Andrew Gelman runs the numbers and comes up with a new reason why Republicans may not care about alienating Hispanic voters by having their members of congress compare NCLR to the Ku Klux Klan. He takes a look at what the 2008 electoral college would look like if we transferred half of John McCain’s Hispanic votes in each state to Barack Obama:

Basically . . . not much happens. Missouri might tip to Obama.

That said, a presidential election is a zero-sum game. Given that McCain lost, in a sense any counterfactual scenario in which he gets fewer votes isn’t very different from a scenario in which he loses. I think the real question about alienating Hispanic voters is what kind of scenario can we envision in which the GOP captures the White House without retaking Florida, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada. Nate Silver has the answer and dubs his map “Operation Gringo.”

Long story short, it can be done, but Republicans would have to start doing much better in the Rust Belt.

Tim Fernholtz makes a great point here that I want to rescue from association with Donald Rumsfeld:

Anyway, I did want to draw attention to this commentary by Christian Brose, which does a good job of laying out what Huntsman’s probable assumptions are about his political future and that of his party. But readers, remember: No one has any idea how the politics of 2012 will shake out, and any political calculation based on current assumptions is just a mistake. Looking at Brose’s conventional wisdom handicapping of the 2012 GOP, I don’t see much to disagree with, but now we have to get into Rumsfeldian unknown unknowns territory. Remember when everyone thought George Allen was a front-runner for the 2008 GOP nomination? Hillary Clinton for the Democrats? The permanent Republican majority of 2004? The never-ending Democratic majority in Congress for most of the latter half of the prior century? You get my point. Whatever Huntsman’s calculus is, I hope it isn’t entirely predicated on the political climate three years from now.

Rather than “unknown unknowns,” I think the issue here is the difference between risk and uncertainty. Risk is the odds you know you face. If a flip a coin and bet on heads, it might turn up tails instead. Uncertainty is the fact that other kinds of chance intrude on the real world. If a flip a coin and bet on heads, someone might come running through the halls and knock me down while I’m in the act of tossing.

Political prognostication tends to fall prey to a failure to adequately appreciate how much uncertainty there is in politics. Nobody knows, ex ante, the odds that any given politicians’ re-election bid will be derailed by a weird blowup at a rally. And less abnormally, political outcomes are heavily shaped by events in the real world. But people aren’t very good at predicting events in the real world. The politics of 2012 will have a lot to do with the state of the global economy in 2012. But while people can make some informed judgments about the likely future, nobody really knows what will be happening and nobody knows what policymakers will be doing in response. Nobody knows what foreign crises will emerge over the next 2-3 years and nobody knows how they’ll be resolved. The future, in other words, is pretty inherently murky.

Via Ed Kilgore, Ed Rogers from the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations makes the point that it’s basically never good to lose a Senator:

Notice to Republicans: Arlen Specter changing parties is good for the Democrats and President Obama and bad for us. If you think otherwise, put down the Ann Coulter book and go get some fresh air. There’s always a delusional element within the GOP that thinks if we lose badly enough the Democrats will gain so much power they will implement all their crazy plans, the people will revolt and purest Republicans will then be swept back into power. Even if this were true, it doesn’t take into account the damage done while our opponents are in control.

I do think it’s always worth considering an alternative. I think it’s very possible that Democrats could “gain so much power” that they implement at least some of their “crazy plans” and that the people, rather than revolting, will just turn their attention to other issues. For example, many Americans feels anxiety about their health insurance status. And the majority of these people vote for Democrats. But if Democrats deliver a health care reform plan that assuages those fears, those voters may start voting more on their hatred of abortion or love of torture and bring Republicans back into power.

You can think of Dwight Eisenhower succeeding as a politician not despite the New Deal, but in large part because the New Deal’s successes eventually built a country that no longer had a strong desire for progressive economic policy. Or how today’s tax cut jihad has trouble attracting votes in part because marginal tax rates are much lower than where they were before Reagan cut them—the issue just doesn’t matter as much to people as it used to.

