Another week, another surprising general election match-up poll from Rasmussen.  McCain and Obama are essentially tied in Washington at 45-44%.  Obama loses independents, splits moderates evenly and loses 16% of Democrats to McCain, gaining just 11% of Republicans.  Once again, remarkably enough, he loses 18-29 year olds and those 65+, but wins voters in their thirties and forties and even the 50-64 group.  This poll puts Obama nine points behind Kerry’s 2004 result in the state.  The only consolation for Democrats is that Clinton is running worse in the state than Obama.  Needless to say, polls that show Democrats losing Washington in this cycle are hardly encouraging for supporters of either candidate.  By way of comparison, I would note that even Dukakis won Washington by a point.  Someone will point to this same fact and say, “Even Dukakis carried the state, so what are the odds of Obama losing it in reality?”  Perhaps, but then winning Washington will be cold comort if the rest of the country responds to Obama as it did to Dukakis in November.

So the big electoral news over the weekend was the special election victory by Democrat Bill Foster in the race to replace former Speaker Dennis Hastert.  He defeated the well-funded and slightly too well-known Jim Oberweis, who had last been seen in state politics being pushed out the side door in the 2004 Senate race to make way for the glorious Alan Keyes.  As everyone has noted, this was a Republican-leaning district, which had voted solidly for Bush both times.  The election was bizarrely on a Saturday and turnout was pathetic, which makes a Republican loss is all the more telling.  Republicans should overperform in special elections relative to general elections, because they tend to vote at higher rates in irregularly scheduled and “less important” contests.  Democratic turnout is historically more closely tied to presidential elections, which suggests that general election turnout for Democratic voters may be huge.  The result certainly reflects the demoralisation of GOP voters and the far greater enthusiasm of Democrats.  The district’s capture by a Democratic challenger shows the continuing trend throughout Illinois’ suburban districts towards the Democrats that we have already seen in the election and re-election of Melissa Bean in IL-08 and the remarkably competitive IL-06 race in 2006 between Roskam and Duckworth to determine who would get Henry Hyde’s old seat.  This suggests that other vulnerable Midwestern Republicans, including some who survived the Ohio slaughterhouse last time, may be in greater jeopardy than in the previous cycle.  The open Ohio and Minnesota seats now seem especially vulnerable to flipping to the Democrats.  This result also has to be disconcerting for Mark Kirk in IL-10, Schmidt in OH-02 (the Heather Wilson of the east) and Walberg and Knollenberg in Michigan, all of whom were narrowly re-elected and all of whom are in at least partially suburban districts. 

What may be happening is a strong pro-Democratic trend in the Congressional races combined with a split electorate for the Presidential race, which seems likely to remain split or even tilt towards the GOP as the Democrats thrash out the rest of their nominating contest over next three months.  What should have been the Democrats’ 1952 or 1920 may turn out to be another 1988.

Update: If you were to list all of the Republican-held seats that voted between 50 and 58% for Bush in 2004, you would have at least 43 seats that could be flipped, including the now-open AZ-03 (Shadegg’s seat), MN-06, Michelle Bachmann’s seat, and both the aforementioned IL-06 and IL-18.

Put this in the “how Republicans will run against Obama” file.  What’s remarkable about the coverage of this statement and Obama’s reaction to the statement is that King’s comments are mostly run-of-the-mill rhetoric against so-called “appeasers” who are “weak” on national security, augmented with very deliberate use of Obama’s middle name and precisely the reversed form of Sullivan’s argument for Obama that I said could be used against him:

The other problem with this talk of Obama as a bridge-builder with the Islamic world is that people might take it rather too seriously and see him as being too close to the Islamic world.  

Declaring that King’s language “has no place in politics” is all very well, but you might as well demand that all war supporters to stop imputing treachery and disloyalty to war opponents.  For that matter, you could ask the sun not to rise.  When Romney announced that continuing his campaign would “aid a surrender to terror” (i.e., the election of a Democrat), I’m sure many people laughed, but no one was particularly scandalised by the statement because it has become so commonplace in Republican circles.  Caricaturing their opponents as “defeatists” is the mainstream GOP’s idea of a coherent national security argument, which doesn’t mean that it won’t win votes.  Typically, winning “national security” messages are long on fear and short on reason.  Demagoguing terrorism is all these people have left, but we would be foolish to assume that it isn’t still a powerful message.  I’ll tell you this much: if Obama tries to dismiss this “appeasement” line of attack in the way that he dismissed King’s comments, he is going to find himself at a significant disadvantage.

