whatever the case, it seems that monumental pile of money spent on this election was not an unqualified poison for our society. In the end, at least to some degree, the truth will out. And that is an encouraging thought.

@ryanlcooper

Julius Malema, via Wikimedia. The sad product of a racialist polity.

The Supreme Court indicated recently it would take up a Voting Rights Act case. Adam Serwer provides some background:

A key pillar of American civil rights law is now in danger of being nullified by the Supreme Court.

Shelby County, Alabama, is seeking to have Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the law that first guaranteed the right of blacks in the South to vote, declared unconstitutional. Section 5 forces areas of the country with a history of discrimination—mostly, but not entirely in the South—to ask the Department of Justice for its approval before making any changes to election rules. The DOJ is then supposed to ensure any changes protect Americans’ voting rights. The law has a provision allowing jurisdictions to “bail out,” but conservatives have repeatedly challeged the law as unconstitutional federal overreach that is no longer necessary because America has transcended its history of racial discrimination.

This has been a festering problem in American democracy for some time now. We have constitutional amendments protecting voters from disenfranchisement based on race, sex, age, and non-payment of poll taxes, but no actual affirmative right to vote. This was actually noted in the Bush vs. Gore decision.

The text of a voting rights amendment could be simple, along the lines of other voting rights amendments:

Section 1. The right to vote of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

One could obviously find some partisan grounds to support this, like beating back the voter ID movement or the huge number of African Americans who have lost voting rights on felony disenfranchisement rules. But I think, aside from the obvious civil rights angle, it should also be a measure for the health of the democracy.

Right now the conservative movement looks to be at a watershed. More than ninety percent of Mitt Romney’s voters were white, and he was crushed among all minorities. With the demographic growth of minorities, their electoral disadvantage will only grow. Down one road they could do the long, laborious work of purging their party of white nationalist rhetoric and trying to build a party open to all people. Some of the most prominent conservative leaders seem to be exploring this option—even Sean Hannity has come out in support of immigration reform.

But down another they could look at overwhelming support of Democrats among minorities and simply conclude that they must be disenfranchised. They tried this to a large degree in this election. As Serwer notes:

A cursory review of recent Republican shenanigans with voting rules should put the notion that the VRA is obsolete entirely to bed. With voting growing more racially polarized, the temptations to alter voting rules to disenfranchise particular constituencies is obvious. Indeed, the Department of Justice successfully challenged Texas’ redistricting map because it diluted the voting power of Latinos. If the court strikes Section 5 down, one of the most effective and important powers the federal government has for ensuring that the right to vote is not abridged on the basis of race will be destroyed.

The nature of a two-party system is such that eventually the Republicans will be back in power. If (enabled by the Supreme Court) they indulge their worst instincts and attempt race-based disenfranchisement, it will only worsen the racial divide and make politics even more tribal than today. On the other hand, if the right to vote is placed beyond reach, and Republicans must compete on a level playing field, they will be powerfully incentivized to clean their house of the Kauses and Limbaughs.

When I lived in South Africa (where blacks mostly support the African National Congress while whites and everyone else mostly supports the Democratic Alliance) I saw the way racialist voting (the ANC has won every election since 1994 in a black-rooted landslide) poisoned the discourse, led to galloping corruption, and made good governance nearly impossible. Our discourse, as hysterical and dumb as it can be, is at least directed in the general vicinity of policy. It ought to stay that way.

See here for more.

@ryanlcooper

One point that remains little-understood about climate change is that it isn’t a traditional environmental issue, where we preserve some bit of nature for the sake of its beauty (with possible tourism side benefits). Even from the most soulless possible economist position, the case for action is ironclad. Climate change is the mother of all unpriced externalities, which Hurricane Sandy (unquestionably strengthened by climate change) made especially clear. Burning all this carbon is raising the sea level, making storms more powerful, creating persistent drought (which still afflicts nearly 60 percent of the lower 48), and much else, all of which is terrifically expensive.

The estimated costs for Hurricane Sandy are on the order of $50 billion. That money is stolen. Coal and oil companies, anyone who sells carbon or burns carbon and profits by it is creating a mess for which they do not have to pay. Even Friedrich von Hayek supported government regulation in that kind of situation. If I build an iPad factory, and as a byproduct of the manufacturing process it creates mountains of dog poop which I dump in my neighbor’s yard, the free market position is clearly that the state must force me to internalize the cost of that poop. It’s a simple point, but one that isn’t widely understood, especially by the national press.

Yesterday David Dayen made the related point that the same logic applies to the federal budget and the national debt:

Spending on sustainable programs like Social Security matters much less to that budget picture in 2040 than the impact of catastrophic climate change. Hurricane Sandy is projected to cost $50 billion. Imagine one or more of those types of weather events every year, in the midst of rising oceans that will only make the impact greater. Imagine the cost of resource wars as water becomes less potable and drought conditions magnify, destroying crops and making the basic human act of feeding ourselves less secure. The costs of unmitigated climate change are almost incalculable.