In his debut column, Ross Douthat laments that Dick Cheney didn’t throw his hat into the 2008 ring, because a Cheney candidacy would have left conservative reformers a stronger hand today:

We tried running the maverick reformer, the argument goes, and look what it got us. What Americans want is real conservatism, not some crypto-liberal imitation.

“Real conservatism,” in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: >a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation. The former vice-president kept his distance from the Bush administration’s attempts at domestic reform, and he had little time for the idealistic, religiously infused side of his boss’s policy agenda. He was for tax cuts at home and pre-emptive warfare overseas; anything else he seemed to disdain as sentimentalism.

This is precisely the sort of conservatism that’s ascendant in today’s much-reduced Republican Party, from the talk radio dials to the party’s grassroots. And a Cheney-for-President campaign would have been an instructive test of its political viability.

I think this is a clever thought experiment, but I doubt that it’s literally true. I think the reality is that governing necessarily involves compromises. But fans don’t like to see the politicians they support compromising. However, as long as the politicians in question are winning it all seems forgivable and you focus on the aspects of the agenda that you support. But when a strategy that entails some compromise leads you to defeat, you necessarily see a backlash from the base which insists that greater purity could have carried the day. I’m fairly certain this impulse would have existed no matter who the Republican standard-bearer had been in 2008.

A further observation would be that while I don’t cherish the thought of conservative purism, one complicating factor for the reform camp is that it’s not true that moderation is always the path to political victory. The Democratic Party’s basic 2008 positioning was considerably to the left of its 2004 positioning on most issues—foreign policy, health care, climate change, civil liberties, you name it—but times had changed and it worked. Meanwhile, though “the base” is always very important in primary elections, the specific electoral system in use in GOP presidential primaries makes it very possible for a candidate who’s not-so-popular with the base to win the nomination.

The noteworthy thing about 2008 is that even though two mavericky candidates (McCain and Huckabee) did well, as did one guy with a moderate record (Mitt Romney), the three of them together came up with about zero interesting, innovative, or sound policy ideas. I think this paucity of real ideas—as opposed to ideas about the need for ideas—is, rather than historical bad luck in not having a Cheney ’08 campaign to point to as a cautionary tale—the bigger problem for reform conservatism.

I think this from Chris Bowers brings a much-needed perspective to the oft-cranky discussions of the Obama administration at Open Left:

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Senate, rather than the Obama administration, is the biggest obstacle to progressive governance right now. If we were dealing with only the House and the Obama administration, there would be a noticeably more progressive government in America. From health care reconciliation, to 100% auction cap and trade, to a larger stimulus package, to bailout reform, to bankruptcy “cramdown” reform, and even to executive compensation, the Senate has moved to the right of both the House and the Obama administration. As such, it is the Senate, and not the Obama administration, against whom we should be directing more of our distrust and pressure.

Just imagine what we would have accomplished in terms of legislation without the Senate over the past few months. The stimulus would have had a hundred billion more in spending, 100% auctions would be on their way, hundreds of billions for new health care would be on its way, bankruptcy “cramdown” would be law, EFCA would be law, executive compensation limits would be far more severe, and on and on and on. However, if we had the Senate but there was no President, the legislative accomplishments would have been pretty much the same.

I think it’s crucially important to be aware of where the responsibility for disappointments lies. There are some important areas where the Obama administration really is the key actor. They are the ones taking positions on executive power that are at odds with what many people were hoping for from a new administration. And if you want to talk about strategy toward Afghanistan, the Obama administration takes full responsibility for whatever good or bad is coming out of that. But on basic domestic policy legislation, the essence of the matter is that the median member of the House of Representatives is more progressive than the median Senator and a lot more progressive than the sixtieth Senator you need to break a filibuster. Mark Pryor and Susan Collins are trying to unleash some torrent of liberal legislation that Obama is holding back.

To the best of my understanding, the main leaders of the environmentalist movement have made a conscious decision that whipping people into a state of alarm and panic about the prospects of catastrophic climate change is not the right way to go. Instead, there’s a preference for focusing on the positive and trying to paint an appealing vision of the clean energy future. And though it’s not something I’ve peered into in great detail, the research in social psychology seems to me to back that conclusion up—it really is better to focus on the positive political message rather than trying to freak people out.

