Via ctblogger, here's Charles Gibson deservedly getting booed for his crappy job moderating last night's Democratic debate.

When thinking about building public support for withdrawal from Iraq, voters fall into three groups: 1) people who favor withdrawal, 2) people who oppose or are ambivalent about withdrawal, but have negative feelings about the war, and 3) people who oppose withdrawal, and have positive feelings about the war. Many voters think the war is going poorly or dislike the war, but aren't convinced that withdrawal is the right solution. Consequently, we've seen many Democratic leaders equivocate on their opposition to the war.

Using the Pew July 2007 Political Survey data, we can view the proportion of the public that falls into each group:

One way to intensify pressure on elected officials to push for a speedy withdrawal is by increasing public support for withdrawal. We have the 54% who support withdrawal on our side, and will have the most difficult time convincing the 27% who both oppose withdrawal and believe that the war is going well (this group is mostly self-identified Republicans). So, in order to build public support for withdrawal, we need to persuade the 19% who currently oppose withdrawal but think the war is going poorly.

This approach raises a couple questions. If these 19% think the war is going poorly, which should imply that the United States isn't currently achieving its political objectives, why don't they want to withdraw? How can we convince this group to support withdrawal? Although we can't use this data to determine what causes people to "move" in favor of withdrawal, here's what I think is going on:

This group's reluctance to support withdrawal may be because their dislike for the war is complicated by Bush's rationales for staying in Iraq: that withdrawal would cause a civil war that would draw the entire region into conflict, and that withdrawal would make Iraq an Al Qaeda stronghold. These assumptions are often repeated uncritically in the media and are probably salient considerations for many people when they form their position on withdrawal.

Today, I had the opportunity to see a presentation by Cliff Schecter on how to handle media appearances against conservative commentators. Cliff showed some examples of media appearances that are particularly instructive (and entertaining). In each video, the progressive kept their cool, stayed on the attack, displayed a superior knowledge of the facts, and used humor to convey how ridiculous the other side's argument was. Enjoy:

Here's what the Congressional Democratic "leadership" is enabling by allowing retroactive immunity to pass:

The FBI acknowledged Wednesday it improperly accessed Americans' telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic in 2006, the fourth straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at tracking terrorists and spies.

…

it was caused, in part, by banks, telecommunication companies and other private businesses giving the FBI more personal client data than was requested. (emphasis added)

Aside from the horrifying precedent this creates (and it's clear that the Democratic leadership doesn't care about that), I don't think it makes strategic sense to capitulate on this.

There isn't a lot of opinion data in the public domain on FISA and virtually nothing on retroactive immunity specifically. My sense is that there's little awareness among the public about retroactive immunity, and that most people lack meaningful opinions on FISA. However, we know that when probed after being given context for the issue, most people would oppose retroactive immunity. There is clearly room to define the public's attitudes here.

People are, unfortunately, usually not very concerned about their own privacy. Still, there's some indication that people react strongly against entities that give out their personal information without their permission. If Democrats activate these feelings, they can turn the fight against retroactive immunity into a winning issue.

In the absence of hard data, the strong emotional reaction that people felt toward the initial version of the Facebook "News Feed" is a good case study of this dynamic. For those who don't know/remember, Facebook's first version of their news feed aggregated users' activities on the site and broadcast them to their friends. Although this didn't change anything about how user data was collected or stored, it did fundamentally change the way the data was accessed. People were outraged at the way their behavior was being broadcast, and opposition culminated in negative media attention and a protest group numbering almost 700,000 members. Facebook finally caved into user demands and built more nuanced privacy settings into the News Feed.

Let's think about what happened as it relates to individual notions of privacy. Users were perfectly happy to give away their personal information for Facebook to use as they saw fit. It's only when people lost control of how their data was being distributed, and were conscious that they lost control of this process, that the site raised a gut level red flag.

Given that the telecom companies are flagrantly violating the privacy of their customers, that the public is open to adopting our attitudes on retroactive immunity, and that people get upset when they are conscious that their own privacy is being violated by trusted external entities, an argument against retroactive immunity could be a compelling message to voters.

Yes, there are going to be 30 second campaign commercials attacking Congressional Democrats who stand up on this issue for being godless terrorist lovers. Still, there's an opportunity here to define the framework for this discussion, instead of running scared from ads that are going to be run against us anyway. We've seen that pro-civil liberties candidates can win tough races centered around national security. The "leadership" needs to think hard about finding a more effective way to deal with this issue, instead of continuing to capitulate while behaving in bad faith with activists.

Joe Trippi today:

In 1976 and 1980 we had fights that went to the convention. In 1976 it was Ford and Reagan fighting it out and Jimmy Carter became president. In 1980 it was Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter and Reagan became president. History says you don't want to campaign into the convention, even if McCain will be carrying George Bush's baggage.

