Blogging the midterms: 3 Questions Answered

This  is the second post from Washington in an occasional series on the current US midterms next Tuesday. In the first i asked readers to leave in the comments the things they wanted answered, and so i thought it only polite to actually provide an answer to some of them. The same thing goes this time - if you see something in the news you don't buy or get, just mention it in the comments to this post, and I'll try to have a look at it. Go on. There must be something you want to know about?

I'll take 3 this time, on turn out, the senate, and the role of business in the election.

1. Why does Turnout matter so much?
David Brede gets straight to it: "You say that the Republicans are one cycle ahead in their turnout operations. As this will be a key issue in 2009 if not before in the UK, is this a sheer hard work issue or something other than that." Its something else. There was a long, very interesting piece in the Times over the weekend which everyone interested in this should read. Here Charles Schumer, who heads up the Dems senate campaign, claims the Dems have caught up. If you want to see the likelihood of this being true, read this very, very funny profile of his optimistic tendency in the Post recently, in which the journalist writes: "Some see the glass as half empty, others as half full. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) sees it as overflowing." Basically the GOP are better across the board on GOTV. They have better existing databases, or "voter files" as they are called over here. They have close-to-perfected the art of the 72-hour Prue-election day push. They are better at "micro-targetting", the new buzz in American politics. (It basically means that they can figure out from precinct level data the extent to which consumer and socio-demographic data reliably predict your voting preferences. If you drink latte and drive a volvo etc etc.) And they are a united GOTV group. The Dems still rely on a motley bunch of unions and campaigning groups - gathered under the umbrella of America Votes - to back up their official effort. My hunch is that all of this isn't going to be enough to save them this time. But the implications of their improved ability to turnout voters are strategically, and i use this word advisedly, profound. It completely overturns the Blair / Clinton pragmatic rationale for centrism if you can inflate your base. And that is the biggest takeaway from American politics at present for Progress people. I'll write more about this later.

2. Where matters in the Senate? Can the Dems win? 
Richard Phillips asked "can you give us a quick summary of the party's chances in the key battleground senatorial races?" Right you are. The long list of key races are, in order of importance, Virginia, Tennesse, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Montana, Rhodes Island, and Pennsyvania. The best way to keep in touch is the Real Clear Politics poll page. As it stands the Democrats need 6 of this 8 to win. And my hunch is they will win, at most, 5. Virginia and Tennessee have been unbelievable races. In Tennessee Democrat Harold Ford Jnr has run a brilliant campaign, but is currently being slimed by his opponent. Jim Webb in Virginia has not run a brilliant campaign, but his opponent George Allen has had a nightmare, as this excellent recent article in the Nation explains. But both VA and TN are very conservative states - most people still expect the GOP to win. This is especially true because the Republicans are very, very good at shifting the message when they need to. There was a tawdry brouhaha going on over the weekend around about whether Jim Webb and / or Lynn Cheney wrote sexually explicit passages in respective books. As Webb said  its "smear after smear - a desperate but politically extremely clever attempt to make the last weeks of this election about anything other than Iraq and the economy. Be it Penthouse models in Tennessee, gay marriage in Virginia or immigration rows in New Jersey - it all smacks of a coordinated campaign to pivot critical campaign messages away from the Democratic ground. Anyway, thats a longwinded way of saying that Democrats will definitely win in Pennsylvania (excellent news, as the incumbant Santorum is a weapons grade idiot.), Rhodes Island, and Ohio. They will probably win in Ohio and Montana. Conventional wisdom says, however, that without VA or TN, they will fall 1 or 2 seats short of a win.

3. What is happening with business? Are the corporations taking a pasting?
Mike Bennett asked how "what's happening with the Corporations and the Democrats." Very interesting. As i mentioned in a recent OpenDemocracy piece there is a very clear anti-corporate theme in the mid-terms. Across America politicians are slamming "big business," attacking their opponents for cravenly taking money from "big pharmaceuticals," and generally being in the pocket of corrupt corporations. Especially popular are attacks on "big oil," big oil profits, big gas prices, and big subsidies to oil giants. This is a different phenomneon from the 2002 / 2004 Enron bashing, where corrupt corruption was the issue. This time my hunch is there is more a feeling that companies are, as the Amercians would say, making out like bandits, while ordinary americans are not doing well. Median income under Bush is stagnant, while wages have declined. For more on the economic debate see these two memos on wages and the economy i drafted for my current employer.  All of this, in turn, is wrapped up in the fractious relationship America is currently having with economic globalisation, which is much, much more controversial than in the UK. The upshot is that in certain Senate races - especially Ohio - there is a strong  business-bashing theme.  This in turn is a function of where this election is being fought. If you find a map of America - like this one - most of the competitive races are in an an u-shape stretching from New York down through Virginia and up to Illinois. No surprise that these rust-belt races tend to be where the manufacturing economy is in the tank; decline breeds discontent.

Right. I have to go to work. Put more questions in the comments and I'll try to answer them best i can. Feel free to debate and challenge these points too, especially the first. As I say, the GOTV issue has big implications for Labour - strategically, and electorally - if we can master it. More anon. James