That said, the trajectory we’re on right now is actually really frightening. The weather seems like a banal topic, but if you study history it’s clear that systematic changes in the climate can have utterly catastrophic impacts on human societies. And it’s also clear that right now climate-related issues are having a significant negative impact on human lives. If you want to give yourself a good scare, Stephan Faris’ book Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Arctic, from Darfur to Napa Valley is all about reportage on this sort of thing and the scary near-future we seem to be heading towards.

Reader J.C. emails in:

Your colleagues over at ThinkProgress have a post up talking about Limbaugh’s speech at CPAC. In his address, Limbaugh claims that Dems can’t “can’t accomplish what they want unless they appeal to Reagan voters,” and for years, I would have agreed with him; but it seems to me that younger voters – of whom I am one – are not nearly as enamoured with the cowboy president as our parents were. Public opinion of Reagan is gradually changing, and he seems to get more criticism for his mistakes now than he did during and directly following his presidency. All those calls for his head to be on Rushmore or the $100 bill have quieted as his domestic and economic policies appear more and more problematic.

So here is a question for you: How many of the Reagan voters have come out from under the spell of the Great Communicator? Perhaps more specifically, how many of the people who voted for Reagan are now dead, replaced by Obama voters? Some cold, hard numbers could help fight Limbaugh’s dictums, or at least our perception of the validity of those claims.

I think this nails the basic problem with nostalgia for the Reagan electoral coalition. When Reagan won in 1980, the younger people allowed to vote were born in 1962. In the last election, voters who are at least that old were somewhat more than half the electorate and John McCain did fine with this group:

Specifically, McCain won about 51 percent of the vote among the approximately 53 percent of the electorate that was at least 45 years old. But Obama won a decisive victory among Americans younger than 45—precisely none of whom were part of Ronald Reagan’s original coalition, and few of whom were part of his 1984 re-election campaign. Four years from now, Americans who were too young to vote in 1980 will be an even larger share of the electorate. Obviously, one could link this to other changes in the racial and ethnic makeup of the electorate and specific generational differences in point-of-view on environmental and gay rights issues.

It seems that Republicans are feeling pretty good about themselves these days:

By citing reservations about the economic recovery package, Gregg reinforced widespread GOP criticism about wasteful spending that has less to do with reviving the economy than rewarding Democratic constituencies. And by noting his differing view on the census, Gregg breathed life into Republican charges of a White House power grab over a critical Commerce Department function.

Both issues are part of an emerging GOP case against Obama and the ruling Democratic Party: Strip away the new face, the lofty rhetoric and the promises of post-partisanship and you’ll find the same big-spending party of old, bent on politicizing government to consolidate its hold on power.

Even with the stimulus package on the verge of passing later this week, the unanimous GOP vote against the bill in the House and the near-unanimous opposition in the Senate revealed a Republican Party surprisingly united in direction and in message for perhaps the first time since losing its congressional majority in 2006.

This reminds me of what Eve Fairbanks wrote back on February 9 when she observed that they are “completely obsessed with winning the media “cycle” and getting the sexiest, most provocative quotes on TV, an attitude that yields the kind of overblown dreck RNC chair Michael Steele is now spouting.” She traces the origins of this mentality back to the summer’s “drill baby drill” outbursts “which Republicans cite constantly as the moment that will someday be recognized as the beginning of their rebirth, their A.D. 0: They mounted a lot of antics, their brazenly hyperbolic rhetoric ended up all over the news, and a frightened Pelosi backed down.”

At the time, what Republican optimism about the drilling issue reminded me of was Republican optimism about the immigration issue. At one point, conventional wisdom held that taking a moderately pro-immigrant, pro-immigration line was necessary for a political party hoping to appeal to Hispanic voters. But the conservative base didn’t like that idea and scuttled it. These things happen. But then as more and more congressfolks got swept-up in the far-right maw, they became convinced that this bit of base pandering was going to deliver them to electoral nirvana. Then in November 2006, they took it on the chin.

