Elective Thoughts

There are four conflicting trends that are making this election season quite interesting, though not entirely comforting: (1) Obama is on a long losing streak; (2) the Republicans are making no inroads with Democratic voters; (3) the prospects are bleak for establishment types; and (4) turn out has been surprisingly low. Let’s make some sense of this.


Trend 1: In the past year, Obama has endorsed almost a dozen candidates in races as varied as the governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey and Senate races in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Arkansas. Every single candidate he endorsed has lost.

What does this mean? It means Obama no longer has the ability to sway the public, or indeed, to sway Democratic voters. It means that Obama, like Bush before him, has become political poison. It means that anyone tied too closely to Obama is doomed.

Longer term, this means that Obama’s agenda is doomed. As the members of his own party start to realize that he’s more albatross than eagle, they will begin to oppose him in favor of their own agendas.


Trend 2: Since Obama’s election there have been various special elections throughout the country, around ten total. The Republican candidate has lost every single one of these, for one reason or another, except for the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts. Last night, the Republicans lost the chance to pick up Jack Murtha’s former seat.

Here’s the catch. While the media makes a big deal of these seats being “conservative leaning” seats, the reality is quite different. Each of these elections has taken place in deeply Democratic-leaning states. Moreover, most of these seats have been in districts that are heavily unionized. Thus, the only trend that can be drawn from this is that the Republicans are not making any inroads with Democratic voters. But, in truth, they don’t need to. As I pointed out before, the Republicans can win 70 additional House seats without winning a single Democratic-leaning district.


Trend 3: The media is making out a case that incumbents are in trouble. I think this is incorrect. The reality is that candidates who are seen as corrupt or “malleable by the establishment” are the ones who are in trouble. Charlie Crist (I-Florida), Arlen Specter (D/R-Penn), Robert Bennett (R-Utah), and Bart Stupak (D-Mich) showed themselves to be unprincipled opportunists. Evan Bayh (D-Indiana) and Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark) showed they were willing to do Washington’s bidding against the strong wishes of their constituents. Alan Mollohan (D-WV) and Chris Dodd (D-Conn) were corrupt. And so on and so on.

There is no evidence that incumbents in general are in trouble, but there is evidence that anyone who has partaken of the waters of the establishment is. Anyone who has willfully handed taxpayer money to cronies, flirted with lobbyists, glad-handed and traded favors or proclaimed their power to milk the system, is in serious trouble.

What’s troubling about this, and what bothers me a good deal about the results last night, is that the Democrats are managing to clean up some of their weakest candidates. Chris Dodd easily would have lost to whatever Republican challenged him. The new guy, despite his Vietnam lie, is a much stronger candidate because he has shed the thing that the Democrats of Connecticut did not like about Dodd -- his corruption.

At the same time, Specter would have been a much weaker candidate against Toomey than Sestak will be. Sestak will have the strong support of Democrats, unlike Specter, and will not enrage moderate Republicans like Specter did. Ditto in Arkansas and anywhere else that the Democrats replace corrupt, establishment co-opted candidates with fresh faces.


Trend 4: Finally, we come to the issue of turn out. Turn out has been low, almost bizarrely low, in every election since the Presidential election. This indicates that the public is not as enraged as people wish to believe. Sadly, this means that the Tea Party effect is quite limited, if it exists at all. But at the same time, this means that Obama’s ability to turn out voters has evaporated. The Kool-Aid is gone and his magical ability to mobilize the masses is no more.

So what does this mean? It’s actually good news. Low turn out means that the party that is more energized has the advantage, and that’s the Republicans. Moreover, this low turn out has taken place during contested Democratic primaries, which further indicates that Democratic voters are demoralized.

That’s good. But all in all, these trends are somewhat troubling. With the anger the public showed when ObamaCare passed, there was a hope that a massive wave of public support would rid us of the Democrats and their RINO hangers-on. But, instead, these trends tell us that we are looking at a very tactical, low-turn out election where local personalities have much greater influence than national trends.

I think the Republicans better consider why they aren’t riding the expected wave.