Republican voters currently prefer Newt Gingrich for their party’s nomination and consider him the most “electable” candidate against President Obama. If the DNC cooked up a Republican candidate in its secret underground labs, I don’t see how they could come up with a better prototype opponent–at a time of revulsion against Congress and Wall Street–than a career politician who was sanctioned for ethics violations while also conducting a secret extramarital affair, who left Congress to become a rich lobbyist, who is personally undisciplined and arrogant, and who enters the campaign season with virtually no money or organization.

But it’s a serious question why Republican voters currently favor him in polls.

We have sorted ourselves into largely homogeneous political communities that only talk to themselves. To judge by some conservative talk-radio that I recently heard, Barack Obama is setting records for abysmally low popularity and should be planning an immediate resignation. (Actual polls show his personal favorability at 47.9%, with 47% unfavorable) Plenty of conservatives live in physical and virtual communities completely free of liberals. Assuming that Obama is sure to lose in a landslide, and hearing very little criticism of the Republican movement that Gingrich once led, they are naturally optimistic about the former Speaker.

I think their isolation is particularly acute, because they have not accepted that most Americans reject strong versions of conservatism–whereas liberals tend to know that their side is a minority. But there are liberals who really believe that 99% of the American people are behind the Occupy Wall Street Movement. That is also a sign of isolation. (For the record, when asked to place themselves on an ideological spectrum, 22 percent of Americans identified as liberals in 2008, 32 percent called themselves conservative, and the rest said “moderate” or “don’t know.” I include “slightly liberal” and “slightly conservative” among the liberals and conservatives.)

If the ruling coalition is in an echo-chamber, sheltered from critical views and convinced that all contrary evidence is manufactured by shadowy elites, that is dangerous for the whole country. But if the opposition party is in an echo-chamber, that is mainly bad for them. They are liable to make tactically foolish decisions.

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I will be on MSNBC for a few minutes between 2 pm and 3 pm Eastern today, talking about the new voter ID requirements that are passing state legislatures. By my count, 11 states require or will soon require voters to show photo identification at the polls (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin). Eight of those states (Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin) added or tightened their requirements this year. Similar requirements are pending in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Governors in five states vetoed ID requirements recently (North Carolina, Montana, Missouri, Minnesota and New Hampshire).

Our election process is already cumbersome and difficult: the very opposite of “customer-friendly.” What business would require you to register for a service months before you were able to receive it–without contacting you before the deadline–and then allow you to get the service only if you showed up in person during specified hours during one particular weekday? A business might handle an extreme shortage that way, but voting is supposed to be for everyone.

A photo ID requirement doesn’t create an extra hurdle for people who already carry driver’s licenses, but at least 10 percent of American citizens do not. Most suburbanites get their licenses when they are sixteen, but most young urban residents do not. Only about one in four young African American adults in the city of Milwaukee hold driver’s licenses (PDF). Whole categories of people, such as individuals who can’t afford to drive or whose disabilities prevent them from driving, do not typically carry state photo ID. They can obtain state ID even if they cannot drive, but that costs money in most states and always adds a third chore to the voting process (getting ID, registering, and then voting).

We have reviewed the empirical studies of existing voter ID laws and found small estimates of the actual effect on turnout: from statistically insignificant to 2.9%. (Alvarez, Bailey, & Katz, 2007; Vercellotti & Anderson, 2006; Eagleton Institute of Politics and Moritz College of Law, 2006; Pastor et al., 2008; Ansolabhere, 2007; Mycoff et al., 2009). Americans should hope that the effects of the new laws will, in fact, be small. On the other hand, the published studies are correlational and based on relatively rare and idiosyncratic laws. The effects of widespread, very tight laws may be worse. Also, if whole subpopulations lack photo ID and yet voter ID requirements do not statistically reduce their turnout, that’s because their turnout is very low already. It is unconscionable to put a legal ceiling on their participation.

There is no need for these new laws. People hardly ever commit voter fraud by showing up at the polls to cast ineligible ballots. You would risk a felony conviction for trying that, and for what? To add one vote to your favorite candidate’s total? Most people vote out of civic duty or group solidarity, not for direct personal benefit. There were four documented instances of ineligible voters trying to vote in Ohio in 2002 and 2004–out of 9 million votes cast (PDF).

As a matter of principle, I do not attribute motives to people without lots of evidence. So I do not know why these voter ID laws are so popular among state legislators–especially Republicans, although in Rhode Island, Democrats enacted the new rules. Perhaps legislators genuinely fear voter fraud or are responding to public pressure for new rules. (There is grassroots pressure, as you can tell from listening to conservative talk radio.) The worst motive, of course, would be to disenfranchise your political opponents, and at least one legislator is on the record with that goal: “New Hampshire House Speaker William O’Brien, a Republican, told a tea party group that allowing people to register and vote on Election Day led to ‘the kids coming out of the schools and basically doing what I did when I was a kid, which is voting as a liberal. That’s what kids do — they don’t have life experience, and they just vote their feelings.'”

My post for the day is an editorial over at The Root, entitled:

Young, Black and Voting

Your Take: Young African Americans are engaged in politics but aren’t guaranteed to turn out in 2012.

Emily Shultheis in Politico has a strong, substantive story about the wave of new voter ID requirements passing state legislatures. It’s hard to predict their precise impact on turnout because many of the specific rules are unprecedented, but (as I assert in the article) the intent is to disenfranchise young people, and that is outrageous.

Yesterday, CIRCLE released our major overview study of young Americans, coming into the 2012 campaign cycle.

The study is here. It includes a separate press release on African Americans, here.

I wrote an editorial for the HuffingtonPost, which is here. I also paste the text of the editorial below.

Here is some sample coverage: Ben Smith, “Breaking Down the Youth Vote” (Politico); Jenee-Desmond Harris, “Young Black Voters: Study Dispels Myths (theRoot).

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