Technical problems seem to be resolved now.  Posting should return to a more normal basis.  Many things have happened over the weekend and today that merit some comment, not least of which is the surprising defeat for the GOP in IL-14, but this item flagged by Sullivan caught my attention.  The press man for Republicans for Obama, Tony Campbell, appeared recently on the Laura Ingraham Show.  As it happens, I caught the interview, such as it was, as I was driving home from my lecture, and his account doesn’t match what I recall hearing.  He complains:

I told her she was the one who wasn’t a Republican, that she and others like her had given up the core of the party with this cultural/socialism kick they’ve been on; making personal decisions about people’s private lives, from the FCC’s ruling on Howard Stern to Congressional intrusion in the Terri Schiavo case. All she could say at that point was that I must be liberal because I teach at a university. But people like Laura Ingraham have basically paid for their houses and cars by feeding on the fear and division of the American people. Partisanship is not the end-all, be-all of our existence. Obama, at least, seems to recognize that.

As far as I remember, Mr. Campbell didn’t say much of anything, and he didn’t say half of what he claims he did.  Part of the reason for this was Ingraham’s aggressive approach, as she kept demanding Campbell to identify why he supported Obama on the basis of policy and he kept trotting out the rather tired “I don’t agree with him on everything” dodge, which made for a very uninteresting interview.  Ingraham hardly covered herself in glory, repeatedly conflating the categories of conservative and Republican (which, judging by her endorsement of Mitt Romney, she does not care to distinguish very carefully) and at one point she did indeed declare that Campbell had to be a liberal because he was an academic.  Nonetheless, the rest of this account does not ring true, since Campbell barely had a chance to get a word in edgewise, and when he did he made an entirely unpersuasive claim about Obama’s “leadership,” of which he had no examples. 

This new material referring to the “cultural/socialism kick” is remarkable, which fits nicely into the bizarre fiction that social conservatives somehow dominate GOP priorities.  The reference to the Schiavo episode is particularly revealing, since Obama did not oppose the unanimous consent motion that allowed federal intervention in the Schiavo case, which he has said recently in a debate he regrets.  Obviously, people can change their minds, but what does it say about his “leadership” that Obama ducked on a controversial case where non-intervention was actually the right move both legally and morally?  Again, when the going gets tough the hopeful are nowhere to be found. 

Why invoke this episode as a reason for abandoning the GOP when Obama did nothing to oppose it either?  It is typical of this kind of critique of the supposed hyper-moralism of the GOP that the episode that purportedly demonstrates so-con dominance more than any other actually had members of both parties acquiescing in a bad decision.  What’s more, the episode reflected no real policy initiative and has advanced the cause of life not at all, and has probably functioned more as a political setback.  It was a symbolic gesture without any greater significance.  It reflects the shallowness of the GOP leadership’s support for life, not its intensity.  Meanwhile, in his desire to transcend partisanship Mr. Campbell goes from backing the party that went overboard in the Schiavo case to supporting the candidate who voted “present” on the state version of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, going literally from one extreme to the other.  That is apparently what “pro-life” post-partisanship involves.

These attacks are supposed to show that Obama can’t be pushed around. But, of course, what it really suggests is that Obama’s big theory is bankrupt. You can’t really win with the new style of politics. Sooner or later, you have to play by the conventional rules. ~David Brooks

But the big theory, the idea that “voters are tired of the partisan paralysis of the past 20 years,” is based on a complete misreading of public frustration with the political class.  The frustration with the two parties does not relate to how or whether they do or do not cooperate, but relates instead to what they propose to do and not do.  There hasn’t been “partisan paralysis” during the past 20 years, but all too often collaboration of members of both parties in policies that do not have the support of large parts of the public or that serve narrow interests at odds with the interests of the majority.  There have been a number of fairly significant pieces of legislation moved through Congress and signed into law during the past 20 years, but the public’s frustration with the system comes from the quality of that legislation and the consequences of the policies of at least the last 20 years, especially as it relates to trade, immigration and, to some extent, foreign policy.  Lack of representation, not lack of cooperation or lack of action, is what frustrates the tens of millions of people who would contemplate backing an independent candidate.  Obama gave the wrong diagnosis, and so prescribed the wrong cure: despite some rhetorical maneuvering on trade, Obama stands with the establishment consensus on all those issues where the disconnect between the public and the political class is greatest, and offers the “healing” of post-partisanship while proposing almost entirely the same content in his agenda as any establishment candidate.

