Cromwell Burns in Hell

Thankfully, California is generally considered to be a “blue” state, leaning heavily Democratic at the presidential, congressional and state level.  But even here in the Golden State, we have our fair share of Republicans.  And whenever you have Republicans, you get teabaggers and the accompanying idiocy.

Lots of attention was devoted recently to Orange County Republican Central Committee member Marilyn Davenport, who sent out an email with a photo attachment portraying President Obama as a chimpanze. 

Her appalling racism ended up making Davenport look like the monkey!

After the predictable uproar, this tea party activist (I know, a teabagger engaged in racist activity, what a shocker) denied that there was anything racist about portraying our first African-American president in such a manner.  Apparently, two-centuries worth of racist cartoons trying to dehumanize African-Americans as ape-like creatures failed to grasp the attention of this “public servant.”  Only after being threatened with removal from her party post did this woman offer a non-apology apology for sending out this vile photo.  We all know the non-apology apology:  I’m sorry if anyone was offended (but they really shouldn’t have been in the eyes of the apologizer), some of my best friends are Blacks/Hispanics/Gays/ Muslims/Etc. (even though we all know they don’t have a single friend among the offended group), and an expressed desire for everyone to “move on” now that this “matter is closed” (please don’t focus anymore attention on me so that I can go back to being the bigot I was before).

 Of course, few observers have felt that her “apology” was genuine.  Like so many teabaggers, her racism is deeply entrenched into her subconscious, and she has become desensitized to what normal people would see as bigoted.  Back in graduate school we would have referred to this as a form of cognitive dissonance.  This pretty much explains how teabaggers can send out e-mails like this one and the one portraying the White House lawn as a watermelon patch or protests signs portraying Obama as an African-witch doctor and still claim that they aren’t racists. 

You would be smiling too if the state was paying $32,000 a year for your luxury car!

While one of the more recent examples of teabagger racism was grabbing national headlines, a delicious bit of teabagger hypocrisy went largely unnoticed by the media.  In the Tuesday, April 16th edition of the Los Angeles Times, there was a profile on freshman California Assemblyman Tim Donnelly.   Donnelly was one of the only teabagger success stories in California in 2010.   And, like most teabaggers, judgment and moderation are not his strong points.  He seems stunned that some people consider him to be a racist.  Perhaps, it might be because of his membership in the notorious, anti-immigrant group known as the Minutemen, his pledge to enact an Arizona-style anti-immigrant law, and the fact that prior to being elected he cancelled his family’s health insurance plan in order to pay tuition for his children to attend a private Christian school (apparently there are too many icky brown people in the public schools).   Donnelly has also offended many by his use of violent rhetoric to illustrate political conflict in the state.  In the immediate aftermath of the shooting of Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords, most decent people decided to embrace a moratorium on some of the more overheated political metaphors.  But not Donnelly.  He continued to rail against “job killing” regulations and taxes, and stated that “we’ve got a .50 caliber with crosshairs and…we’re going to pick off two or three of them using this issue”  and has turned his state legislative office into a gun shrine.  Classy.

Here’s the best part.  After getting elected, the dimwitted Donnelly thought that he would start receiving paychecks rights away.  Just like Maryland’s Andy “Where’s my government health-care?” Harris, this anti-big government teabagger couldn’t wait to start sucking the government teet.  Once in office, Donnelly accepted the perk of a state car.  Not just any car, but the one of the most expensive in the entire state fleet…a 2011 Ford Edge, leased to the state at the cost of $32,000 a year!  How does Donnelly reconcile his teabagger rhetoric with this high-priced government goodie?  Oh, it his “mobile office” and it’s a “base model car that doesn’t even have a Sync in it.” 

"But it doesn't have a Sync in it!"

In this era of budget cuts in California, as essential public services are being cut to the bone, we appreciate your great  sacrifice for us, Tim Donnelly.

For over two years, President Obama has continually reached out to Republicans in a bipartisan fashion.  Those overtures have been lead to months in delays in addressing pressing issues, the watering down of legislation, and - in the end- led to virtually no Republican votes.  Many economists have pointed out that the economic stimulus package was only about half as large as necessary to give a real boost to the economy, and was too heavily weighed down with tax cuts that provided little stimulative effect.  The watering down of that package was due to win the support of just three Republican senators (Collins, Snow and Specter).  Efforts for a bipartisan health care reform bill dragged on for months, many Republican ideas were adopted (the legislation in the end largely mirrored the Republican alternative to President Clinton’s health reform proposal in 1990s) and the final result was NOT ONE Republican vote in favor on final passage.  There was the conditional surrender last December on extending the Bush tax cuts (with total capitulation avoided only with a provision to also extent unemployment benefits for an additional thirteen months), and finally the surrender on the 2011 budget (how can it not be defined as a defeat when you agree to $6.5 billion in additional cuts beyond the $32 billion that you defined as unacceptable two months before?).

