Who are the swing votes?

[jducoeur]

Here's a political question, looking for opinions.

What with the Supreme Court nomination shaping up to be the greatest political debacle of our time, I'm thinking about the most useful way to proceed -- where my voice would most likely be *useful*. I look at mega-petitions like MoveOn and such, and I find myself pretty skeptical that anyone's going to really pay much attention to them. Indeed, I'm not even sure that they're entirely productive, because I expect them to push a line nearly as intransigent as the neocons.

What I *personally* want to see is a relative moderate on the bench. In this case, the best plausible outcome is getting someone who is fairly open, forthright and thoughtful -- conservative but not knee-jerk conservative. Frankly, someone like Justice O'Connor herself. What I do *not* want is to wind up with either a tool of the religious right, or a cipher. (Who would probably be such a tool in reality.)

So the question is: who would be optimal to write to? Say I want to send semi-personalized letters (in my own words, rather than pure machine-driven petitions) to ten Senators. Which ones should they be? The hard-right ones would be entirely useless, I believe, and the hard-left ones nearly as much so -- both of those sides are going to settle into open warfare, and are unlikely to give ground.

Rather, I'm looking for the swing votes, who might be convinced to be reasonable. I want the moderate Republicans to withhold support (or, at least, not actively fight for) the more ideological nominees. And I want the moderate Democrats to keep a stiff spine against those ideologues, while seeking genuine compromise candidates to push for. A filibuster is likely to be necessary, but it's important to present viable alternatives while doing so. There is no chance of getting someone *less* conservative than O'Connor, but a disciplined campaign might be able to get someone similar to her -- a genuine swing vote.

And to both sides, I think I want to ask for patience and stamina. This is going to be brutal and bruising, and the first few rounds are either going to stalemate, or the conservatives are going to have to pull out the anti-filibuster nuke again. Working past that is going to take a lot of patience. This is all about round three, when the public has lost its patience with both sides and compromise is strictly necessary.

Yes, it may be rosy-eyed to even imagine a decent outcome of this mess. But better to hypothesize a possible good outcome and do my own tiny statistical part towards it, rather than throw up my hands and give up...

Comments

[jducoeur]

Quite possibly, but there is little benefit to simply giving up. And frankly, I think you're too blithe in assuming that the Republicans in the Senate are such a simple block.

What's going to happen? Bush will nominate a hardcore right-winger. That nomination will be filibustered into the ground. Then things get interesting, because the Senate majority has a choice: they drop the anti-filibuster nuke (which many of them don't want to do), or they fall back and begin to negotiate.

Frankly, I don't think that the money decision is so simple, nor do I think *they* think it's so simple. You keep saying that it's black and white, and that we're fucked, yet the polls keep shifting. And the Senators are paying a *lot* of attention to those polls. Their loyalty to a President whose ratings are in the toilet are not the same as they were a year ago when those ratings were stratospheric. Their calculations are all about what the voters will think in another year, and at this point riding on the President's coattails isn't looking like nearly such a good bet any more.

Nor are the election purse-strings nearly so simple. Bush has held that tightly for precisely one reason: he was soaring in the polls. But as soon as that weakens, the party's collective equations change. At that point, senior Senators start to have a *lot* of power. Hell, all sitting Senators hold huge power. Do you really believe that the Party is going to fail to support their incumbents? Rubbish. Just possibly, factions in the party *might* try to support a challenger in the primary against one or two junior Senators, to make an example. That's the most that's realistically going to happen. The Party's highest priority is holding power, and they're mostly not stupid enough to cut their own collective throat by feeding on their own.

Yes, there's a danger in opposing Bush: the religious right would punish apostates. But again, that's a calculation. Being a *moderate* Republican is going to play very well in much of the country in the next election; being viewed as an extremist is going to get dangerous. Say an ideologue does get into the Court. Say that a major abortion case comes before it quickly. (Which the right wing is itching to do.) Do you want to be painted as a Senator who voted against Roe v. Wade? I'd bet that most of them are completely dreading that prospect. Satisfying the religious right this time is a fine way to win the battle but lose the war electorally, and a good bunch of Senators have to be thinking about that carefully.

Will Bush win? Quite possibly: he holds a strong hand. *If* he plays this smart, and nominates a cipher in the second round, he probably will win. But his track record of "smart" has been weakening lately, and it takes relatively few defections to weaken his position. And the moderates have a lot of incentive to defect. I'm actually quite curious to see how this plays out. And it's worth adding to the relatively small pile of mail that is actually centrist, saying essentially, "Don't be stupid"...

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

I'm not so blithe, actually. There have been several object lessons created for the education of the electable - consider one no further away than Rhode Island and Lincoln Chaffee. (You did notice what they've been doing to Chaffee, right? If you had, you'd realize that your list of impossibles above is much shorter than you say it is.)

Look at the publicly released "short list", a couple of extremist and insane stalking horses, and Gonzalez. "Look, honey, he's the lesser of the evils".

Yes, the polls are what they are - and Bush doesn't have to be re-elected. There is a whole year between now and the 06 elections. I think the only levering point is that O'Connor wasn't Chief Justice - we might get a softball now to get a hardball later.

I cherish ambiguity - and I'd love to be convinced there was more ambiguity here. But when you support your argument by positing things are impossible, when they have happened recently(Lahey, VT? Chaffee, RI? plenty of other states....), you haven't convinced me much.

And if the balance of your argument is to convince me of the kindliness of the strategists like Rove (did you see the Nova special on him?), your firecracker just fizzles.