I have a question — for both the conservatives and the lefties who read “Alas” — which I think might enhance our post-election discussion in eight or nine months. What are your expectations for how many seats Democrats will lose (or gain) in November? Not just your predictions, but also what levels will make you feel that each party has exceeded expectations (i.e., “won”)?
Nate Silver has a table which might help with thinking about this:
Add on top of that the lousy economic situation, which is always bad for the incumbent party. My feeling is that if the Democrats can keep it down to losing about average for a midterm election, they’ll have done extremely well — as Silver says, they’ll have “won” the election cycle.
My expectation is, all else held equal, Democrats will lose around 30-40 seats in the House, and 4-6 in the Senate. If Democrats end up losing 60-70 in the House and 8-10 in the Senate, I’d call that an enormous, stunning loss, beyond what I’d expect.
Rob and Ron, both of you have (iirc) suggested that passage of the Affordable Care Act will lead to enormous losses for Democrats in November, beyond what we’d normally expect in a mid-term election with a lousy economy. (Robert even bet $100 that Republicans would have a two-third majority in the House after the election — which means Democrats losing 111 seats.) Could you put those expectations in numbers, please?
Not just Ron and Rob, but everyone. How well do Republicans have to do so that we can say they did much better than we’d normally expect, given the circumstances? And at what levels would you say that Democrats actually “won” under the circumstances?
Defeat of Biblical proportion. 111 seats in the House, 10 seats in the Senate. Barbara Boxer sitting stunned and alone on a milk crate outside her HQ, smoking a cigarette handed to her by a compassionate conservative passerby, wondering if she can get a job teaching at UC even after the budget cuts.
(Nuanced hedge: 20 or so of those House seats might actually be won by nominal Democrats who caucus with their party but vote with the Republicans on 90% of issues. That won’t win my bet but the political landscape will nonetheless have shifted.)
What would constitute Democratic victory? I’d say if Dems lost 40 House seats and 4-5 Senate seats, they did very well. That would obviously also constitute a Republican defeat.
My predictions aside, if the Republicans pick up 70 seats in the House, that’s a historic move. Not as vast as I predict, but pretty good.
Why I think it will be so epic:
1) HCR has motivated the right more than it has been motivated in the 25 years I’ve watched politics, and more than in any history book I’ve ever read. I don’t go to political rallies; I have a job. Over the last year I went to four rallies for this issue. My commitment has not gotten weaker; it has become grim. (And hey, if I go broke spending all my time on politics, you guys will buy my health insurance for me! Thanks!)
2) Poor fanservice to the liberal base (HCR rhetoric aside, we all know this is a fairly centrist approach that does nothing for progressives, other than promise them a path to larger future state control) leaves the activists dispirited. What are leftie bloggers talking about now? Right-wing reaction to HCR. People charged up about a win move on to their next items. Leftie activists are in the dumps and are reactive.
3) Economy in the shitter, and will go more so this year as company after company realizes how much this bill is going to cost them, and takes charges/start layoffs. (Yeah, yeah, five years from now they’ll all be handing out Lexuses to the custodial staff because their costs will be so magically reduced. The chargeoffs are now, though.)
4) Racism. Soft-bigotry liberals disappointed with O’s failure to be transformative stay home, low-key-racism rednecks who weren’t attuned in 2008 now pay close attention.
5) Economics. Not the consumer economy – the crescendoing tidal wave of entitlements and “mandatory” spending drowning future growth. People are scared, and pissed. It isn’t entirely fair (Republicans bear a considerable part of the blame for this) but the popular perception is still that it’s the Democrats’ fault. And it’s a Democratic president and Congress, so guess who gets the stick.
6) Incompetence. Obama’s political team has a tin ear, and as president he is basically the boss of the Congressional run. (Other people have input, I don’t mean to oversimplify.) He doesn’t really know how to win elections outside of safe districts, and an awful lot of the safe districts aren’t safe anymore. Also, he (or perhaps more fairly, his team) seem very resistant to contrary data. This is a valuable asset when a decision has been made and a policy is being carried out, because you avoid analysis paralysis. It’s a big deficit in running for office, where you do have to be light on your feet. What this all boils down to is that they’re going to get a lot of data that points out weak areas, and there’s going to be resistance on the team to taking appropriate action. Instead of adjusting course to pander to the voters, we’ll get speeches about why the voters are stupid for not understanding how great Rep. Frank Lee Onthetake (D-GM) is.