So, you can imagine my delight last week when President Obama bitch-slapped Eddie Munster’sPaul Ryan’s outrageous budget plan.   The basic components of the Ryan plan are to: 1) phase out the current Medicare coverage for those under age 55, 2) substitute the federal guaranteed coverage with a $15,000 voucher, 3) convert Medicaid into a block grant program to the states, 4) repeal the Affordable Care Act, 5) slash federal funding for additional programs (such as Pell Grants) benefiting low-income and middle-class Americans, 6) exempt defense from the budgetary knife, 7) permanently extending the Bush tax cuts, and 8) slash taxes for the highest income earners from the current 35 percent marginal rate to only 25 percent. 

Paul Ryan really is Eddie Munster. After all, who could come up with such a monsterous, ghoulish budget?

While pretty much every component of the plan is highly objectionable, let me focus primarily on Ryan’s idiotic ideas on health care and tax policy.

If Ryan’s plan Medicare plan was implemented, the results would be nothing short of catastrophic.  Medicare (along with Social Security) has been one of the most effective anti-poverty programs in American history, with seniors no longer having to face the prospect of spending themselves (or their children) into poverty trying to provide for their medical care.  Seniors would be left to the tender mercies of the for-profit health insurance industry for medical coverage.  What happens to a senior whose health care premiums/costs exceed this $15,000 figure?  Those additional costs would be totally out-of-pocket.  In addition, given the inflation rate in health care costs (which the Ryan plan fails to address in any way),  seniors would find that the voucher would pay for a decreasing percentage of their health care costs. 

Given that Ryan would also eliminate the Affordable Care Act (which prohibits health insurance companies from denying people coverage for pre-existing conditions, dropping coverage for those currently enrolled, and abolishing life-time limits on medical expenses for enrollees) many seniors would find themselves uninsured.  The bottom line of Ryan’s Medicare vision would be increased poverty, a significant decline in those enjoying comprehensive care, and a lessening of the quality of care.

Ryan’s Medicaid idea is to essentially turn the program over to the states through federal block grants.  The block grants would be increasingly insufficient to cover the costs of the poor (particularly as the Medicaid rolls would be swelled by millions of newly-impoverished seniors).  In states controlled by the likes of Rick Perry, John Kasich, Rick Scott, Scott Walker, Jan Brewer, etc., there would be opposition to increased taxes to fund these programs or to shift scarce resources from other areas.  The result would be fewer people covered with a dramatic decline in the quality of care.

It should also be pointed out the Ryan’s plan dramatically increases the deficit by repealing the Affordable Care Act (legislation which the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projects will eventually save the federal government hundreds of billions in health care costs.  This is just one of the many components of the plan that conclusively prove that Ryan and his Republican brethern care not at all about balancing the budget, but rather focusing on the interests of the their wealthy benefactors.

The most obnoxious evidence of this the lowering of the marginal rates for the highest income earners to 25 percent.  While Ryan and other Republican call for sacrifice on the part of the poor and middle-class, the rich will enjoy the lowest tax rates in over eighty years.  While Ryan takes a meat-axe to social spending (with $4.3 trillion in cuts), those reductions are almost totally offset by $4.2 trillion in tax cuts enjoyed by wealthiest segments of society.  

This proposed budget not only reflects the appalling lack of social conscience or sense of fairness by the Republican party, but also exposures their massive budgetary hypocrisy.  As President Obama observed, Ryan voted for two Bush wars, Bush tax cuts, and the Defend and Expand Big Pharma Profits Act (a.k.a. the Medicare prescription drug benefit) without providing for any revenue funding mechanism and placed them on the nation’s credit card.  The fact that he and other Republicans should be lecturing this president on fiscal discipline is laughable in the extreme.

From the moment of Obama’s Inauguration (as the Bush Great Repression was reaching it’s peak in costing hundreds of thousands of American jobs each month)

Jobs losses under Bush and job gains under Obama (Private Sector - since you wingnuts don't think that government jobs count!) Chart from WashingtonMonthly.

 until election day 2010, the Republican party did everything in it’s power to frustrate this administration’s economic recovery efforts.  Republicans like John Boehner essentially made “President Obama, where are the jobs?” the unofficialslogan of the Republican congressional campaign of 2010. Boehner pledged, that as House Speaker, he would be focused on job creation.

