Sunday opinion.
Dan Balz:
Who is ready to proselytize on behalf of candidates over the next few weeks? Just 22 percent of Democrats say they are very likely to do so, compared with 30 percent of Republicans, with liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans more committed. Topping them all are tea party supporters, 39 percent of whom say they'll very likely make the effort to persuade others. And among strong tea party supporters, 49 percent say they're ready to do so.
Dan Balz again:
A new study by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University shows that most Americans who say they want more limited government also call Social Security and Medicare "very important." They want Washington to be involved in schools and to help reduce poverty. Nearly half want the government to maintain a role in regulating health care.
Michael Shear:
Surveys suggest that the Republican case has made headway with the American public. By large margins, a healthy majority of people say the country is headed on the wrong track.
But Mr. Plouffe said he remained optimistic that the Republicans had made as much traction as they were likely to make with that argument. In a nutshell, he said that the conservative wave had peaked a month before Election Day.
"They are going to have very good turnout," Mr. Plouffe predicted. But he said: "I don’t see that getting a lot better for them. The point is, I don’t see another surge here."
Michael Shear again:
Candidates rarely want to draw attention to the commercials made on behalf of their opponents. But this year’s West Virginia Senate race is an exception.
Joe Manchin, the state’s Democratic governor and candidate for Senate, has condemned an ad made to benefit his Republican opponent, businessman John Raese, in which the production company said it was looking for "hicky" actors to portray real West Virginia voters.
The controversy over the ad has played right into the hands of Mr. Manchin, who had already been trying to portray Mr. Raese as a rich outsider whose family lives in Florida.
Via Tim Fernholz, Simon Rosenberg:
I can't help but notice in the last couple of weeks you've been a bit prescient?
Or a bit aggressive, I'm not sure...
... about how the generic ballot is tightening. You think the Republicans peaked too early. How do you think they missed the mark?
We have to remember this has been a remarkably volatile and unpredictable election cycle, so people shouldn't be surprised that this remarkable and unpredictable election cycle had one more unpredictable and volatile trick left up its sleeve.
Democrats, in order to improve their position, needed to reclaim voters they already had, which is a lot easier than reclaiming voters that have never been with you. They had this large pool of people that had voted for them in both '06 and '08. It wasn't just Obama's 53 [percent in 2008]; the Democrats got 52 percent in 2006, right? It was our advocacy that if the Democrats spent a lot of money speaking to their base and re-engaging their core supporters, and the president drove this very stark contrast and reminded the country that the Republicans had screwed everything up and the Democrats had done a pretty good job at putting things back together, that there was a chance to substantially improve their numbers.
You've got trend lines where one party is dropping and one party is gaining -- it's indisputable at this point. If you're a Republican right now, and you look at this environment, the party that's dropping a month out usually loses. If you're a candidate or a political party in a close election and you're dropping a month out, and the other guy's rising, you usually lose, because those dynamics are very hard to adjust.
Frank Rich:
Just as "The Social Network" hit the multiplexes, Malcolm Gladwell took to The New Yorker with a stinging takedown of social networks as vehicles for meaningful political and social action. He calculated that the nearly 1.3 million members of the Facebook page for the Save Darfur Coalition have donated an average of 9 cents each to their cause. He mocked American journalists’ glorification of Twitter’s supposedly pivotal role during last year’s short-lived uprising in Iran, suggesting that the rebels’ celebrated Twitter feeds — written in English, not Farsi — did more to titillate blogging technophiles in the West than to aid Iranians in their struggle against totalitarian rulers.
