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Oct 21, 2014 9:07am

By MICHAEL FALCONE (@michaelpfalcone)

NOTABLES

THE ROUNDTABLE

ABCs RICK KLEIN: His feelings will be the least of his worries, if the Senate winds up tipping. President Obamas latest comments linking endangered Democrats with his agenda these are all folks who vote with me was hardly a necessary link for 2014. His previous comments -not to mention the Democrats own voting records made that connection quite effectively. But the presidents moves to hammer that point home, and taking personal responsibility for making sure that our voters turn out, ensure that the comments will be remembered in 2015 and 2016, too. The quotes are teed up for post-election analyses. The president is putting himself, and his agenda, more explicitly on the line. If voters reject the candidates, it follows that theyre rejecting his agenda in Congress. Those judgments, of course, last two years Obamas last in office.

ABCs JOHN PARKINSON: Wal-Mart Moms, identified as women who shop at the super chain at least once a month with a child under 18-years-old, believe Washington is out of touch. In two focus groups in battlegrounds in Charlotte, N.C. and New Orleans, La., none of the women, who largely considered themselves independents and undecided voters, knew much about the candidates despite millions of dollars in advertising. They think its a choice between the lesser of two evils. These swing voters make up between 14 to 17 percent of the electorate, according to Public Opinion Strategies. All expressed negative views of the direction the country is heading, particularly on foreign affairs and border security. The women had a lot of questions about Ebola. They think the government doesnt have it under control but dont believe Ebola will likely infect them. They arent flying. They want the president to ban travel from the region. The CDC is behind the ball, and the government is playing catch up. While the women who participated in the focus groups have an overwhelmingly negative perception of Congress, none held such deep opinions about the candidates on the ballot in two weeks. Instead, they plan to cram for Election Day like a test, googling the information they need to make a decision the night before they head to the polls.

ABCs JEFF ZELENY: The National Republican Senatorial Committee believes it has found another way to tie Democrats to President Obama: Ebola. Their press releases today come with these screaming headlines: Grimes Defers to Obama on Ebola. Nunn Defers to Obama on Ebola. Hagan Defers to Obama on Ebola. And on and on, throughout the roster of top Senate races across the country. But is the GOP overplaying its hand? While Ebola may be the October surprise of the fall campaign largely because its October and there has yet to be another surprise its hard to imagine that the outbreak moves any voters. To fire up the base, sure, its another way to hammer the president. But undecided voters, if there are truly any who remain, could surely be turned off by the crass political treatment of a deadly outbreak. If its too soon to crack jokes about Ebola, is it too soon to blatantly politicize it?

THE MIDTERM MINUTE

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Not What Democrats Needed To Hear

On Nov. 5, if the election turns out theway almost every forecast suggests that it will with Republicans taking the Senate, Democrats will likely blame the failure of their voters -- young people, African Americans and Latinos -- to turn out. And given that many states with tough Senate races are in the South, where the majority of African Americans live, Democrats are very much banking on black voters to be their firewall.

A story from The New York Times blares"Black Vote Seen as Last Hope for Democrats to Hold the Senate."

And in the USA Today, "Black lawmakers anchor Democratic Southern Voter Push."

President Obama, who spurred black voter turnout to record numbers in 2008 and 2012, is making his own appeal to black voters -- an effort backed by a $1 million push on black radio in North Carolina and more in other states from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. (Of course,given the tens of millions the DSCC spends, thisis a significant -- though not huge -- investment.)

Here was Obama on the Steve Harvey show on Wednesday morning (emphasis mine):

The truth of the matter is, African American voters, young voters, progressive voters, Latino voters, they now vote at relatively high rates during presidential elections. But I bet a whole bunch of your listeners arent even thinking about this election coming up on Nov. 4. But this is really the last election in which I have the opportunity to get a Congress that will work with me.

Back in 2010, folks didnt vote. As a consequence, the tea party took over the Republican Party. We lost the House. And, although weve made a lot of progress on various issues since then, basically Congress has fought me every step of the way and it led to things like the shutdown and all kinds of negative consequences in terms of things like gun control that we couldn't get done. So, we really need to have the kind of Congress that is serious about the issues that matter to folks and the responsibility is ultimately up on everybodys whos listening.

Folks like to complain, talk about Washington. But if only 45 ... 40 percent of the people are voting, then its not surprising that Congress isnt responsive. If people voted at the same rates during midterms as they did during presidential elections, we would maintain Democratic control of the Senate . . . and so I need everybody listening to understand this is really, really important.

Harvey's audience is primarily black, spread across 64 markets and numbers 7 million listeners.

Obama said "folks didn't vote," and as a result he was handed a shellacking in 2010, courtesy of the tea party and the failure of his folks to show up at presidential rates. Keep in mind, though, that turnout drops across the board in midterms,often from around 60 percent to somewhere in the 40s, depending on the demographic.

More:
The Fix: President Obama was wrong. Democrats wont lose because of black voters.

Two weeks ago, we looked at initial early voting data compiled by the U.S. Election Project with the aim of sussing out how campaigns were doing at putting votes in the bank. At that point, it seemed like Democrats were doing particularly well in Iowa and North Carolina compared to voter registration numbers. Republicans were doing well in other battleground states.

Now, that's changed. Compared to overall voter registration, Iowa and North Carolina Democrats are doing much worse than earlier in the month, and Republicans in those states much better. We've also added new states that recently began early voting: Nevada, California and Colorado. In each, Republicans are outperforming Democrats.