Well,we now approach the one-hundredth day of Speaker Boehner and the new Republican House majority.   Perhaps it is now time to ask “Speaker Boehner, where are the jobs?”  There has been no Republican jobs proposal introduced either in the House or the Senate.  In fact,  the only things that the new majority has done concerning jobs are budget cuts that would have the effect of continuing to undermine the Obama recovery. 

Economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics has stated that if the $61 billion in proposed cuts advocated by the Republicans were enacted, those spending cuts could cost the economy between 400,000 and 500,000 jobs and the economy’s 2011 growth could be reduced by half a percentage point.   Goldman Sachs economists said the impact of budget cuts could be far worse: 1.5 percentage points to 2 percentage points in the second and third quarters.  Scott Lilly of the Center for American Progress has calculated that the cuts could tip the economy back into recession as nearly one million jobs could be lost. 

The agreement between President Obama, Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Reid is reportedly around $38.5 billion in cuts, and estimates are that this package could reduce employment by over 400,000.  Of course, the Republicans demanded that these budget cuts fall most heavily on the most vulnerable in society, with no consideration at all of sacrifice on the part of the rich or corporate America.  Essential and already underfunded social programs will be slashed, and the bloated defense budget will not suffer a single scratch.  Just the latest capitulation from our allegedly liberal president (summed up by the latest “This Modern World” cartoon), but I digress…

The latest adventure of "Middle Man" (a.k.a. the always over-compromising president)

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that the Republicans really don’t care about job creation.  After all, just last fall every single Republican voted against the Creating American Jobs and Ending Outsourcing Act.  This legislation would have given U.S. employers a two-year “tax holiday” from payroll taxes on wages paid to new U.S. workers performing services in the United States.  It would also have prohibited business from taking any tax deduction, loss or credit for costs related to reducing or ending U.S. operations while expanding similar operations outside of the United States,  The bill would have also eliminated tax laws that allow companies to defer paying U.S. tax on income earned overseas until the profits are brought back to the United States.   Of course, their masters in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposed the bill because it’s more important to them to maximize profits than to save American jobs, and every Republican dutifully followed orders.

While the Republicans never can find any time to do anything serious about joblessness, they have had no problem wasting the nation’s time with their old parade of culture war obsessions like the defunding of NationalPublic Radio and Planned Parenthood.  The U.S. federal government was pushed to the brink of a government shutdown last night because .0083 percent of the proposed budgetwas devoted to the funding of Planned Parenthood.  This organization - which often provides the only affordable and accessible health care services to women in much of the nation - has been long targeted by Republican ”pro-life” zealots as an abortion provider.  While no federalfunds are used by Planned Parenthood to provide the tiny three percent of its services that deal with abortion, extremist wingnuts like Arizona’s vile John Kyl and Indiana’s putrid Mike Pence have engaged in repeated smears and falsehoods about the organization.  Only the prospect of a significant voter backlash against the Republican’s budgetary extremism headed off a shutdown, at least temporarily.

John Kyl claimed that "over ninety percent" of Planned Parenthood services were for abortion. Only 87 percent plus off, John! Then again, Republicans have never proven to be very good at math! Chart from ThinkProgress.

What should be clear now to any lucid observer is that the Republicans aren’t serious about responsible governance.  In 1995,  Newt Gingrich’s budgetary extremism led to a government shutdown, and public rightfully put all the blame on the Republicans.  In no small measure, Gingrich helped pave the way for Bill Clinton’s reelection in 1996.  When Nancy Pelosi - a responsible grown-up - led the House, they were no such drama in her budgetary dealings with George W. Bush.  his nation into a budgetary train-wreck when When the Democrats gained control of the Congress four years ago, there were no threats directed at President Bush involving a shutting down of the government.  Now, with another Republican Congress, this destructive game of budgetary chicken begins again.

When will the voters wake up?  The ones watching Fox News or listening to Limbaugh et al are probably lost causes.  They seem to relish being misinformed and voting for those who work against their own self-interests.  One can only hope that swing voters - who haven’t been politically lobotomized by the right - will learn from their mistake in 2010 and elect a progressive Democratic majority in 2012.