Exactly. Few things could be more expensive than having to replace our nation’s entire stock of capital goods, or having to build a seawall around every coastal city, or having all our farmers go bankrupt because the US heartland becomes a windswept desert.

There are of course many other, much better arguments for action on climate change, like for example that billions of people will die if we don’t do something. The point, though, is even if we adopt the morally bankrupt and quite frankly idiotic focus on the national debt über alles of the Pete Peterson/B-S commission crowd, the case for action remains ironclad.

@ryanlcooper

From the New York Times:

Consider the case of Chris Williams, the subject of this Op-Doc video, who opened a marijuana grow house in Montana after the state legalized medical cannabis. Mr. Williams was eventually arrested by federal agents despite Montana’s medical marijuana law, and he may spend the rest of his life behind bars. While Jerry Sandusky got a 30-year minimum sentence for raping young boys, Mr. Williams is looking at a mandatory minimum of more than 80 years for marijuana charges and for possessing firearms during a drug-trafficking offense.

The story is, by now, a familiar one. Chris Williams was operating an enormous grow operation based on the fact that Montana passed a medical marijuana law and fact that the Obama Justice Department promised they would not go after people who growing marijuana in the boundaries of state law. He was so scrupulous about following the rules that he had local law enforcement and politicians tour his operation on multiple occasions. And then the Obama DEA busted in. During his trial, he was prevented from using the fact that he was following state law as a defense.

This is a sick perversion of justice. If there really were some urgent reason to shut these operations down (setting aside the rather strong possibility that the DEA simply wanted to steal all Mr. Williams’ possessions) then how much easier and more just would it have been to post a notice on the business’s door? Or send an email? Businesses that give tours to the police are not the ones that will disobey a direct order from the government.

Even if that were not possible, President Obama still has the power of the pardon. If Mr. Williams was growing in violation of clear direction from the Justice Department, that would be one thing. But that’s not the case. He is in prison right now because of a campaign promise from the president, one which was codified in writing, and later reversed with no warning.

Barack Obama is, apparently, a man who can be moved to tears by the tireless efforts of his campaign staff. Has he no place in his heart for a man who only started his own business providing medicine, in what he thought was safe legal territory based on the promises of Obama himself? Has he no sympathy for a son who will grow up without a father? Does a prison sentence greater than that for murder or child rape sound fair to him?

Chris Williams should never have been arrested or tried. But it’s not too late for some semblance of justice. Mr. President, free this man.

@ryanlcooper

In case you haven’t seen it, I found this clip of the president losing his famous cool a little quite interesting:

Obama is often compared to Spock in his near-total unflappability. But stress, lack of sleep, and the emotional release of victory can erode that control and make a person expose their humanity a little.

@ryanlcooper

Ah, what a week! You’ve heard about enough from me for a while, so I’ll get right on to the day’s leftovers:

* Petraeus resigns from CIA, citing extramarital affair. Seems if you want to find a sacred cow these days, you need to stick with an actual cow.

* More secession talk from Texas!

* 12 elected officials recalled on Election Day, while 10 others survived recalls. Who knew?

* At Ten Miles Square, Jonathan Zasloff calls for some serious progressive heat on Obama now that he’s not in danger of being evicted from the White House.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer reports that voters in four states approved ballot initiatives boosting funds for community colleges.

And in non-political news:

* New concert footage of Elvis! The age of miracles is not over.

Ryan Cooper will be in as our Weekend Blogger. I’m going to go see the new James Bond movie and then sleep for two days.

Selah.

So the U.S. Supreme Court granted cert today in a case in which an Alabama county is challenging the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSblog has the basic info:

Specially at issue is the constitutionality of the law’s Section 5, the most important provision, under which nine states and parts of seven others with a past history of racial bias in voting must get official clearance in Washington before they may put into effect any change in election laws or procedures, no matter how small. The Court came close to striking down that section three years ago, but instead sent Congress clear signals that it should update the law so that it reflects more recent conditions, especially in the South. Congress did nothing in reaction.

At MoJo, Adam Serwer sounds the alarm:

Although Section 5 survived in 2009, conservative Justices appeared to believe that the law was discriminatory—against Southern white people. “Is it your position that today Southerners are more likely to discriminate than Northerners?” Chief Justice John Roberts demanded of the attorney defending the Voting Rights Act at the time. Despite the 8-1 vote, the 2009 decision was widely seen as leaving Section 5 hanging by a thread. The justices hinted very strongly that Congress, which had just reauthorized the Voting Rights Act in its entirety in 2006, should change the law soon or risk it being declared unconstitutional next time around.