If I wanted to be dishonest and just undermine liberal hopes and dreams, I’d add (7) Campaign finance reform decision in United Citizens means vast corporations will buy the election for their Republican stooges. I don’t think that’s actually going to happen, or that it would make a big difference if it did, but some of you guys might believe it. So there it is, for what it’s worth.
2,4,6 are subjective. I could be wrong. 1,3,5 I think are data; unhappy data for some people, perhaps, but data. 7 I don’t think is real, but hey, I could be wrong.
I’m going to be boring and endorse the Cook Report (like anyone who reads Alas is enough of a political junky to be able to independently rate the odds in all the House races…). Assuming that the equivalent of the number of Dem toss up races goes Republican, I’ll guess that the Dems lose 30 seats. Going by Cook, Dems losing 55 seats would be a blow out (the equivalent of the Dems losing every toss-up and every lean Dem race). Dems losing 20 seats would be a serious Dem victory (but Hell, I’ll take Robert’s position. The Rs have gone all in on a strategy of obstructionism. If they can’t retake the house or the senate, they lose, because the Dems are going to severely limit the power of the filibuster if they control the senate next winter).
In the senate, I’ll put my money on the Dems losing 7 seats (fivethirtyeight.com, every race from Boxer on up flips sides (or the equivalent) although my greatest hope is that Burr in NC goes down to defeat), which will be bad news if it comes true, since only 2 or 3 of them are problematic conservaDems (Lincoln and Bayh and Dorgan). If the Dems have enough votes next January to reform the fillibuster, they won the election. If they don’t have the votes to reform the fillibuster, they lost, unless they have 64 or more senate seats. My hope for the senate is to hold the loses to 4 seats net. the best I can imagine would be to hold the loses to a net of 2. The worst I can imagine the Dems doing would be to lose 10 seats.
Robert,
I find it funny that your senate prediction is so incredibly mild compared to your house prediction. fivethirtyeight.com gives Boxer a better than 30% chance of losing, and doesn’t have any Rs with worse than a 45% chance of losing, so a 10 seat loss is around an 8% chance. In the House, the Cook Report only has 95 Democratic seats listed and 35 of those are seats that are currently safe but could become competitive. If the election is so extreme a wave that numerous completely safe seats are being lost, I’d expect to see Murray, Gillibrand and Wyden go down as well. Why so glum on your senate predictions?
Charles, I agree that the Republican strategy is an all-in bet on obstructing Obama. My Senate prediction is much milder because I think the Democratic strategists are going to focus $$ and resources on holding the line in the Senate, where they have a hope of holding the majority by winning a relative handful of races.
(I may be overestimating their intelligence. Trying to hold the Senate and letting the House go hang would be MY strategy, so I give them the benefit of assuming they’re at least as brilliant and handsome as I am. The Senate is defensible, the House isn’t, a smart gamer will put all his chips on the fight he can win.)
And of course, from a metagame position, hedging my bet on the Senate makes me claim moderate success downstream even if there’s only a normal-sized midterm shift. (“See, I was wrong about half the equation, the House, but my prediction for the Senate was spot on.”) Whereas if there’s a 100-seat blowout and the Senate also goes nuclear, your reaction isn’t going to be “ha, Robert was only half right!” but “I can’t believe he was right about that giant sweep.”
Robert and I made different projections on this. I never predicted that the Democrats will lose their House majority. I think there’s about a 5% – 10% possibility that they will lose their Senate majority, but I think there’s a excellent chance they’ll lose 6 – 7 seats. In fact, I’m willing to make a $50-to-your-favorite-charity bet that the Dems will lose at least 6 Senate seats. I’d have to do a little more research to make a House projection.
One thing I will predict that kind of ties into some of the points that Robert made is that the voting numbers will be down, and pretty much all the losses will be on the Democratic side. A lot of people who were motivated – for various reasons – to vote for “!Bush” and/or “The First Black President” or “Hope and Change” will not turn out for this election. Robert’s covered some of that, but there’s also just the total lack of the hype and excitement that Obama’s candidacy generated. What excitement there is right now is on the Republican side and people who are likely to vote Republican (such as those who identify with the Tea Party movement).
I would love to see the Democrats lose their House majority. I’m seriously considering not contributing to that, though. My representative is Dan Lipinski (D-IL). Yes, he’s a Democrat. Yes, he inherited his seat from his father. But he voted against the healthcare bill, and in an interview with John Kass on the 2nd page of this last Sunday’s Chicago Tribune he gave as his reasons that a) he’s pro-life and has no trust in executive orders and b) it’s far more complex than needed and will cost far more than we can afford. That happens to pretty much jibe with my opinion of the bill. I may have to vote for him.
