Month: August 2012

Simon Jackman sees almost no movement since the veep announcement:

Using a tracking model and algorithm I've developed exclusively for Pollster, I estimate that Obama's share of national level voting intentions is virtually unchanged, ticking up from 46.2 percent on Friday, Aug. 10 (the day prior to the Ryan announcement) to 46.3 percent today, a mere 0.1 percentage point increase … Romney's numbers are off by the same amount, falling from 45.1 percent on Friday August 10 to 45 percent today.

But surprisingly, Wisconsin may be back in play. Two new polls show a real shift since the native son's arrival on the GOP ticket. Here's the least-smoothed latest polling graph:

So the candidate designed to nationalize the election is now a classic Electoral College asset. Nationally, the Romney campaign may regret picking someone who believes a zygote created by a rape has the full standing of a citizen and who co-sponsored a bill with Akin that qualified the word "rape" with the word "forcible". 

The latest poll shows both a very close race and Romney beating Obama among women voters. At least, that was the case before the GOP disappeared down the "defining rape" rabbit-hole:

The [August 12] poll also shows that Romney leads Obama among female voters, 46 percent to 43 percent. But 29 percent of those women said that they have some reservations about their choice. The numbers suggest that Obama could put Missouri back into play by winning over the support of women who are on the fence about Romney — incidentally, the same group of voters who are most likely to be insulted by Akin's ignorant "rape" comments.

The above graph has been made more sensitive to reveal the latest shift. I'd dismiss it as an outlier but it's the second poll in a row to show a tied race. Missouri can't be a serious toss-up, can it? If so, Romney's electoral college hill just became a little steeper.

Shauna Prewitt shares her story:

I am an attorney and the busy single mother of an amazing second grader. My rape is responsible for both of these roles. You see, I enrolled at Georgetown Law School after learning, firsthand, that pregnancy from rape creates unimaginable obstacles for women who decide to raise the children they conceive through rape. In the vast majority of states, a rapist has the same custody and visitation rights to a child born through his crime as other fathers enjoy. In 2010, a paper I wrote on this topic was published by the Georgetown Law Journal, and I continue to travel throughout the country speaking on this issue. 

I believe that the way we as a society, and especially legislators, speak about rape — often wrongly and without a sound, reasoned basis — restricts our ability to pass laws offering meaningful protections.

Hanna Rosin applauds her bravery:

One worry I had upon reading Prewitt’s letter is that Akin and other conservatives will seize it as fodder for the pro-life position. See, what matters is the precious life that resulted from this! But again, that is not at all Prewitt’s point. What she’s saying is, things are complicated. There is no predictable magic. One can feel rage and shame and joy about the same fact. That’s what it means to really understand "life."

The Romney campaign puts out yet another attack falsely claiming that Obama is gutting welfare reform, this time using the biography of a Hispanic man:

It's worth noting that these ads continue to rely on right-wing sources such as the Heritage Foundation and the National Review, in all their epistemic closure. Meanwhile, the DNC has two new web ads out today, one hitting Romney on his student loan policies and the other bringing up the tax return issue again – seen here:

In outside spending news, two pro-Dem groups, Super PAC Majority PAC and its "non-profit" extension, Patriot Majority USA, have dropped $1.6 million into four states attacking GOP Senate candidates. Even more interesting, however, is that Patriot Majority USA is also running $500K worth of ads that specifically target the Koch brothers:

Lastly, Senate candidate Tim Kaine (D-VA) is out with his first TV ad this cycle, the start of a $4.5 million ad campaign:

By the way, the apology ad from Todd Akin that we ran this morning now has $150K behind it through August 27th.

Ad War archive here.

Paul Tough examines it. He emphasizes that Obama moved aggressively to support poor families as the financial crisis took hold:

If you do count food stamps and other noncash aid, the poverty rate has, according to some calculations, not gone up much at all during the Obama administration, during the worst economic crisis in 70 years. That is a remarkable accomplishment. When I asked William Julius Wilson last month for his thoughts on the current administration’s antipoverty efforts, he said that Obama had “done more for lower-income Americans than any president since Lyndon Baines Johnson.”

Jared Bernstein pushes back on Tough's framing:

I found it interesting that Tough cites William J Wilson in numerous places but pays too short shrift to one of Wilson’s most prominent conclusions: the dwindling employment and earnings opportunities of the historical marriage partners of many single moms’ whose families are stuck in deep poverty. The loss of family-wage jobs to non-college educated men—and not just minority men—was a well-documented problem even when Wilson wrote his influential treatise on urban poverty—The Truly Disadvantaged—in the 1980s, and it was a core theme of the book.

Examining the sectors that defied cyclical downturns during the last two decades, Derek Thompson makes the case for the relative importance of local jobs:

About half of the jobs created between 1990 and 2008 (before our current downturn) were created in education, health care, and government. What do those sectors have in common? They're all local. You can't send them to Korea.

Chait observes that "the world of popular culture increasingly reflects a shared reality in which the Republican Party is either absent or anathema":

Liberals like to believe that our strength derives solely from the natural concordance of the people, that we represent what most Americans believe, or would believe if not for the distorting rightward pull of Fox News and the Koch brothers and the rest. Conservatives surely do benefit from these outposts of power, and most would rather indulge their own populist fantasies than admit it. But they do have a point about one thing: We liberals owe not a small measure of our success to the propaganda campaign of a tiny, disproportionately influential cultural elite.

Waldman adds:

A media effect that occurs over a long period of time and interacts with social influences and other inputs is extremely difficult to tease out with the tools social science researchers have available to them. That isn't to say communication researchers aren't always trying; for instance, there's a long line of research on what's called "cultivation," which says that over time television in particular shapes our view of how the world works. It isn't without its critics, but few doubt the basic premise that what we watch can influence what we think.

Alyssa's push back:

[Chait] ignores one of the strangest disjuncts between Hollywood’s stated and practiced values, and one the deepest drivers of the shallowness of Hollywood liberalism: the striking illiberalism of the industry’s hiring practices. The Hollywood liberals who shape the worldviews Chait discusses are largely white men, and the actual patterns of employment in the industry are the kind of nightmare stories liberals like to tell about what American life would look like under conservative rule. 

Not every SNL alum is a maven of impressions:

(Hat tip: Devour)

Romney would get a massive tax cut:

Matthew O'Brien of The Atlantic calculated last week that under Ryan's proposals Romney would have paid not 13.9 percent but .82 percent, or just $177,000 or so on $21 million earned. In fairness, I should note that the Ryan proposal isn't the same thing as the Romney proposal–the Ryan plan eliminates all taxes on capital gains (the main source of Romney's income), while Romney's position is to continue to tax rich peoples' capital gains, albeit at a lower rate than presently. So Romney under Romney's plan would pay more, but less than 13.9.

It was fairly recent:

Here’s a little perspective: In 1939, gas cost 10 cents a gallon at the pump. A movie ticket set you back 20 cents. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the year’s bestselling hardcover book, was $2.75. For a nation suffering 20 percent unemployment, books were an impossible expense.

Robert de Graff's "Pocket Books" changed all that:

[De Graff] knew that printing costs were high because volumes were low—an average hardcover print run of 10,000 might cost 40 cents per copy. With only 500 bookstores in the U.S., most located in major cities, low demand was baked into the equation. … So de Graff devised a plan to get his books into places where books weren’t traditionally sold. His twist? Using magazine distributors to place Pocket Books in newsstands, subway stations, drugstores, and other outlets to reach the underserved suburban and rural populace.

It worked: after a week, Pocket Books sold out its initial 100,000 copy run – and democratized reading forever.

(Image by Cara Barer via My Modern Met)