Now it looks like the conservatives on the court will get their chance.

The timing is certainly inappropriate, immediately after a national election in which Republican elected officials made the most concerted and open (if largely unsuccessful) effort to suppress minority voting in many years. It’s worth noting that Section 5 is not the entire VRA—and a good thing, too, since it doesn’t cover Ohio or Pennsylvania. But its continuing importance was illustrated most recently when a federal court would not allow Rick Scott to restrict early voting in those Florida counties covered by Section 5. It’s an essential part of the already limited machinery of voting rights in this country, and if Adam’s correct, it may take an entirely new—and perhaps national—effort to create something to take its place.

A dog that definitely did not bark on November 7th was the once-very-intense Republican effort to “wedge” Catholic voters with claims the Obama administration was waging a “war on religion,” notably via the allegedly insufficient exemptions it offered to a contraception coverage mandate created by Obamacare. Obama won Catholics by a 50-48 vote, almost exactly his margin among voters generally, and continuing Catholic voters’ very close similarity to the electorate as a whole. The failure of the “war on religion” effort is all the more remarkable since it received tactic (and in some cases overt) support from the Catholic hierarchy, particularly via the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ “Fortnight for Freedom” campaign during the spring, aimed at mobilizing the faithful against the contraception mandate.

In a thoughtful piece for the National Catholic Reporter on Election Eve, Maryland parish priest Fr. Peter Daly examined the failure of the “Fortnight for Freedom,” and basically schooled the bishops:

Our Catholic bishops started out leading a political parade in the spring. But when they looked behind them in the fall, they discovered that almost nobody was following. What happened?

A few groups got in line. The Knights of Columbus were very active. EWTN had several programs devoted to Fortnight. There were some rallies around the country. A lot of money was spent on pamphlets and videos. There was an opening Mass in Baltimore and a closing Mass in Washington, D.C. But there was hardly any talk about it in the pews. The average Catholic hardly even noticed a Fortnight for Freedom was happening.

Why didn’t this movement catch fire? Four reasons, I think.

First, perhaps some of our language was hyperbolic. When language is perceived as exaggerated, it is not taken seriously.

Bishops and Catholic publications used words like “alarming,” “unprecedented” and “unconscionable” about the HHS mandate. But most people did not see it as an existential threat to our religious liberty. They saw it as a disagreement over government policy….

Second, the statement that this was unprecedented was not historically accurate.

Bishops said that never before had people been required to violate their religious conscience to comply with the law. But every day, we tax Quakers and other religious pacifists to support wars. Jehovah’s Witnesses pay Medicare taxes for blood transfusions. Seventh-day Adventists in the military must report to duty on Saturdays. Mormons had to give up their cherished practice of polygamy as the price for bringing Utah into the Union. The fact is that religious liberty has never been absolute.

Third, the Catholic church is not a convincing defender of religious liberty because of our own history…..

Fourth, the Fortnight for Freedom was perceived as a partisan effort to influence the election.

The bishops, of course, did not intend to be partisan and vociferously denied that they were partisan, but both sides of the political equation perceived “Fortnight” as an effort to defeat President Barack Obama. I went to one Knights of Columbus meeting that ended with a blunt appeal to “get behind our bishops” and defeat the president.

Fr. Daly might have added that sizable majorities of the laity don’t agree with traditional Church teachings on contraception to begin with, and that the hierarchy is not exactly standing on high moral ground these days. But he’s right: The Bishops and their political allies wrote a check on “the Catholic vote” they couldn’t cover. We’ll see if what looked to be a burgeoning alliance between conservative evangelicals and Catholic “traditionalists” of the sort that Chuck Colson and Richard John Neuhaus long dreamed of will find a way to make a comeback after this ignominious incident.

There’s a lot of confusion and cross-talk over the meaning of the initial post-election maneuvering of the president and the House speaker over negotiations to deal with the so-called “fiscal cliff”—the impending expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the imposition of across-the-board spending cuts as agreed to at the end of the 2011 debt-limit negotiations. John Boehner has reiterated his party’s absolute opposition to any tax rate increases on the very wealthy—which will happen automatically if the Bush cuts are allowed to expire—but has opened the door to higher revenues via the usual “loophole closing” mechanisms that GOPers often talk about in conjunction with further tax rate cuts—in exchange, of course, for both “entitlement reform” and a cancellation of the scheduled defense spending cuts. The president’s reiterated his demand for a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction that demands revenues, and more specifically “a bit more from the very wealthy.” Meanwhile, like some clunky deus ex machina, deficit hawks, including some Democrats and maybe a few Republicans, are ginning up a new, well-funded campaign to push for adoption of the Bowles-Simpson framework for a big deficit reduction deal that would involve new revenues and “entitlement reform.”

