Polls and the 2014 Congressional Elections

Reposted from Epic Journey:

The tea leaves do not look great for Democrats, though there could be some turnover in primaries -- provided strong challengers emerge.

Peter Grier writes at The Christian Science Monitor:

A new Associated Press/GfK poll demonstrates his residual personal appeal. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said Mr. Obama is very or somewhat likeable. That’s an increase of nine percentage points since the end of the partial government shutdown in mid-October.

But there’s a cliché about where nice guys finish. Hint: It’s not first. That’s reflected in AP’s numbers, in that only 31 percent find Obama to be an outstanding or above average president. Forty-two percent rate his presidency as below-average or poor. Twenty-five percent say it's average.

A just-released CBS survey contains numbers that are better for Obama, but only just. It shows Americans almost exactly split on his merits, with 46 percent approving of Obama’s job performance, and 47 percent disapproving.

...

RealClearPolitics political analyst Sean Trende crunches the numbers on this in a long piece that’s attracting attention among experts at the moment. In short, Mr. Trende says there’s a relationship between the level of presidential approval and the vote share of the president’s party in congressional races. Applying Obama’s current numbers to the 2014 electoral landscape produces a mild surprise, says Trende: Right now it’s possible, even likely, that Republicans will win control of the Senate.

Gallup reports:

Consistent with abysmally low congressional approval ratings and widespread dissatisfaction with the nation's system of government, the proportion of registered voters saying Congress deserves re-election has hit an all-time low of 17%. While Congress as an institution is no stranger to voter disenchantment, American voters are usually more charitable in their assessments of their own representatives in the national legislature. But even this has fallen to a new trough.

Typically, results like these have presaged significant turnover in Congress, such as in 1994, 2006, and 2010. So Congress could be headed for a major shake-up in its membership this fall.

However, unlike those three years, when one party controlled both houses of Congress, the beneficiary of the anti-incumbent sentiment is not clear in the current situation, in which one party controls the House and the other, the Senate. Partisans on both sides of the aisle are displeased with Congress. But with so few voters saying they are willing to re-elect their own representative, it suggests that many officeholders will be vulnerable, if not in the general election, then perhaps in the host of competitive primaries soon to take place.

House of Cards

What Grownups Look Like

On Janury 12, 1991, House Speaker Tom Foley (D-WA) and Republican Leader Bob Michel (R-IL) spoke about the impending Gulf War.  Click for video of their remarks:

• Tom Foley
• Bob Michel

 

Lyndon Johnson's Johnson

Robert Caro was recently on the Colbert Report...and ended up discussing President Johnson's Johnson... Click here to see the video of Caro's interview (it gets interesting at 5:07).

How we broke the Senate without breaking any rules

Ezra Klein wrote an interesting piece in The Washington Post highlighting the Senate's tendency to "run on norms rather than rules."

He cites Gregory Koger's new book "Filibustering," which explains "how and why obstruction has been institutionalized in the U.S. Senate over the last fifty years, and how this transformation affects politics and policymaking."

Klein explains, "We’ve broken so many norms in recent years that the Senate of today bears little resemblance to the Senate of 1983, much less the Senate of 1953. But because there was never a formal fight over a rule change, and because the changes came gradually, we didn’t notice. Now it’s too late. The norms that once protected the Senate are largely gone. And we haven’t erected new rules in their place."

The Mighty Wurlitzer

After it was mentioned in class today – and with the discussion of unpublicized acts of courage  - I thought I would share some more information about Professor Elliott, Sr. This comes from Hugh Wilford’s very interesting biography of the CIA and its role in American culture, The Mighty Wurlitzer.

“Kissinger had been put in touch with the Office of Policy Coordination by Harvard professor William Y. Elliott. An all-American tackle at Vanderbilt, poet of the southern Fugitive school, and Roosevelt braintruster, Elliott had done his best academic work, on European political relations, in the 1920s, thereafter living off his reputation as the “grand seigneur” of Harvard’s Government Department and trusted counselor of six U.S. presidents. […] In addition to regularly advising Frank Wisner, Elliott helped the CIA by sitting on the board of the émigré organization AMCOMLIB, overseeing student front groups, and steering promising Harvard graduates toward secret government service.

[…] It was Elliott who provided the future National Security Advisor and Secretary of State [Kissinger] with his principal power base at Harvard – and Launchpad for his rise to global celebrity – in the shape of the university’s International Summer School.”

“The Senate is actually going to vote for a bill.”

The title of this post is a quote from Senator Durban, joking today that C-Span watchers were going to see something "historic" and "precedent-setting" in the easy passage of a bipartisan bill to tax online retailers. According to this New York Times article, the Republicans were split on the Internet sales tax bill, also called the Marketplace Fairness Act, with antitax group against it and Republicans prioritizing "Main Street businesses" in favor of the bill's passage. Since bipartisan legislation is becoming rarer and rarer, as per our class discussion today, we should note such accomplishments when they occur. It will be interesting to see what happens to this bill in the House. I also thought it was notable given our simulation strategies that the New York Times reported: "Its sponsors intentionally kept the bill simple — just 11 pages in length — to ease passage."