One of the things I missed with my computer’s untimely demise this week was Obama’s absurdly short press conference earlier this week.  Now Obama’s limited availability to the media has become very noticeable over the last few months, and it has remarkably coincided with the wave of favourable coverage that had been going on for at least the last six months (and, really, for the last 14).  For those who missed it, Obama ended this press conference after eight questions.  You may recall another candidate and then President who disliked the formal ritual of the press conference and held very few for years–his name is George Bush.  In Bush’s case, he stayed away from these things to avoid having to speak on camera more than necessary, since he was hardly a master of elocution, but in Obama’s case the reluctance to talk to the press in these formats is odd and more damaging.  It feeds into an impression of arrogance that the “cult” atmosphere of his rallies already creates, and it undermines his calls for transparency in campaigning and politics.  Surely one of the better ways to have transparency is for politicians to speak with the press on a reasonably regular basis.  Obama has been a media darling in spite of his coolness towards them, but that may not last forever and won’t if he can’t give straight answers to questions.  As far as the Rezko business goes, Obama seems to have no reason to avoid questions about it, since there appears to be nothing that ties him to any of Rezko’s wrongdoing, so the evasions are creating problems for him where none should exist. 

Update: John Heilemann views the press conference brush-off in much the same way:

It also gives off the distinct whiff of arrogance and entitlement that’s lately been emanating from him.  Eight questions! OMG! That’s, like, three more than I usually answer — and five more than I should have to answer!” 

Since I jumped on the “Obama is going to win the nomination” bandwagon two weeks ago, I’m not going to backtrack now and say that he won’t, but it’s worth looking at how the Wisconsin results misled me to declare the contest virtually over.  Obama had struggled with downscale voters and many regular Democratic constituencies, and in Wisconsin the resistance to his candidacy among these voters seemed to melt away.  There were a couple things at work that I neglected before that tell me that I overestimated the importance of this: Wisconsin was to Obama what New Jersey or New Hampshire was to Clinton (i.e., neighbouring states where the candidate really had to do well), and in the same way that Iowa exaggerated Obama’s strengths in the eyes of the media Wisconsin seemed to show that Obama had started winning Clinton’s core voters.  But once he moved farther away from Illinois, however, he could not win those voters away from her and the old Mondale-Hart dynamic reasserted itself.   

The last week has been something of a disaster for the Obama campaign, and it has not really experienced a combination of gaffes, losses and blunders (plus coping with the Rezko trial) in quite this way before.  How the campaign recovers and handles the next week or two will tell us a great deal about whether he can regain his footing and still get the nomination.  Since the superdelegates seem all but certain to decide this, this is the time when he and his campaign have to show resilience or face three months of increasing anxiety about his electability.

Foremost among them is that Obama has yet to win a major state other than his own (Illinois) because he’s still having trouble appealing to both Hispanics and working-class Democrats –those so-called Reagan Democrats. ~Steven Stark

As I suggestedsome weeks back, the profile of Obama’s wins and Romney’s was remarkably similar, and this pattern has continued through this week.  Stark has looked at the “scrambled map” idea and has found it wanting just as I have:

But a more accurate analysis is that while McCain would be competitive in many states — even California — once considered safely Democratic, it’s hard to see as many comparable states where Obama might do the same.

In addition to this Romney-like weakness in large states, he has Huckabee-like weaknesses with Catholic voters for what are probably obvious reasons on life and marriage.  Add to this his weak hold on Democratic voters, and you have the makings of an electoral collapse.

That SurveyUSA general election polling is interesting, and it may be significantly skewed in each state in different ways, but the results are still rather puzzling.  SUSA shows the same Obama weakness in New Jersey that the Rasmussen poll I discussed earlier this week already showed, so there really may be greater resistance to Obama in the state.  However, it also asks us to believe that the Democratic candidate who loses New Jersey and Pennsylvania wins New Mexico and Virginia.  In other words, safe Democratic states are switching sides, but traditional swing states are supposedly falling into the Dem column.  That doesn’t strike me as evidence of the map getting “scrambled” so much as it points to the potential for Democratic meltdown in their core states.  Compared to other New Mexico polling I have seen, Obama’s 50% is quite high.  

I disagree with SUSA’s overall method of assigning tied states to one column or the other, which exaggerates the strength of the candidates.  The oddness of the results in New Hampshire also stands out: we’re supposed to believe that Clinton, who actually won the Democratic primary there, will run eight points behind Obama and lose a state that has been trending dramatically Democratic, but that both win Ohio in a walk?  This polling doesn’t show McCain necessarily winning New Jersey, but it does show Obama’s limited appeal there as of right now.  This is an important point: McCain isn’t the one making New Jersey a battleground state in this match-up.  In any other cycle and with almost any other match-up that we could have had, New Jersey would have likely been solidly Democratic.  Obama does rather badly in his current polling in Massachusetts: he wins the state, but receives just 49%?  I guess being frequently likened to Devall Patrick really doesn’t help him. 

If we can rely on any of this, Obama’s total of 280 electoral votes is almost identical to Clinton’s 276, which suggests at the very least that talk of realignment or new trajectories was always the stuff of fantasy.  Whatever else it may tell us, it does tell us that the election will be very close and will still be decided in a relative handful of states, even if the particular states involved are different than they have been.  The “new era” has not yet dawned.