Note that I express what I want to see as a Democratic defeat and not a Republican victory. I’ve never had any great love for the GOP. They’ve gone way far afield from what they’ve claimed to be their principles. The best we can hope for is a divided legislature and executive, which will make sure that no one side can push through any more radical nonsense.
If they can’t retake the house or the senate, they lose, because the Dems are going to severely limit the power of the filibuster if they control the senate next winter).
Charles S., I doubt that. The Dems are bright enough to know that they could end up in a minority within another couple of years and will want to have that available for their own use. It would also be a radical re-writing of the Senate’s operation. It has always been a debating chamber – the cloture rule didn’t even exist for it’s first century and a quarter (IIRC) and once established the cloture requirement was at 67% until 1975. We are a democratic republic, not a democracy. The Founders very deliberately avoided creating a democracy.
This is incorrect. The Senate had a motion to cut off debate — then called a “previous question motion,” and still called that in the House of Reps, actually — since 1789. So right from the start, a simple majority could vote to end debate.
From a post by Ezra, quoting Sarah Binder, a professor who wrote a book on the history and use of the filibuster:
It’s quite possible, by the way, to set up a filibuster rule which preserves the right to debate, but which doesn’t allow a united minority to have a veto on all legislation.
At one time, the filibuster was used only rarely — although often for awful causes, such as preventing civil rights for blacks. The filibuster is now used on virtually all laws and all confirmations, creating a supermajority requirement for routine business that is entirely opposed to how the Senate has traditionally conducted business, and also opposed to how the founders imagined the Senate would work.
You can’t both argue for keeping Senate tradition intact, and argue that the current use of the filibuster should be retained. These are two entirely contradictory positions.
Unlike Ezra, I used to argue for the filibuster — at the time, it seemed like a good idea to let the party elected by a majority of the country’s voters (as the Democrats in the Senate were in 2006) have a say in governing. Now, however, the filibuster is being used to prevent the people elected by the majority of voters from governing. On balance, I think getting rid of the filibuster is the lesser evil.
So I hope the Democrats eliminate the filibuster (or weaken it hugely). If that means that Republicans get to enact their agenda when they have a majority, then I can live with that. Let the winner of elections pass laws, and let voters judge the outcomes based on what those laws are, rather than based on which party can best manipulate Senate rules.
RonF,
I agree that my statement that you quoted was overly confident. However, I’ll stand by what I said later in that comment:
If the Dems have enough votes next January to reform the fillibuster, they won the election. If they don’t have the votes to reform the fillibuster, they lost, unless they have 64 or more senate seats.
Sadly, that puts their chance of winning much lower than their chance of retaining the Senate.
My guess is R+30 (±5) in the House and R+5 (±2) in the Senate. A major factor in this is that Democrats have generational majorities in both houses (larger than the GOP has had in over a century) and simply have nowhere to go but down. They’re already holding ~20 seats that they have no business holding.
I think Robert is completely off; we’ve never seen a flip of more than 100 seats in the House and we’re not going to see it now — especially since the Democratic base is getting fired up thanks to passage of health care. Indeed, the enthusiasm gap has shrunk dramatically since health care passed, and while I still think things favor the GOP this fall, I don’t think that we’re looking at epic defeat.
What would be a disaster? For the Democrats, anything more than R+40 in the House is a disaster, as that flips control. I don’t see much difference in the Senate between 52 and 55 Dems/Indies; if the Democrats can hold their losses to -3, 57 votes gives them the opportunity to reach out to Scott Brown/Olympia Snowe types.
If the Dems can hold their losses to R+20 or below in the House and/or R+3 in the Senate, that’s a win. My guess is they won’t do that well — but again, my long-term theory that Obama is Mirror Universe Reagan expects the GOP to gain seats, but that doesn’t mean Obama is doomed in 2012. Indeed, I expect him to win in a landslide.
I think the best argument against Robert’s prediction is that my prediction would be nearly the same, and I have a record of being a really really terrible at predicting election outcomes. But even knowing my own record, I can’t get myself to see how the Dems can possibly hold onto control of the House with double-digit unemployment.
Amp, I had taken as my source an essay on this topic from the Senate’s own site.. Here’s a detail from that:
That says that the House could not close debate in the beginning and that the rule to be able to do so was added later, and that it never existed in the Senate. Based on that it seems to me that in the Senate, at least, a majority could not close debate until the cloture rule was established in 1917. Now, your essayist holds that this was an accident. He claims that the Senate got rid of that rule in ignorance and didn’t realize the implications. I’d like to see him support the concept that the people in the Senate didn’t understand how a representative body works, how the rules they had worked and what would happen when they changed the rule.