Public Policy Polling (PPP) has a new survey out examining the attitudes of Mississippi Republicans.  Not surprisingly, Mississippi’s Governor Haley Barbour is favored for the 2012 Republican nomination.  Hidden in the survey are some really stunning numbers. 

Senator Roger Wicker (apparently extending his greased palms out for another corporate payoff)

In February, a Gallup poll found that Mississippi was the most conservative state in the nation.In that survey, 50.0% of adults identified themselves as conservatives.  But just how conservative are Mississippi Republicans?  Well, when presented the option between voting for hard-core right-winger incumbent Senator Roger Wicker and a generic challenger who was even more conservative, Wicker leads by only a 40%-39% margin!   Wicker, who ”earned” a 96 percent score from the American Conservative Union in 2010, and has a 91.13 percent lifetime rating from that organization, isn’t conservative enough for a large percentage of Mississippi wingnuts.  Apparently Wicker needs to start goose-stepping around the state wearing a black shirt and boots to convince these extremists that he’s really on their side!

 Even more jaw-dropping is how extremist Mississippi Republicans are on the issue of race.   The PPP pollshowed a 46% plurality of Republican voters said they thought interracial marriage was not just wrong, but that it should be illegal!  Only 40% said interracial marriage should be legal. This is how Mississippi Republicans feel not in March 1961, but March 2011.   Now, while I would favor Clarence Thomas being arrested for lying to Congress during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings and for his recent tax evasion, he and his obnoxious wingnut wife Ginny certainly shouldn’t be thrown into jail for being an interracial married couple. 

Thomas and his wife wouldn't be laughing if a plurality of Mississippi Republicans had their way.

Perhaps these Mississippi Republicans should also surveyed on their attitudes about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and numerous other issues from the 1960s that most of us had thought had already been settled decades ago.

Thanks to PPP for adding one more piece to the mountain of evidence demonstrating that the modern Republican party, tea party movement, and conservatism in general are saturated with bigoted and racist attitudes.

Maine's Paul LePage: another one of the new teabagger Republican douche-bag governors.

Recently,  Maine’s  Teabagger Governor Paul LePage (who was elected with a whopping 38 percent of the vote last November) ordered some changes to the state’s Labor Department office. The aggressively pro-business (a.k.a. “anti-labor”) LePage has decided that the department’s conference rooms will no longer be named after labor-rights icons like Cesar Chavez or Francis Perkins (presumably soon to renamed after the more “deserving” Koch brothers).  The other change was that a mural depicting Maine’s labor history be removed from the LABOR Department lobby.  Apparently, some teabagger businessman saw the mural and thought it was a piece of North Korean communist propaganda (after all, it was celebrating those dirty, sweaty, smelly workers and not their wealthy exploiters) and wrote the governor to complain.  

One of the panels on the mural represented the lost childhood of child laborers in the state. 

The "Lost Childhood" part of Maine's Labor History mural.

Unfortunately for profit-at-any-price business interests in the state, a bunch of obviously socialist do-gooders passed laws abolishing child labor in the state back in 1847.  Now, LePage and Maine’s Republican state legislators are pushing a bill to restore the good old days of child labor.  Under the legislation, the number of hours that sixteen year olds could work during the school week will be raised from 20 hour to 32 hours per week (the original bill has NO limit on the number of hours), allow them to work until 11:00 p.m., and cut their hourly rate from the current state minimum wage of $7.50 to $5.25 per hour for their first six months of employment.   Education groups are pushing back against this legislation, pointing out that students working long hours were falling asleep in class and suffering from failing grades.  Labor groups are also aggressively fighting this reactionary legislation, pointing out that such a policy undermines adult unemployment (allowing businesses to higher teenagers at lower rates) and exploits teenagers (with businesses hiring new teenager workers before the higher six-month wage kicks in to keep labor costs down).  Not surprisingly, these common-sense arguments are falling upon the deaf-ears of the corporate boot-licking Republicans in the state. 

The Republican/Teabagger march backward to Social Darwinism continues. Congratulations, Maine voters!

A year ago this month the Affordable Care Act was passed by the Congress and signed into law by President Obama.  Given the lies and misrepresentations by those opposed to health care reform, it isn’t surprising to see that the general public doesn’t have a very good understanding about the content of the legislation.