How to read this: A red or blue dot above the diagonal line shows that the Republican (or, for a blue dot, Democratic) vote in the state comprises a larger percentage of the early vote than the total voter pool. A dot below the line indicates that the early vote is under-performing for that demographic. The further above or below the line the dot falls, the better or worse the group is faring. The change since the last time we did this is indicated with a line connected to the small dot at the previous percentage.

Interestingly, unaffiliated/undeclared voters are uniformly underperforming their registration numbers, perhaps in part because campaigns aren't targeting them as aggressively in the early vote process. But that puts the poor performance of Democratic campaigns in sharper relief. If unaffiliated voters are underperforming as a percentage of all of the votes that are in, one would expect the two parties to be overperforming.

But Democrats aren't. The bad news for them is clear: the extent to which the red dots are above the line and the blue dots are below it. In what we expect to be a relatively low-turnout election, Democrats would want (and really need) to leverage their generally superior turnout mechanisms to bank votes early. So far, they're getting beaten at that effort.

The bad news for Republicans is that as we mentioned two weeks ago these numbers can and will change quickly. As always, it's the trend that's worth watching, and while the red dots are mostly rising, they're falling in Florida and Maine. (In Georgia, where data areavailable in terms of the race of the voter, the number of black voters voting early is rising, which can be read as another good sign for Democrats, since they are a reliably Democratic constituency.)

The bottom line: Republicans are seeing what they want higher rates of turnout among their voters.

Philip Bump writes about politics for The Fix. He previously wrote for The Wire, the news blog of The Atlantic magazine. He has contributed to The Daily Beast, The Atlantic, The Daily, and the Huffington Post. Philip is based in New York City.

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Democrats have an early vote problem

Immigration is the definitive wedge issue in American politics, but it doesn't have to be. When the Senate's Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act failed to pass the House this year, it was the third such failure of comprehensive reform in a decade. Here's a good rule: Three strikes, you're out. It's time for a different approach. Congress should forget comprehensive reform and try for pragmatic and incremental change instead.

Skeptics will thunder that there's no room for compromise, the other party is unreasonable, the issue boils down to either amnesty or deportation and there's nothing in between that anyone can agree on.

Want to bet?

The Hoover Institution has been surveying immigration experts a 40-member working group of scholars from across the political spectrum to test that hypothesis. We have asked them to consider policy innovations that purposefully look at all aspects of immigration, not just the hypersensitive topic of illegal immigration.

Most recently we challenged our panel to think about work visas. The United States issues 60 million visas annually, but only 3 million are for work. Indeed, work visas in the United States are an excessively complex mixture of quotas, rules and bureaucracy.

How could work visas be improved? How would reforms affect the economy? And could liberal, conservative and independent wonks agree on any of it?

The answer is yes. Almost everyone surveyed (86%) thought that the bureaucratic thicket regulating temporary work visas should be reduced. There was strong consensus (79%) for eliminating the cap on non-agricultural H-2 visas (which cover seasonal jobs such as food servers or landscape crew members), for making the E-Verify program mandatory so that only legal workers could be hired (73%) and for unlimited visas for high-skilled STEM workers (66%). Sixty-one percent favored using visa pricing (61%) requiring employers to pay a fee when they hire guest workers which would provide an incentive for hiring the native-born and is a better way to allocate visas than the centrally planned and administered quotas in place today.

We also asked the scholars to judge nine components for a better temporary work visa system. One idea known as portability had overwhelming support, with 97% in favor. So if Congress could do just one thing related to immigration, this is it: Allow visa portability, so that guest workers can change employers and thus avoid exploitation.

As it turned out, some of the least popular ideas were ones that had been embedded in the Senate's latest failed comprehensive plan. Can you say poison pill?

Only 20% of experts supported the Senate bill's requirement for employers to certify that no U.S. worker could be found before they could hire guest workers. Only 14% supported the requirement that employers guarantee non-displacement of its U.S. employees.

Original post:
There's a better way to do immigration reform

I dont agree with Jeb Hensarling on everything. (For example, I think his attack on the Export-Import Bank is a needless distraction.) But he is spot-on when it comes to immigration reform.

In The Wall Street Journals Saturday Interview, Rep. Hensarling (R., Tex.) said that hesupports pro-growth immigration policies (my words, not his), which include a vibrant guest-worker program for low-skilled workers and more H-1B visas for high-tech workers.

He also acknowledged that we dont have to build a wall across our entire southern border and that a good guest-worker program makes it easier for law enforcement to focus on catching bad guys.

Contrast this sensible view of fixing our immigration system with the bombastic rhetoric coming from his Texas colleague, Sen. Ted Cruz (R.),who fulminated against illegal amnesty in an op-ed in USA Today.

James Freeman, who wrote the Wall Street Journal piece, said of Rep. Hensarlings position on immigration reform: This focus on immigrations economic benefits is consistent with his free-market principles, though it puts him at odds with the drift of many Republicans who are falling for the fallacy that there are a finite number of jobs in the country and every immigrant robs a job from someone already here.

Mr. Freeman and Rep. Hensarling are right. Fixing our broken immigration system is an important part of the strategy to expand our economy. I am glad that Jeb Hensarling understands that basic fact.

John Feehery is president of QGA Public Affairs and a former spokesman for then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert. He is on Twitter:@JohnFeehery.

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From Jeb Hensarling, Sensible Talk on Immigration Reform