I oppose the sense of this statement that in American politics a party is elected, and that as an entity it should have a say in anything. Parties are not elected in American politics (especially in the sense that they are in parliamentary-based systems). Individuals who associate with them and have their support are, certainly. But it’s those individuals who represent us, not the parties. Those individuals should and do have a say in how the country is governed. A party should not. Consider that in the House a number of Democrats did NOT vote for the Senate plan, including my representative.
It’s not preventing them from governing. It’s preventing them from governing without having to take into account the views of a group of people that represent > 40% of the country. Is that purely democratic? No – but then we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a republic. Given the incredible power of the Federal government and how it’s power over both the State governments and the people has expanded past the vision of the Founders of this country I think that such a check on a slim majority in government is a very good thing. And I accept that when the Republicans regain the majority the same check will be placed on them by the Democrats – and that this in it’s turn will be a good thing.
Remember that it’s only one vote in the Senate that keeps the Democrats from ramming through anything they want. If they had managed to win 60% of the Senate we wouldn’t be having this conversation – at least not in this format. Frankly, I don’t think that winning 60% of the Senate is too obstructive a barrier from being able to switch from “having to negotiate” mode to “do whatever the hell you want”.
Again: You can’t claim to be for continuing the way the Senate has traditionally been run, and at the same time defend a routine supermajority requirement that is radically against how the Senate has traditionally been run.
You can argue that the way things are now are great, and shouldn’t be reformed. Or you can argue that we should have the Senate run the way it’s traditionally been run. But you can’t argue both at once, unless you’re a total hypocrite.
I’d really like to hear you address this, rather than ignore it.
Also, Republicans are not negotiating. They are adamantly refusing to negotiate. They are doing their best to prevent the Senate from running — even to the extent of filibustering bills that they themselves vote for overwhelmingly once the filibuster is overcome.
This isn’t because Republicans are evil, but because they’re rationally responding to political incentives. Now that the political parties are much more ideologically uniform than they have historically been (that is, nearly all elected Dems agree with all other elected Dems about nearly all issues, and ditto for the Republicans), the logical thing for any minority party to do is to obstruct, rather than negotiate in good faith. This is the quickest and surest route back into political power. It’s unrealistic in the extreme to expect either party to refuse to follow incentives like that.
Our current system creates no incentive for the minority to negotiate. It is, in fact, against the minority party’s best interest to negotiate. And far from causing the majority to take the minority party’s views into account, it discourages it; because the majority knows that they can’t get any Republican votes on most issues, no matter what they offer, the only people they really have any incentive to negotiate with are right-wing Democrats like Ben Nelson.
At work one night last week, I overheard my boss talking to a customer about their shared right-wing activism. My boss was talking animatedly about how ‘the silent majority need to go out and vote in November and get rid of this terrible regime’ etc etc etc.
I sat there thinking ‘lady, your Republican congressman ran unopposed in 2008, and there is no serious threat to the Republican senator that’s coming up for reelection. Your precious vote is not worth shit.’
Right-wing enthusiasm is all very well, but you’ve got to think about where it is as well as how big it is. One thing the boys at fivethirtyeight have been highlighting over the last year; Obama’s approval ratings nationwide are much lower than a year ago, but the dropoff has happened almost entirely in the South while in the rest of the country he doesn’t do so much worse than hold steady. It seems likely that the most dense and fervent enthusiasm is concentrated in places that are either already Republican strongholds, or which are naturally inclined to be so and thus would be difficult for the Dems to defend in any midterm year.
Basically, I am unconvinced that those enthusiastic Tea Partiers provide a great deal of added value to the Republican party. I don’t think the right can rely on the enthusiasm gap that they provide to stay wide open, either. Failure to stop the healthcare bill might cause despondency – and the violent actions and rhetoric we’ve seen since that defeat could spur an enthusiastic backlash in Democrat and independent voters (in the same way that Sarah Palin’s rhetorical contributions to the McCain campaign provoked a backlash). Frankly if those voters aren’t getting fired up with anger against the right – especially against the nakedly racist Birther movement – then they should be, and the added prominence they’d get from a full-on election campaign may not be to the right’s benefit.
Robert:
So how did he win NC, IN and VA in 2008?