Go to kff.org for some great charts and graphs concerning health care reform (unfortunately, I was having difficulty downloading them for you here)

According to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey, almost half the population aren’t even certain that the legislation is still law, with almost a quarter (22 percent) believing that the legislation was repealed earlier this year (a repeal vote did pass the House but failed in the Senate, and would have certainly been vetoed by the president) and just over one-quarter (27 percent) indicating that they weren’t sure of the status of the legislation. Just a bare majority (51 percent) knew that the legislation was still the law of the land.

Kaiser also conducted a December 2010 survey which attempted to measure knowledge about specific elements of the Affordable Care Act by asking ten specific questions about the legislation.  Less than one percent of respondents were able to correctly answer all ten questions correctly, with a total of only one-in-four (25 percent) of the respondents earning a passing “C” grade by correctly seven questions. 

Overall, 72 percent could correctly identify that the legislation would provide subsidies to middle and low-income people to buy insurance.  Two-thirds (67 percent) also correctly indicated that insurers would be prevented from offering coverage based upon a pre-existing condition.  Also exceeding the sixty percent mark was knowledge that the act would provide tax credits to small business to offer insurance to employees (65 percent), that there would be an individual mandate to obtain insurance coverage (64 percent), and that Medicaid would be expanded to cover some of those without coverage (62 percent).

Not surprisingly, the misinformation campaign by opponents to defeat health care reform resulted in only 45 percent knowing that there were no government “death panels” (Sarah Palin’s infamous ”lie of the year”), only 42 percent understanding that undocumented immigrants would not be covered under the plan (no, “you lied,” Joe Wilson), and only 40 percent realizing that Medicare benefits would not be cut as a result of the legislation.  Barely a quarter (27 percent) knew that there would be no government “public option” offered or that the smallest businesses would be exempted from a health care mandate for their employees (25 percent).

There were some very revealing results when one broke down the demographic data.  Democrats tended to be the best informed about the plan (32 percent getting seven or more questions correct), with Independent trailing with 26 percent, and only 18 percent of Republicans being able to correctly answer at least seven of the questions.  Amongst those favorable to the legislation, almost two-in-five (38 percent) answered at least seven questions correctly, while less than one-in-six (16 percent) of opponents achieved a passing knowledge grade. 

Some of Fox News viewer's favorite "information sources." No wonder wingnuts are so clueless!

When queried about the future of the legislation, 38 percent those who favored expanding the legislation could answer at least seven questions correctly, 34 percent of those who favored leaving the legislation could do so as well, only 25 percent of those who favored a partial repeal could do so, and a paltry 13 percent of those favoring a total repeal could do so.  These differences could be explained in part by looking at the source of information respondents cited as their favored news source.  While 39 percent of MSNBC viewers and 35 percent of CNN viewers could answer at least seven questions correctly, only 25 percent of Fox News viewers could do so.

So Republicans and Fox News viewers were least likely to know objective facts about the Affordable Care Act.  I know, shocking isn’t it?

Ohio’s state liquor stores take in nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in revenue every year, funneling money into the state’s general fund.  So, now that the state faces a large budget deficit, what bright idea does Governor John Kasich conjure up?  Let’s sell the stores to his buddies on Wall Street! 

A-Oh Way To Go Ohio!

In order to address Ohio’s immediate money woes,  he has decided to sell off operation of these stores for the next thirty years.  During that period of time, the stores would take in an estimated seven billion dollars in revenue for the state.  So, how much does Kasich intend to sell off the stores for?  The fire-sale price of $1.2 billion!  Yes,  this fiscal genius has decided to blow  almost six billion dollars in state revenue over the next three decades for a one-time infusion of cash to deal with this year’s deficit. 

This is fiscal insanity, but apparently makes perfect sense to the privatization-obsessed, big-business coddling Republicans and their teabagger sheep followers.

Good job, Johnny.  You’re solidifying your title as “Worst New Republican Governor” from the stiff competition from Wisconsin’s Walker, Michigan’s Snyder, Pennsylvania’s Corbett, Maine’s LePage and Florida’s Scott.

Pathetic.

Daily Kos recently commissioned Public Policy Polling to see how the eight Wisconsin Republican state senators eligible to be recalled this year would fare in such an election.   Here are the results:

Three Republican incumbents: Kapanke, Olsen and Hopper (who doesn’t even live in his district now that he’s abandoned his wife and moved in with a 25 year old female lobbyist) are facing an electorate that favors their recall.  Two others (Cowles and Harsdorf) also face electorates where the numbers lean against the idea of a recall, but if one occurs only lead a generic Democratic opponent by slender margins (two and four points, respectively).  One additional Republican (Darling) has an electorate that opposes recall by sixteen points, but whose lead against a generic Democrat is only half that number. 

