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Re(2): Dear Markus
I wish I knew where to find all those cool graphs. Then I might actually stand a chance in these arguments ;)
I think my concerns are best classified as "frustrations" rather than "panic," and upon further reflection I think they lie mostly in my third point.
I don't want Obama to win just by exciting and registering more liberal voters. Don't get me wrong: I think it's amazing that this election is breaking records and the Obama campaign is working so hard to register more people and get them involved; it's a great step forward for this country, and I'm proud to have joined them in registering voters this summer.
But it would be an even bigger step forward if that excitement came coupled with an overwhelming mandate from the center of the electorate for Obama and the Democrats. Maybe I'm too idealistic, but in my mind the Obama campaign in the primaries billed itself as capable of building a broad coalition across the political spectrum, and from the recent numbers I just don't see that happening.
Without that coalition, this movement is just a one-time thing. Republican Senators up for re-election in 2010 and beyond are not going to be scared into voting for health care or alternative energy if they know that the Democrats' win in 2008 came merely from the insurgence of marginal voters who were only inspired by one man and who are not likely to vote again.
We need to be convincing the center of the electorate that, on the major issues (the economy and health care especially) the Democrats are better. Certainly given the way the campaign has gone so far, we should be well on our way to doing that. My disappointment with the state of the race lies in the fact that as yet, we have not.
Maybe it's too early, and all of this will settle itself in the fall. But the only way to make true progress is to move the center of the country left, and I'll judge Obama's overall success on his ability to accomplish that.
The thing is that there is
The thing is that there is no "center of the electorate". It's an illusion. Everyone in this country is either a partisan, or an unengaged marginal voter (most of whom have no ideology whatsoever) -- that's just a statistical fact. I think when Obama talks about coalition-building, he's talking about a mixture of engaging huge numbers of new voters, and maybe peeling off a few disaffected or marginal Republicans in the process; sort of the inverse of "Reagan Democrats," which is another tiny phenomenon that got blown out of proportion.
For that matter, let's look at the election of 1980, which was the last presidential race that really redefined political coalitions in this country -- Obama is often compared to Reagan in that regard. Well, check out the numbers: Reagan won with a whole 50.7% of the vote, to Carter's 41% (and 7% for John Anderson). Half the country. That's it -- Obama's current polling levels, even if you split undecideds evenly and don't give him any turnout boost, would put him up near that level on election day.
And winning over members of the opposing party? Well, among self-identified Democrats, Reagan '80 pulled in 26% -- just a four-point improvement over the performance of the decidedly non-transformative Ford '76 campaign. Among self-identified liberals, there was no relevant difference (1%) in Reagan's and Ford's performances.
The way Reagan won is that he brought new people to the polls, people who wouldn't previously have called themselves Republicans or maybe even conservatives, and turned them into engaged Republican voters. They didn't come from the "center", just the outside. And that's how he then, over the following 20 years, erased Democrats' century-old partisan advantage and turned "liberal" into a dirty word. It's by just the same method, in the inverse of course, that Obama can (and likely will) redefine our politics.
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I wouldn't dismiss out of
I wouldn't dismiss out of hand the possibility that the group of new voters comes from the center of the electorate. It seems somewhat improbable to me that, if the Democrats picked a candidate less exciting than Obama, there would be a whole bunch of non-voters sitting on the left side of the political spectrum, going, "Man, John McCain really sucks, but since nobody's tried to register me, I guess I'm not gonna vote!" In my totally unrepresentative and anecdotal experience, a lot of the people who are getting excited about Obama's candidacy would otherwise be in play for the Republicans. (Sadly, I have no numbers to back this up, but maybe Markus can help me out.) In short, I'd be very surprised if we were just registering liberals - I don't think you can get the kind of turnout and enthusiasm that Obama has attracted without building precisely the coalition that you (and I) are hoping for.