As Jonathan Chait has been pointing out for some time, this isn’t just a return to the dynamics of the debt-limit talks. Aside from the fact that Obama has just won re-election after talking frequently about demanding more taxes from the wealthy (a position that remains exceptionally popular), Republicans aren’t the ones with a big hostage right now. If nothing happens, tax rates go up automatically. It’s Republicans who badly need something from Obama—an agreement to boost defense spending—and Republicans who are in danger of looking unreasonable by threatening the economic recovery in order to preserve lower taxes for their donor class. As Chait’s pointing out now, so long as Obama can make a credible threat to do nothing if Republicans don’t make major concessions—and then maybe come back with a free-standing bill to lower taxes on middle-income families, daring Republicans to block it—the GOP is in danger of losing on everything it cares about.

There are, in my opinion, three things Obama must do to strengthen his hand even more: (1) stop talking about the “fiscal cliff” as though life will end if the Bush tax cuts expire or Pentagon cuts take effect, however partially or briefly; (2) tell Democrats in no uncertain terms to keep their distance from the Simpson-Bowles effort (if a revenues-for-entitlement-reform deal eventually proves essential, control over its dimensions should under no circumstances be forfeited to “independent” deficit hawks); and (3) force Boehner and other Republicans into the big leap from “more revenues” to “higher rates,” or at least the permanent cancellation of some features of the Bush tax cuts benefitting the wealthy. Congressional Republicans cannot be allowed to enjoy the luxury of fearing Grover Norquist more than Barack Obama, restive financial markets, or defense contractors altogether, at this point. And if Boehner and company refuse to take that step, Obama should make his own non-negotiable demands—such as taking actual benefit cuts for Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security recipients off the table (with or without some wiggle-room for additional means-testing in the latter two programs, again keeping the focus on protecting low-to-moderate income Americans).

Whether or not Obama pursues this exact strategy, he has absolutely no reason to bend to GOP demands at this point. He’s got the upper hand until he chooses to lower it.

As Rich Yeselson mentioned in his post earlier today, and as I’ve harped on now and then for several years, the biggest single under-discussed aspect of contemporary national politics is the consistent disparity in turnout patterns between presidential and non-presidential elections, which at the moment happen to align almost perfectly with party preferences.

By that I mean that midterms always, always produce an electorate that is older and whiter than presidential cycles. In 2006, the electorate was 79% white, with African-Americans composing 10% of the electorate and Latinos 8%. In 2010, the numbers were almost identical. In 2006, voters under 30 were 12%, while those over 65 were 19%. In 2010, under-30s were 11%, over-60s were 21%. Meanwhile, in 2008, whites were 74%, African-Americans were 13%, Hispanics were 9%. In 2012 whites were 72%, African-Americans were 13%, Latinos were 10% (Asians, BTW, were up from 2% to 3%). In 2008, under-30s were 18%, and actually increased to 19% in 2012. In 2008, over-65s were 16%, exactly where they were in 2012.

2006 was a great Democratic year mainly because Democrats broke even with Republicans in the over-65 vote, which then proceeded to break 53-45 Republican in 2008, 59-38 in 2010, and 56-44 in 2012 (Democrats also won the 45-64 vote in 2006, before narrowly losing it narrowly in 2008 and a bit less narrowly in 2010). Unless Democrats can do something to change the typical mid-term composition of the electorate, or can boost their percentage among older and whiter voters, 2014 does not look good. And FWIW, not only will the 2010-2012 redistricting continue to protect the GOP’s House majority, the Senate landscape isn’t much better than it was this year (20 Democratic seats are up, compared to just 13 Republicans, and 7 of the Democrats are in states carried by Romney; just one Republican—Susan Collins—is from a state carried by Obama).

On top of everything else, second-term midterms are normally a disaster for the party controlling the White House (look at what happened in 1958, 1966, 1974, 1986, and 2006), though one of the very few exceptions ever was pretty recent, in 1998.

I’m not trying to provide a buzzkill for happy Democrats here, but just as it was inevitable the day after Barack Obama’s election that 2010 was going to be difficult for Democrats given the drift of older white voters towards the GOP, 2014 will be difficult as well. What we don’t exactly know at this point is whether the turnout patterns in 2012 were basically normal presidential patterns, or owed a lot to heroic Democratic GOTV efforts given the voter-discouragement that would have normally accompanied (a) bad economic times, and (b) a reversion-to-norm after the historic 2008 elections.

If it’s the latter, then Democrats had better go to school fast on those GOTV efforts and intensify them going into the midterms, or hope an improving economy or some other change in partisan dynamics give the numbers a tilt back towards the benign-to-Democrats breakdowns of 2006. The best news for Democrats is that Republicans, for all the talk of them “learning lessons” from 2012, do not seem inclined to change much of anything between now and then beyond cosmetics.