J-Ro two days ago:

Since 1972, when a party has let their primary go on until the convention, they have lost 100% of the time. Even when the primary was relatively open on both sides with no incumbent running - as it 1976 and 1988 - the party that let their fight go on until the convention lost.

(originally posted at nirmalm.com)

A good friend e-mailed me a blog post citing an op-ed that claims that "Democratic candidates who appear on “The Report” receive 44% more money than those who do not in the first month after their appearance."

It might be true that appearing on Colbert increases candidate visibility which ultimately increases fundraising. The problem with making that claim is that the group of candidates who go on the show are probably very different from the group of candidates who don't go on the show. The group of candidates who agreed to go on the show might have personality traits that make them better fundraisers. Or they might have been in the middle of a push for publicity that included an appearance on the show. Or they could just have more savvy or daring communications staff than candidates who didn't go on the show.

Fowler did control for party, incumbency, and so on, but that doesn't reflect the underlying behavioral differences in candidates and campaigns that might cause some to go on the show and others to not. The only way the DCCC could really test the "Colbert Bump" would be to randomly select a group of Democratic candidates, make half of them go on the show, and make half of them refuse to go on the show. I doubt that'll be happening anytime soon.

Nirmal is an activist from Michigan who has worked with a variety of progressive organizations and campaigns. His writing can be found at nirmalm.com

(originally posted at nirmalm.com)

We've often heard the argument that because Democratic primary participation is disproportionately higher in a particular state, Democrats stand a chance of performing better in that state in the general election. After Alex Thurston made this argument about the upcoming Oklahoma Senate race, I decided to find out if this claim is actually true.

To validate this argument, we want to compare the percentage Democratic primary turnout (out of the total primary turnout) to the performance of the Democratic presidential candidate in the general election for each state. To account for crossover voters, it makes sense to only consider state primaries that were competitive on both sides. For simplicity's sake I decided to look at the 2000 election, but the 1988 election would work as well. Data and full details on how I selected the states here.

Continued from part 1

(cross posted at nirmalm.com)

Broadly, there are two dimensions of the "free trade" argument: economic and moral. The economic argument boils down to whether free trade is good for the domestic economy or not. The moral argument is, of course, about whether the effects of free trade policy are desirable from a moral standpoint.

Individual attitudes on free trade based on moral and economic arguments are further complicated by differing definitions of what "free trade" is, and perceptions of how free trade affects that individual person's life. The survey questions unfortunately don't fit into this framework of looking at the free trade debate, but we can keep it in mind when examining the data.

Here are the responses to each attitude question vs. the overall feeling about free trade:

(originally posted at nirmalm.com)

The results of the exit polls tell us about the impact that "crossover" voters had on the Republican primary, and give us a hint about what the Democratic race might have been like had the other candidates not been taken off the ballot. Check below the fold for a few quick notes.

Crossovers

According to the exits, the Republican primary vote consisted of 7% Democrats, 25% Independents, and 68% Republicans. Some of the pundits sounded surprised that a smaller proportion of Democrats and Independents voted in this primary, as opposed to the 2000 Republican primary where self-identified Republicans were less than 50% of the voters.

It shouldn't be that surprising. In 2000, we already had a presumptive nominee on the Democratic side. This time around, when faced with choosing a ballot, most of the party faithful were going to pick Democratic (out of habit, party loyalty, or pro/anti Hillary). That diminishes the pool of "very engaged" voters who would cross over to the Republican primary. Even though our race wasn't particularly exciting or meaningful, it was still a Democratic election.

So what impact did these crossovers have on the Republican primary? According to the exits, McCain took the plurality of Democrats (41%) and Independents (35%) who voted in the Republican primary, but didn't pick up nearly enough votes among those groups to close the gap between he and Romney among conservatives.

Doing some simple spreadsheet math (row percentages to column percentages), we can approximate the support that each candidate received by party:

McCain and Ron Paul greatly benefited from the presence of self-identified Independents (and to a lesser extent Democrats), whereas Romney, Huckabee, and Thompson did not.

Clearly, Kos' effort to get Democrats to propel Romney to victory didn't work. It was still a cool idea, though.

(originally posted at nirmalm.com)

There is a lot of uncertainty about the impact of John Edwards' presence in the race. We often hear the argument that if it weren't for Edwards, Obama or Clinton would be doing better. Yesterday, Matt Stoller discussed Edwards' role in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination as a second tier candidate.

So who would win the Edwards supporters if he dropped out? We can't say for sure, because we don't know who among his supporters will opt to not vote instead of choosing another candidate. Still, there are a couple pieces of information that shed light on this situation.