…
@Thene: By having those candidates run at the same time as a charismatic national leader was hugely mobilizing the Democratic base with his inspirational run.
Ah – I see. I am talking about tradition from the viewpoint of “this has traditionally been the rule”. You are talking about it from the viewpoint of “this has traditionally been how the Senate has operated” – how the rule has been used or taken advantage of. Very well. I would say then that you yourself have pointed out that the Senate has broken with tradition in how it functions:
First, I’m not so sure that you can make this claim validly. For example, I suspect that in the days leading up to the Civil War the Senate and House were in similar straits. I’d like to see you document your position. But in any case, what we have is that the Senators are not acting in their traditional collegiate fashion.
And yet, this system has existed for over 200 years; in fact, according to what I’ve cited from the Senate site, matters have actually gone farther towards limiting the ability of a minority to be obstructionist over the years. So why do we have a problem now when we didn’t before? As you say, it’s because right now the legislative parties are more polarized than they were previously.
But if the filibuster was then removed, what would that lead to? One highly uniform party with a relatively small majority imposing it’s will over that of another highly uniform party. You see that as a good thing, because that’s how a purely democratic system would function and because you hold that a majority of the country voted for the Democratic party and thus for the agenda that the Democratic party leadership espouses.
I’ll challenge the last statement. I give as an example the Blue Dog Democrats, while includes my representative, Rep. Daniel Lipinski. People in his district tend to vote Democratic. But they do not favor the Democratic party leadership’s policies. Specifically, they do not favor the existence, never mind the expansion, of a right to abortion and to making it a publicly-funded entitlement. Lipinski explained that based on his views and those of his constituents he voted against the Senate bill. My point being that because it was the will of the people to put a majority of Democrats in the House and Senate does not mean that it was also their will that the Democrats should be able to put through their entire agenda. It’s very likely that they instead voted on the basis of one or a few particular issues, or on the basis that the incumbent’s opponent was a cipher (rather unfortunately prevalent these days).
That aside, I don’t see the result of the removal of the filibuster as a good thing. If the result of the existence of the filibuster is that a definite but small majority of people in both houses cannot impose their will on the electorate I say that’s a good thing. Your position is that in this situation that means that the majority party can’t implement it’s agenda and we’ll have gridlock. My position is “Good!”. I hold that a situation where the parties will not negotiate with each other and nothing gets done is superior to a situation where one party can do what it wants without negotiating. Eventually the electorate will realize that they’ve got to elect people who are going to work with each other. They’ve done so before, so I figure they’ll do so again. Then things will change; but they’ll change incrementally instead of radically like it did with the Senate healthcare bill where the filibuster came off the table because at the time the Democrats were able to cobble together 60 votes. It’ll take time, but while that may not be in the best interests of certain individuals I believe it to be in the best interests of the country.
Robert:
Robert, Obama won in those three states, none of which were at all easy states for him to win in (would you have predicted he’d take all three? I seriously doubt it). Claiming that Obama doesn’t know how to run a hard fought campaign in difficult races is just dumb. It is true that all of his races that he one before the Presidential race were easy, and it is arguable that McCain was so incompetent that Obama was pretty much guaranteed of a win in the Presidential race (arguable but doubtful), but it is absurd to claim that McCain was so incompetent that Obama had a walk in NC, IN, and VA. He didn’t. He won in those states by campaigning hard and organizing incredibly effective GotV operations.
Now, you could argue that running a campaign and being cheerleader in chief for other people’s campaigns is not at all the same thing, and that we don’t know how well he will do at getting people mobilized to work for candidates that he supports (and you can argue that the evidence so far from 3 special elections is not in his favor), and that therefore he is unlikely to be a huge help for house and senate races this fall. You could argue that he is way less popular among the Democratic base than he was in the fall of 2008, and that therefore he won’t be able to mobilize the base as much as he did in 2008.
But when you claim that he didn’t run an excellent hard fought campaign that expanded his victory into unlikely areas, it just discredits anything else you say.
No, I’m not saying he doesn’t have good personal campaigning skills. If I said that, I didn’t mean to. I was referring exclusively to his ability to manage House and Senate races (the subject of the discussion) where, indeed, the evidence post-election isn’t impressive. Of course, he’s also busy now. Of course, he’s not going to be any less busy in November.
I should also perhaps clarify that what is in many ways more important than HIS skills are the skills of his political team.
Okay, none of that do I disagree with.
Anybody got any updates on their predictions? I’m sticking with mine.
Aren’t you considering tweaking your Senate predictions after the Delaware Republicans killed their chances of taking that seat? I sure did.
