Poll: Every midterm goodbye ain’t gone

Voters generally don’t turn out in big numbers for the midterm races, especially black and minority voters. For the conservatives and for many political analysts and professional pol-watchers, that’s been not so much a talking point of the 2010 campaign debate as holy writ. The Republicans and their proxies with blogs and microphones in the wider world, have been relying on that historically proven assumption, counting on it as they ramp up their strategies for retaking the Congress in November.

They may want to retool their efforts: A newly released poll suggests — convincingly — that among those black and minority voters, past performance in the midterm part of the election cycle need not be a guarantee of future results.

According to the poll conducted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, about two-thirds of black adults in four states with Senate races in the fall say they’re watching the political scene, and monitoring analysis about the fall elections, and between 74 percent and 80 percent said they’re very likely to go to the polls in November.

The nonpartisan D.C.-based organization, which monitors minority participation in matters of public policy, surveyed 500 black people in Missouri, Indiana, Arkansas and South Carolina. Despite the relatively small sample, its methodology makes sense, given recent events and established political history.

“In many competitive congressional districts, blacks make up a quarter of the electorate, and they vote overwhelmingly for Democrats,” the Associated Press reported Tuesday. “Their surge during President Obama's 2008 victory is widely credited with helping sweep many Democrats into office who might have otherwise lost.”

Dr. David Bositis, a Center researcher and the director of the poll, told The AP that, while the turnout would certainly be lower than poll estimates, the results reflect a continued support for President Obama.

“I think the Obama election and the fact that there is an African-American president is something of a game-changer,” he told AP. “African-Americans feel like they have a real investment in President Obama ... I think it's a major motivating factor.”

“A real investment”? Big time. From the poll: “Nearly all respondents feel favorably toward President Obama. In each of the states surveyed, between 94 and 95 percent of black adults said their feelings toward him were favorable. There has been no public figure in the past 20 years who has elicited such favorable feelings from African Americans. “

Sensibly, black Americans are focused on the economy and health-care reform; the poll found those were the top-tier concerns on the minds of black voters.

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Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University who specializes in African-American politics, had doubts about the poll’s turnout forecast. “One of the things you have to realize with polls is that if you ask people if they're going to vote, people can misrepresent themselves,” she told AP. “Nobody wants to look like a civic deadbeat.”

That’s true enough — and no more or less true today than it was in November 2008, when African Americans turned out in record numbers to elect Barack Obama president. And with health-care reform and jobs hanging in the balance, there’s at least as much at stake this election as the last one. Black Americans got that when the survey was conducted last year, between Nov. 11 and Dec. 1. They certainly understand it better today.

And black and minority voters are more plugged in today than they were in 2008, not less. A late-February survey from the Center found that black Americans and Latinos with college degrees and earning more than $50,000 a year are adopting broadband faster than any other cohorts of the population. About 94 percent of this African American group and 98 percent of the Hispanic group have broadband.

Those voters are more plugged in, they’re more attuned to life and culture, they’re more sophisticated, and more likely to avail themselves of the levers of our democracy. Simply put: they’re better citizens now than they were before, and with as much on the table as is on the table now, there’s no reason on earth to think they’ll walk away from the closest thing to full political empowerment they’ve enjoyed.

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The takeaway? Among other things, the Joint Center poll means that the GOP needs to resist the temptation to go native & go negative, two of the defining characteristics of contemporary Republican strategy.

They need to get focused on enhancing their own message, refining what the GOP has to offer the American people – instead of using the history of midterm voting patterns as the compass heading for its political direction. Past ain’t always prologue.

The Joint Center poll findings also mean that, contrary to some of the more downbeat assessments of Obama’s prospects coming from the punditburo, the president still enjoys the inaugural benefits from black American voters.

It’s not just a honeymoon anymore; almost fourteen months in, there’s a real marriage going on now, with highs and lows. And contrary to what the pundits think and what the conservatives wish, black Americans aren’t really having second thoughts.

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Image credits: Logo and chart: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. President Obama: Still from NBC News.

Drinking the Kool-Aid Tea

In what may be the most egregious kowtow of a major political party to a political nonentity in at least recent American history, Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, met on Tuesday with members of Tea Party WDC, maybe the most formally established manifestation of the series of ad hoc conservative protesters and extremist malcontents that have rallied under the Tea Party banner for nearly a year.

Steele reportedly huddled with about 50 Tea Party leaders for more than four hours, discussing their angles of attack on the Obama White House, what Republicans and Tea Partiers have in common, and what they don’t have in common, in the runup to the 2010 midterms.

“The chairman believes it is extremely important to listen to this significant grassroots movement and work to find common ground in order to elect officials that will protect these principles,” RNC spokesperson Katie Wright said Tuesday to The Washington Post, offering an olive branch the size of a tree to the cohort of American conservatives that could, maybe, be a force in November.

We may be months away from a political scenario once thought improbable but more and more likely all the time, a variation on the storyline of “King of Hearts,” the 1966 Philipe de Broca film that posits what happens when the inmates run the asylum, and the town it’s located in.

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The devil and the details are inseparable. Even as the Tea Party makes its mainstream move (a unifying flag-bedecked logo, spokesmen with titles), it’s forced to come to grips with issues that have complicated its existence from the jump.

Credibility has been a problem for the Tea Party set. To this point, the TP’s followers have been characterized by a noisy intolerance that traffics in the symbols of don’t-tread-on-me populism married to silly exercises of self-identification (Tea Party members walked around last April wearing tea bags) and virulent intolerance (others carried signs that equated President Obama with Hitler).

To now, it’s been an orange-pekoe protest whose buffoonery contained just enough extremist rhetoric to make it something to take at least semi-seriously. But it’s hardly enough to suggest it could be a political game-changer for the broad cross-section of Americans who vote.

Another problem for the Tea Party (really, stemming from the first one) has to do with the fraud of its genesis. When the first large-scale Tea Party protests began last April 15, in demonstrations from Oak Harbor, Wash., to Sag Harbor, N.Y., they were heralded as the bellwether of a new grassroots, bottom-up movement in America.

The facts were something else again: A parade of K Street lobbyists and government insiders like former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich were instrumental in sparking and bankrolling the protests; and Fox News, the conservatives’ media arm, broadcast the Tea Bag Day rallies from various places around the country.

It’s impossible to believe that the fingerprints of such conservative powers could have disappeared from the movement in less than a year. The populist thrust of this movement was blunted from the start, and still is, by the involvement of the same government and corporate insiders the movement was meant to protest against in the first place.

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What’s the Tea Party’s reason for being? From the start, most people couldn’t see much difference between the bullet-point credo of the Tea Partiers and that of the Republicans. Even today, Americans still can’t find daylight between their mutual positions. The GOP and the Tea Partiers are in lock step on major issues like tax cuts, smaller government and the disturbingly imprecise notion of “returning to American values."

With no substantive differences in their basic philosophy, then, the TP movement is faced with a question: What can it hope to do in Washington that the GOP can’t do with more resources, more lobbyists, more like-minded partisans already on Capitol Hill? Carving out a distinction when there’s not much distinction is a huge challenge if you define yourself as an independent grassroots political insurgency — like the Tea Partiers do.

That’s what the Tea Partiers have tried to do: articulate distinctions between themselves and the Republicans; they’re doing what they can to make their claim of independence stick. “We're not a function of the Republican party,” one D.C. Tea Party member said last April, and said for a damn good reason. Implicit in that statement is an inescapable fact: If the Tea Party finds common cause with the Republicans, the Tea Party has absolutely no reason to exist.