As Kos notes, this is a different type of recall than the one we went through in California back in 2003.  In the recall of Gray Davis, voters were presented with two questions.  The first question dealt with whether Davis should be recalled.  Voters weren’t choosing between Davis, Schwarzeneggar, Bustamante, etc.  Davis was essentially running against himself in a “Yes/No” election, which pretty much sealed his fate given his low approval ratings. The second issue presented on the ballot was who should replace the governor if the recall were successful, which was the election Schwarzeneggar won in a 130+ candidate freakshow race.  In Wisconsin, there will be no actual recall question.  It will simply be an election pitting the incumbent versus a challenger.  Incumbents usually tend to fare a bit worse when pitted against a generic, “blemish-free, all things to all people” opponent.  Still, these numbers do indicate that five or six incumbent Republicans will be potentially vulnerable, and of this group three are seriously endangered.  A flip of three Republican seats would shift control of the Wisconsin state senate to the Democrats and prevent that body from continuing to be a rubber-stamp for their power-hungry, reactionary governor.  Unfortunately, two Republicans from deeply-red districts appear out of reach in a potential recall (Grothman and Lazich).  Still, it will be sweet seeing the odious liar Glenn Grothman (who described the protesters fighting for their rights as “slobs”) having to spend time and money back in his home district dealing with the righteous anger of many of his non-zombie teabagger constituents.

Stochastic Democracy did some number crunching looking ahead to the 2012 presidential election.  Right now, Obama’s re-election against Romney and Huckabee might largely hinge on a turnout model similar to 2006 or 2008.  Against Gingrich or Palin, Obama’s re-election seems much more of a sure bet.

Here’s the full story:

Registered Voter Polls, the Enthusiasm Gap, and the 2012 Presidential Election (March 2, 2011)

“…Even though the election is more then a year and a half away, we already have 123 presidential polling match-ups in 27 states. Almost all of them are from Public Policy Polling - a well respected North Carolina polling firm that did very well in 2010. This is easily an order of magnitude more polls than we had at this point in the last election. The problem is that all of these polls are done on a sample of registered voters instead of likely voters due to the inability to forecast who is going to turn out to vote next November.

Discrepency between Likely and Registered polls in the last four national elections, estimated using Stochastic Democracy’s Bayesian DLM model with House-Effects.

This can be a big problem. Because Republican support is concentrated amongst richer high-turnout groups, Republicans almost always do better among Likely voters than Registered Voters. This gap varies from election to election, almost disappearing at at half a point in 2008, but increasing five-fold to 2.6% in 2010. Because of this, it can be helpful breaking down results into different turnout scenarios in order interpret current Registered Voter polls.

Presidential vote estimates by candidate, Turnout, and state. Color scale runs from red to white to blue. Click for larger version.

This is a big map to digest. We’ve compiled all available state-by-state presidential maps and aggregated them by state, using Obama Approval and demographic information to fill in data for the states without polls via a 3 variable linear regression model (R^2~.96).

Obama needs 270 electoral votes to win the election

The take-away from this is that if the election was today, Obama would win under most turnout candidate combinations. Even under the most favorable Republican electorate in recent history, Obama would still defeat Gingrich and Palin in a land-slide. Romney and Huckabee can win, but only if they can keep the Enthusiasm gap near 2010 levels.

But this is only if the election was today. If the economy heads south due to an oil shock or a government shutdown, then Obama’s baseline approval could decrease. I’d also expect a lot of Republicans who don’t want to commit to Palin and Gingrich to come home. But as of now, Obama looks to be a favorite heading into the electoral cycle…” 

Under only two scenarios does Obama lose his re-election bid.  Those would be a 2010 turnout model against Romney and Huckabee (and remember, these polls don’t reflect Huckabee’s repeated “foot-in-mouth” moments over the last couple of weeks).  Even in this most favorable of Republican environments, it would be a 1976/2000/2004 style squeaker.  In a more normal environment, Obama averages well over 300 electoral votes.

Against Gingrich, the electoral map would be quite similar to 2008, with pretty much every scenario  having Obama being re-elected in the mid 300 electoral vote range.  Against Palin, it would be an Obama blowout.  Even in the most favorable Republican environment, Palin would max out around 152 electoral votes.  In every other environment, the outcome would likely be a 1964 Lyndon Johnson style landslide, with Obama reaching 468(!) electoral votes.