In an article from our last print issue, Mark Schmitt argues that Obama could not have done nearly as well as he did without the dramatic increase of progressive strength in states that were expected to be battlegrounds:
The strong progressive majorities in these former swing states or Republican strongholds are not the accomplishment of the Obama campaign alone; they are more like a gift the campaign was given. Nor did political or partisan work entirely lay the groundwork for the transformations. Colorado and Wisconsin are arguably the best examples of successful progressive efforts to build capacity at the state level. These long-term efforts strengthened think tanks, issue advocacy groups, and community organizations and coordinated them around a common agenda and an awareness, within legal constraints, of elections and their consequences.
Paul Waldman looks at how liberals and the mainstream media got so many aspects of the Obama campaign so wrong:
That's in part because there are so many more predictions swirling around the tornado of commentary that accompanies the modern campaign. But never have so many supposedly informed and knowledgeable people gotten so much wrong in a single election. Most of the misconceptions, it turns out, can be traced back to the fact that the pre-election conventional wisdom embodied so many conservative hopes and liberal fears.
And Peter Dreier and Kelly Candaele explain why the Employee Free Choice Act is necessary:
These numbers show the tremendous power of grass-roots organizing. Nationwide, according to Molyneux, 67 percent of union members of all races -- and 69 percent in swing states -- supported Obama.They voted for him because of the unions' effectiveness at educating and mobilizing members. They spent millions of dollars and built an army of volunteers who went door to door, reaching out to other members about key economic issues. Members in "safe" Democratic states staffed phone banks and made tens of thousands of calls to unionists in key swing states.
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--The Editors
