Thursday Open Thread [10.18.12]

Dave Nyczepir & Shane D’Aprile have a post on “A roadmap for the final 72: How your campaign can make the most of the run-up to Election Day” up at Campaigns & Elections. One tip: “Among the toughest decisions the campaign has to make is how to spend late cash. While it’s easy to get sucked in by the low cost and speed of robocalls, Democrat Marty Stone says there are much better ways to use phones…”Don’t just think about 30-second blasts of messages, but think about where the voters are,” Stone says. “Do push-button auto calls, getting their opinions back.”

What’s the matter with Tennessee? Put another way, why can’t Democrats get much traction in the Volunteer State? This, despite a long heritage of producing distinguished Democratic leaders like Andrew Jackson, Kefauver, the Gores and Fords, to name a few, and reaping tremendous benefits from Democratic leaders, like FDR? Today, incumbent Republican Scott DesJarlais, embroiled in a particularly ugly scandal, still leads his Democratic adversary Eric Stewart in their 4th district race. Greg Johnson addresses the race and TN Dems frustrations in general in his Knoxnews.com post, “Is Democratic brand irretrievably and permanently damaged in Tennessee?”

The economy is starting to show a “full-on comeback in everything related to consumers and households.”

September housing starts were up, hitting a four-year high:

Groundbreaking on new homes surged in September to its fastest pace in more than four years, a sign the housing sector’s budding recovery is gaining traction and supporting the wider economic recovery. […]

The U.S. economy has shown signs of faster growth in recent months as the jobless rate has fallen and retail sales data has pointed to stronger consumer spending.

The data showed housing, which was battered by the 2007-09 recession, is increasingly one of the brighter spots in the economy and could add to growth this year for the first time since 2005.

Jared Bernstein believes that “things are slowly getting better and Romney’s claims to the contrary may be drowned out by this reality”:

I suspect there’s NCD—nontrivial cognitive dissonance–between Romney’s portrait of the economy and many people’s experience of it, especially around some of the more tangible aspects, like housing values and mortgage rates.

Steve Benen:

The unemployment rate is at its best point in four years; consumer confidence is at its best point in five years; the federal budget deficit is at its best point in four years. Just this week, reports on retail sales, industrial production, and new housing construction showed sharp and unexpected improvements.

This probably isn’t what Republicans wanted to hear.