WASHINGTON -- Call it a thumping. Call it a shellacking. However you
want to describe the 2014 midterm elections, the point remains the same.
Democrats took it on the chin Tuesday night, losing the Senate, getting
crushed in winnable governors' races, solidifying their minority status
in the House for years to come, and stemming the party's ability to
continue putting its stamp on the judiciary.
The question is
whether it was all avoidable. Democratic strategists will say that the
party was dealt a terrible hand, forced to defend too many vulnerable
Democrats in red states against too much money. It was, to be sure, a
lousy hand. But Democrats never tried to play it.
Candidates
across the country shunned the president, with one famously refusing
even to say whether she voted for him; they ran from the party's
signature accomplishment, national health care reform; and they panicked
when the White House considered doing broad-based immigration reform by
executive action. Instead, a robust get out the vote operation was
supposed to save the party, which rested its hopes in shifting
demographic trends and fear of GOP extremists. But when you don't give
your voters much to "get out" for, what's left?
"We gave Dems no reason to run," said an adviser to President Barack Obama. "We ran as Dems-lite."
The
decision not to take action on immigration was, perhaps, the best
example of a Democratic strategy that was too cute by half. The delay
was intended to protect vulnerable red state Democrats, as if the only
thing stopping anti-immigrant voters from backing Democrats was a
potential executive action. Despite the delay, Democrats in Arkansas,
North Carolina and Iowa lost, while Sen. Mary Landrieu was forced into a
runoff in Louisiana she is expected to lose.
Making the bold
move, meanwhile, was expected to boost enthusiasm among Latino voters to
the benefit of Democratic Sen. Mark Udall in Colorado, a purple state
with a sizable Hispanic population. Instead, he lost to Republican Cory
Gardner. The only tangible effect of the delay may have been the
deportation of thousands of people who could have been helped by
executive action.
There was evidence that voters were willing to support progressive positions. Voters in Arkansas and Nebraska voted heavily in favor of
a minimum wage increase, while those same voters in Arkansas defeated
Democrat Mark Pryor, who had voted against a federal wage hike in line
with the interests of the state's dominant company, Walmart. Candidates
in both parties turned progressive in their rhetoric in the final weeks,
on everything from renewable energy to reproductive freedom.
With
control of the Senate now resting in Republican hands, the White House
is left to recalibrate its ambitions. An administration official told
The Huffington Post Tuesday evening, before all of the results had come
in, that the president would keep pushing for his core priorities --
including the continued implementation of Obamacare.
But he also
recognizes the demands of a new Congress. White House Chief of Staff
Denis McDonough "has been running a process to prepare for the lame duck
session," the aide said. After that, the White House hopes to find some
middle ground with congressional Republicans on matters like corporate
tax reform to help pay for infrastructure repairs, funding for the Ebola
epidemic and cybersecurity preparedness.
Meanwhile, the action
will continue to shift away from the legislature, as power gathers in
the judiciary, the executive branch and in the statehouses. Beyond the
coming executive action on immigration, the administration is finalizing
major rules on greenhouse gas emissions and still has an outstanding
decision to make on the Keystone XL pipeline.
In the absence of a
Democratic agenda to vote for, voters found something to vote against,
registering their anger with the direction and structure of the economy.
Attitudes measured in exit polls were negative in the extreme, with
eight in 10 saying they were dissatisfied by the performance of Congress
and 54 percent giving the thumbs down to Obama. A potent majority was
unhappy with the U.S. economic system itself, with nearly two-thirds of voters saying it's unfair and favors the wealthy and only 32 percent saying it's fair to most people, a shift even since 2012. (One percent deemed the economy "excellent.")
Insecurity
and fear, leading motivators of voters, have been in abundant supply
over the past several years, exacerbated over the summer by the sudden
rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and an Ebola outbreak that
has captivated world attention.
On Tuesday evening, some top
officials argued that there simply was no way to turn those rotten
lemons into drinkable lemonade. How, after all, were Democrats supposed
to trumpet a president who remained intensely unpopular, or embrace a
health care law that's consistently polled poorly, or make a coherent
argument that they deserve power when a string of events has caused
voters to question their competence?
"In the end, they had to do
what they did to [try to] get re-elected," said Jim Manley, former top
spokesman to Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the soon to be former senate
majority leader. "There will be plenty of time for second-guessing later
on. But I’m of the belief they tried to make the best decision they
could."
Manley now works for Quinn Gillespie & Associates --
the lobby shop that had been home to Republican Ed Gillespie before he
nearly unseated Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) on Tuesday. Warner, the epitome
of centrism in Washington, offered little contrast to his opponent.
Having
only cracked open the bottle of wine as the clock struck midnight,
Manley studiously avoided playing the blame game. Plenty of others were
willing to do it for him.
"There was no alternative as far as
campaign strategy goes. In a blowout like this that runs across
governors races too it's clear this wasn't about senate campaign
strategy," said one Senate Democratic aide. "The only alternative was
for the White House to not fuck up the rollout of Obamacare, which set
us back immeasurably at a time when we had Rs on the ropes by keeping
Democrats unified during the shutdown."
The aide has a point.
While the Republican Party remains more unpopular, its image has
recovered since the worst days of the government shutdown, as Democrats'
favorability ratings continue to sink.
Democrats
and the president are in a difficult political spot, getting blamed for
a sagging economy that they have little power to improve without
control of Congress. But it is also a problem partly of their own
making. As early as May 2010,
more than six months before Democrats lost control of Congress for the
rest of Obama's term, the party turned its focus away from jobs and
stimulus and toward deficit reduction and belt tightening. The resulting
fiscal pullback slowed the economic recovery and contributed to anger
at Washington, which typically gets directed at the party that controls
the White House. While pundits spent the last six years warning that
voters cared first and foremost about the deficit, the news that it has plummeted under Obama was nevertheless met with a rebuke from voters.
Democrats also suffered from a flood of big money
that entered the system as a result of the Supreme Court's Citizens
United decision. At the same time, the collapse of the traditional media
has allowed candidates with bizarre conspiracy theories to broadcast themselves as middle-of-the-road folks.
If
there is one silver lining for Democrats in a night filled with misery,
it's that the Republican hold on the Senate is likely tenuous. The
field was tilted heavily against Democrats in 2014, with Senate races
held in red states where Obama was even more unpopular than he was
nationally.
But in 2016, the GOP's tea party wave will be up, with
Republicans defending 26 seats while Democrats are on the line in just
10 races. Republicans will be forced to defend seats in New Hampshire,
Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio and several other states that are likely to
go Democratic in the presidential election.
Between now and then,
little governing involving Congress and the White House will take
place. The president will implement some form of executive action that
allows undocumented immigrants to stay in the country legally, while he
explores other ways to implement an agenda absent congressional
approval. The flow of judicial and executive confirmations will slow,
the budget will run on autopilot absent another shutdown threat, and a
series of standoffs will give way to the 2016 elections.
Beyond
that, said one high-level Republican congressional aide, the American
people should expect little. "The congressional agenda does not match up
with normal people's lives," he observed.
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