Then you flash forward to 2008. At one point, conventional wisdom held that offshore drilling was a bad issue for its proponents—the only people who really cared about it were the people whose livelihoods and lifestyles would be imperiled by it—which is why even friend of the oilman George W. Bush never previously campaigned on offshore drilling. But the base wanted to drill offshore. So “drill, baby, drill” it was. And this, too, was supposed to be not just base pandering but brilliant politics. Then in November 2008, they took it on the chin.

Now they’ve convinced themselves that lockstep opposition to economic stimulus is the way to go. And the press, which mostly keeps believing that the right is politically brilliant despite two blown elections in a row, is inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. But it seems hard to figure. Here’s some Gallup numbers:

And more:

I’ll be the first to tell you that none of this will matter very much if the economy is in the toilet in 2012. But the fact remains that what conservatives are doing is moving in lockstep opposition to a popular initiative backed by a popular congress and a Democratic congressional leadership that, while not particular popular, is still more popular than they are. And if you think back to what serious people thought Republicans’ electoral problems were two months ago, it’s very hard to see how complaining that the stimulus bill was insufficiently weighted to corporate and capital gains tax cuts is expanding the party’s appeal to non-whites or to the younger cohort of voters or demonstrating that it’s an effective custodian of the economic interests of lower middle class traditionalists.

I know some progressives who are cheering Sarah Palin on in the view that if the right nominates the most terrible and wingnutty possible leaders, it’ll be easier for progressives to win. And somewhat along those lines, Spencer Ackerman watches the virus of neoconservatism seeking to use Palin as its next host and remarks:

A segment of conservatism still loves Palin, even though it appears that Palin cost McCain support from independents who didn’t think her prepared to take over the presidency. Whether conservatives will embrace Palin when they have policy-heavy and deeply-religious young alternatives like Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal remains to be seen, obviously. But Palin needs a policy platform if she wants to run for president, and the neoconservatives desperately need a political force they can ride back into power. But look: to quote Napoleon, never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.

I think this style of thinking is misguided. Election outcomes are largely determined by the fundamentals, and there’s a large element of chance and uncertainty associated with the whole thing. The best way to become president is to (a) win a major party nomination and (b) hope for luck. In other words, anyone who secures a major party nomination has a decent shot of winning. And over the long haul, the tendency is for power to alternate between the parties. And under the circumstances, one wants both parties to nominate the best possible people. For example, any Republican would have won in 1988. We are fairly lucky, as a country, that we got George H.W. Bush who managed foreign affairs competently and on domestic issues proved willing to reach pragmatic compromises with progressive legislators on some fronts. If instead of Bush we’d gotten someone with more of a Newt Gingrich attitude, the whole situation could have been much, much worse. He could have, like his son, really trashed the country.

Meanwhile, legislatively almost nothing of consequence ever passes on a straight party-line vote even in the current era of heightened partisan alignment. Advancing progressive policy requires some members of the less-progressive party to be open to some elements of the progressive agenda. Indeed, in many ways building that kind of support is the most important part of driving policy.

Kevin Drum asks:

Now, suppose Kerry were running this year and therefore had the following three advantages over his previous self: (a) he was running after eight years of Republican rule instead of four, (b) the economy sucked, and (c) he had a fantastic fundraising advantage over his Republican opponent.

Question 1: how well do you think Kerry would do? Question 2: how well do you think Obama is going to do this year? Question 3: how big is the difference between the answers to Q1 and Q2?

I think (c) shouldn’t be added into the experiment. You can’t treat Obama’s spectacular fundraising success as exogenous to his individual appeal as a candidate or to his campaign’s particular organizational and tactical gambits. Rather, I think the way to specify the hypothetical would be to wonder what would have happened if instead of offering tepid support for the war and running for president in 2004, Kerry had offered mild opposition to the war and ran for president in 2008. I think he’d be doing pretty darn well, though presumably with a slightly different electoral coalition behind him than Obama has.