Oblique Signals

This week, Oregon lefties were dealt a bit of a blow in our effort to see the exit of Republican Senator Gordon Smith--regarded as one of the top five most vulnerable GOP incumbents. John Frohnmayer, a former member of the Bush Administration (National Endowment for the Arts), announced his independent candidacy with a call to impeach President Bush. This doubly sucks, because we not only have a chance to take the seat back, but both Steve Novick and Jeff Merkley, the Dem candidates, are solid lefties.

But as I think about it, there is something interesting in this phenomenon. Frohnmayer, who has lately lent his support more in the Democratic direction, is nevertheless one of those candidates who acts as a kind of barometer for the national mood. In the mid-90s, the political winds blew right, whether it was Clinton ending welfare or the rise of the poisonous Fox network or the general derision directed all things culturally liberal and urban. Dems were a joke, liberalism was dead, markets and Jeses were ascendant (remember the discussion that we lived in a post-nation world?).

Frohnmayer, as the independent, gives voice to the extra-party mood of the electorate. And what he says, loudly, is that the American polity is incompetent and corrupt. His argument will undoubtedly be that the Dems are no more trustworthy. But while that may screw the Dem this year, the message is clear: the era of GOP rule is done.

I have this debate with friends pretty regularly, who argue that since Dubya was the worst candidate in history--theoretically or in reality--ipso facto, the GOP will win in '08 when the same electorate who voted W will have a better Republican on the ballot. If the ascendancy of the GOP brand were still so strong, however, former Bush administration officials wouldn't be running against the GOP in 2008.

Rural Voters Stray the GOP

I just posted this at BlueOregon, and at the same time, we had another guest post on the same topic. So I deleted it. An item for the Zombie Blog, I imagined ...

For those of us who read polls like tea leaves, hoping to discern a pattern that will give us insight into what Americans will do in the next election, the recent Rural America poll sponsored by NPR was a shocker. Generally, reading polls is like reading tea leaves--and about as accurate. You may be able to perceive opinion trends, but how these correlate to what people do in the election booth, that's an iffier prospect. But this latest poll is dramatically at odds with conventional wisdom that it looks like it may actually mean something.

Forty-six percent of the survey respondents indicated they'd vote for an un-named Democratic candidate for president if the election were held today; 43 percent favored a Republican.... The numbers reflect a plunge in Republican support among rural voters. Exit polls from the 2000 presidential election had Republican George Bush beating Democrat Al Gore by 22 per cent in rural areas. In 2004, the actual vote tally showed President Bush outpolling his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, by 19 percent among rural voters.

NPR credits the war in Iraq as the main cause for the shift, and it's clearly a factor; they note that "three-fourths of those surveyed know someone who is serving or has served in the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan." But digging a little deeper, I notice a trend that should be a lot more alarming for Republicans. When compared with average Americans, rural voters feel far less prosperous and see themselves as having far worse prospects in the future.

Pollsters asked respondents to describe whether certain words applied to rural America and then whether it applied to the country as a whole. Seventy percent believed "prosperous" applied to the country, but only 42% thought it applied to rural America. Similarly, 64% thought "increasing opportunity" applied to the country, but only 39% to rural America.

More predictably, they believed rural America was more strongly oriented toward "traditional values" (80%-56%) and "strong family values" (85%-62%) than the country as a whole. These are the elements the GOP has highlighted for decades, but it apparently they are no longer enough to keep rural voters reliably loyal.

There are three statewide races in '08 (attorney general, secretary of state, treasurer), in addition to Gordon Smith's Senate seat. Conventional wisdom holds that it's the swing districts in Clackamas and Washington County where the real race is. But this assumes that Republicans have the rural districts sewn up. Perhaps that assumption isn't accurate.

Historically, Democrats did a lot better in rural America exactly because they focused on economic fairness issues. We don't know whether these results would be mirrored in Oregon. (Western politics tend not to line up like rural/urban politics of the South and NE.) And yet, the economic concerns are surely as dire in rural Oregon. So, could we be at one of those historic moments when traditional political coalitions collapse and regroup? Maybe the polls are telling us something. It's definitely worth keeping an eye on in 2008.