I am aware that McDonnell was able to overcome the GOP’s problems with suburban voters when he was elected governor. However, those problems came back to haunt him once he was in office, with the controversy over the somnogram legislation. Whatever one’s views of the merits of that issue, it is undeniable that the Dems were able to use it to drive down his numbers in VA.

I also recall that McDonnell made some ill-considered comment about the Confederacy that was also used against him. If he’s not smart or quick enough to avoid pitfalls like that, he’s not presidential material. It’s no excuse that the comment may have had some reasonable, non-racist explanation (as I’m sure it did), that it was distorted by the Dems and their lackeys (as I’m sure it was), or that it was the sort of comment that would have been well-received by highly conservative, all-Republican audiences in out-the-way rural or exurban areas.

I agree that tone matters, but I don’t share your confidence that a candidate’s “ma[king] the case for . . . social conservative positions” with which people viscerally disagree (and one does not have to have given an issue any independent thought to feel strongly and “viscerally” about it) can bring around significant numbers of voters. I’d be pleased to be proven wrong on this, however, and I agree that the approach has not really been tried.

what IS IS & what ISlam IS !

Too bad Mitch Daniels didn’t run. Just around the time he removed himself from consideration, I came around to him. Oh, well.

I took the time to read not only the studies, but also your own words. You wrote:

“And I have never seen a single objective piece of evidence that unemployment compensation actually reduces the available labor supply”

Schmieder et al write:

“Our results show that substantial increases in benefit durations lead to moderate increases in nonemployment durations in the short run, but there are little long-term effects on labor force attachmentor observable job quality. The point estimates indicate that the effects on employment are approximately constant over the business cycle or slightly smaller during economic downturns”

Your quotation of Chetty is deeply misleading in how it it cuts off as Chetty writes:

“The evidence described here suggests instead that unemployment durations rise mainly because households have cash on hand [from UI] while unemployed and are therefore less pressured to find work.”

So we have both studies directly contradicting your assertion. But that doesn’t tell us what the policy should be as Schmieder finds the effect to be small (though they cite studies that find larger effects.)

Here is the third study I meant to link to
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9014.pdf?new_window=1

“We do not find strong effects of increased UI duration on average job quality or on longer-term employment outcomes. Our findings imply that large expansions in UI during recessions are unlikely to lead to sizable increases in unemploy- ment duration or the unemployment rate, to contribute to unemployment persistence, or to lead to worsening job outcomes for the long-term unemployed.”

And here are some of the highlights in your third link of Chetty’s conclusions on the impact of Unemployment Insurance on the labor supply:

“This paper has argued that unemployment benefits raise durations primarily through non- distortionary income effects rather than the substitution effects emphasized in the existing literature. Roughly stated, the standard view has been that people take longer to find a job when receiving high UI benefits because it pays less to go back to work…..

The strong link between unemployment benefits and unemployment durations has been interpreted in previous studies as evidence that UI generates a substantial deadweight cost by reducing labor supply. The results of this paper challenge this view…..

Although a formal analysis of optimal UI policy is outside the scope of this paper, there are some qualitative insights worth mentioning. If the deadweight cost of UI is lower than previously thought, it follows naturally that the optimal benefit level should be higher as well.”

This sort of thing is one of the reasons I link very little and quote quite a lot. Extracting a pertinent quotation mandates that you spend some time reading the source.

A. Obama was just more popular in November 2012 than he was in 2010.

B. Scott Brown had hot issues in 2010 on Obamacare and civilian trials for terrorists. They just weren’t as hot in Massachusetts in 2012 and he (like a lot of Republicans) had no other set of popular issues to run on.

I think the masterstroke stuff (not singling you out, just the general praise of the Obama campaign) is overdone. He ran a fine mechanical campaign. It wouldn’t have saved him if he had been running in the demographic American of 1988. That is the most disturbing thing as it is a culmination of trends that have been building for a generation of more.

“The Republicans came with a C- candidate playing a D+ game. As was pointed out numerous times on this site, there were at least a few more competitive candidates to be had in the party.”

I think we need to make some distinctions here. I do think there were Republican candidates who could have run better in this year. Whether they run 2.7% of the electorate better I don’t know. But Romney ran ahead of the Republican Senate candidates in Ohio, Virginia, Florida, and Wisconsin. I doubt those candidates were ALL D+ candidates who ran F campaigns. There are real agenda and messaging problems that are distinct from Romney’s personal weaknesses and more important too.

“The 47% comment, I believe was taken out of context, but again never got a great explanation as to what he really meant. (I took it as a statement that considering the demographics of the country Obama already had a lock on a substantial portion of the population so there was only a small target audience to try to swing Romney’s way).”

The problem with all these defenses of Romney’s statement is that they involve rewriting what Romney said to make a different point. If Romney had said that Obama is likely to get at least 47% of the vote regardless of the course of the campaign, it would not have been controversial in the least. Here is what Romney said:

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. And he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives”

So he says the 47% who have no net income tax liability are “dependent”, think of themselves as “victims” and cannot be convinced to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” this is not infelicitous commentary. This stuff is just plain wrong.

“Obama already had a lock on a substantial portion of the population so there was only a small target audience to try to swing Romney’s way).”

I think that is true, but what does it say of the condition of the Republican coalition that they have to draw to a demographic inside straight to win even under moderately favorable conditions?