A little stronger, actually, Ben, because other races have moved. Here’s the rundown. Someone else put it together, but I agree with it and restate it here. Poll numbers taken from various places and damned if I’m citing it all. Mostly taken from RCP, 538, similar sites.
5 Safe GOP pickups: Arkansas, Indiana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. (Sorry, Russ fans.) Those are all pretty much done deals, unless someone comes out with the usual live boy/dead girl routine, so no poll #s.
3 Leaning GOP: West Virginia has the Republican up about five points, Colorado has Buck anywhere from -1 to +5 (the rape case thing has gotten a bit of traction but fundraising has solidified for Buck as libertarians like me sigh, hold their noses, and decide to support him), Illinois is R up 3.
2 Tossups, Slight GOP: Nevada (hah!) has R up 2, Washington in a dead heat but late fundraising breaking heavily to the R challenger.
2 Conceivable Edgeouts: Connecticut, where the R challenger stumbled last week but seems to be recovering, and California, where Barbara Boxer is only up 3 points.
RCP is calling it R + 7 in the Senate at the present, but they are presenting current polling rather than making a forecast of the actual event. Check out the tightening trend graph under the main map:
http://realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2010/senate/2010_elections_senate_map.html
Republicans are actually going to win a bunch more Senate seats than this, of course, but most of them are open seats previously held by Republicans so they won’t be a net pickup.
The general trend in the electorate seems to be pretty solidly anti-Democratic, so I would not expect to see any huge jumps in either direction. So far the national Democratic message has been “Ken Buck was harsh to a rape victim and some guy named Iott likes to wear Nazi regalia ZOMG!” Which is maybe less effective than was hoped. Oh, and Joe Biden explaining that Democrats are running away from the administration’s accomplishments because it’s just “too hard to explain”. I’m sure that reassures everyone.
The one big surprise that could happen is that we could still pull out DE. It would take a miracle, but there are two things that make the miracle at least possible: there’s no incumbency advantage and O’Donnell is raising unbelievable amounts of money. It’s possible that she could seize the media narrative and overcome her current positioning. Very unlikely, but possible. NY and OR have similar no-chance-in-hell poll #s; they won’t flip.
So overall I’m pretty comfortable with 10. My House prediction is the one that I’ll be biting my nails over. RCP has the Republicans picking up +51.5 on current polling. The trendline is in my direction fast and hard, but time is getting short. We’ll see.
I had guessed that the Senate would make a +5 to +7 gain in the Senate. I’m sticking by that, but on the high end. I’ll be (pleasantly) surprised if they actually gain the majority. The O’Connell primary victory in Delaware may mean that the seat is held by a Democrat, but it also means that the next GOP establishment candidate will likely be more conservative than the last one they put up.
I didn’t say it above, but I was thinking then that maybe the GOP cuts the Dem’s House majority down to single digits. Now I think that the GOP may well take the House. Things are going to tighten up, they always do, but it’s a real chance now.
I attribute this to the same reasons I had before. President Obama was elected because of the historic symbolism of a black man being elected President, because he was far younger and more charismatic than his opponent and because he was not George Bush. He was not elected because the electorate approved of his agenda or of the overall agenda of the Democratic party leadership (or, frankly, even paid much attention to them). The reaction to the actions taken to make policy based on that agenda has been exactly what I expected, although apparently a surprise to the Democratic party leadership.
A well-known politician once said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Seems he was right. Too bad his own party hasn’t been listening to him. After all, the real dive in George Bush’s fortunes before the 2008 election coincided with the dive in the economy. The expiration date on “It’s Bush’s fault” was November 2nd, 2009. The true believers will hold that position for the next 6 years at least, but to the rest of the country – I’d say about 75% of the electorate – the continued presentation of that meme is an attempt to cover up incompetence and an attempt to avoid responsibility. You may think that they’re wrong, but frankly that doesn’t matter in the polling booth unless you can convince people otherwise. Good luck with that. This election will show that to be a losing strategy.
What do you think about this retired Marine (the usage preferred by the Corps is to use the term “ex-Marine” only if the Marine in question is dead or has done something absolutely dishonorable) challenging Rep. Barney Frank? All of a sudden he’s within 10 points. About the same time in his campaign that now-Sen. Brown was all of a sudden within 10 points of Martha Coakley? Barney’s now doing debates with the guy and ramping up his spending. Good. Even if Bliebat loses, every $ Barney spends is a dollar he doesn’t give someone else for their campaign.