Post-primary prediction: Democrats will salvage majority in the House
I’ve been predicting for months that Democrats will fare far better in the November midterms than most pundits predict, and now that the fall ballots are set, I’m sticking to that contrarian view.
Again, for the record, I stink at predictions. People much better at reading the tea leaves than me think my take on all this is nutty.
Here’s why I think they’re wrong.
The polls for Democrats are grim, but they’re also really grim for Republicans.
And because of the prevailing zeitgeist in Washington, pundits keep focusing on one side of the ledger, and not the other.
Here’s an example.
Today’s Politico leads with the glaring headline, “Battleground Poll: Voters see GOP takeover of Congress.”
The influential on-line journal punctuates the message with a photograph of Republican House leader John Boehner, looking, well, like the next House Speaker.
And it’s true that by a 9-point margin, voters think Republicans will take control of the House, according to this survey.
After all, that’s what the media has been telling them for months.
But the poll also says this:
In a generic matchup between the two parties, those surveyed were split 43-43 when asked if they would back a Republican or a Democrat on Election Day.
This is good news for Democrats and at odds with many other public polls, which have shown Republicans holding a single-digit edge.
Better yet for Democrats, in several key regions with numerous House and Senate seats in play — namely, the Midwest and Northeast — they hold a 5-point advantage, suggesting the party’s congressional fortunes aren’t nearly as grim as the media coverage might suggest.
Meanwhile, today’s CBS-New York times poll gives Republicans only a 2% edge among likely voters. And a PPP poll released the same day actually gives Democrats a 1% edge.
Polls show Republicans hold strong advantages in the South and the Rocky Mountain West. Indeed, Democrats are so unpopular there that it tends to skew the national statistics.
But in other regions of the country — the West, the Midwest, the Northeast — where many of this year’s key races take place, Democrats remain far more popular.
Still, Democrats will lose a ton of seats, no doubt.
That’s what happens to most parties in midterm elections when they’ve just won the White House and the nation is struggling with a down economy.
But Republicans will struggle to capitalize on those advantages because their own movement remains deeply divided and deeply unpopular.
Here’s a startling statistic: 63% of Americans disapprove of Democrats in Congress. But 73% of Americans disapprove of Republicans in Congress.
More than a third of Americans describe themselves as Democrats. But only a quarter of us say we’re Republicans.
As the GOP muddles into the fall, they are trying to focus on victory over Democrats, but find themselves entangled in an ideological feud with the tea party.
That dynamic has redefined races from the North Country’s 23rd House district all the way to Senate majority Harry Reid’s re-election battle in Nevada.
Finally — and this is more than just a sop to In Box readers who hate horse-racey stuff — I think Republicans have once again managed to stumble outside the American voter’s comfort-range on policy.
A straight-forward message of middle class tax cuts and smaller government might have sounded like a fairly easy pill to swallow, the perfect antidote to Democratic overspending.
But most Americans don’t support maintaining tax cuts for the wealthy.
They’re not comfortable with the ultra-conservative social views held by many of the GOP’s top-tier candidates.
And they’re anxious about the end-times and revolution rhetoric that has come to define the tea party.
So here’s my post-primary prediction: Democrats take a beating, and even lose a handful of seats here in New York, but retain a razor-thin majority going forward.
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Brian,
I bet there are probably many republicans that hope your predictions are correct.
If the democrats retain their majority they and the president will have to own up to what we have in two years.
The days of blaming Bush will be over (with the exception of the kook fringe that will never get over it) and voters will be able to see if these current policies (throw in some tax hikes if the “debt commission” suggests it) are working.
Are jobs being created at a good clip?
Is health care less expensive than it would have been w/o a “health care” bill?
Is the deficit being reduced?
Is government spending going down?
Do Americans feel the country is headed in the right direction?
I might even just throw the lever (or fill out that new thing we have) for the democrats to give them a little more time!
For example today’s “good news” is that drug use is rising sharply, and that home foreclosures are the highest they have been since the housing crisis started.
Who wants to own this stuff??
It’s difficult for me to see a candidate who has run two races in the past 10 months or so and lost both as “the peoples’ choice.”
For better or worse, a President’s influence extends well beyond his time in office. The course that one administration sets, and the policies they implement, can not always be undone in the following term, let alone the first few years. This seems to be a fact lost on some people, despite its obviousness.
Okay Dave, so when will the new policies kick in?
Brian don’t be such a berry picker with your stats and listen to the real people.
Which ones specifically are you asking about? You mention health care expenses – well, some of those policies don’t kick in till 2014, and the affects of them will likely not be felt till sometime after that.
I agree with what I think is the emotion behind your point of view… I too wish things could be fixed faster than they are. I wish Obama had a backspace button he could press to undo everything that went wrong before him, but he doesn’t. Reality dictates otherwise.
Fact is, there are mistakes that can be made that can take a long time to recover from. We happen to be living under some major damage from a two term president – trying to absolve him of blame and shift it to the current president, after half a term, is beyond silly. It would be akin to blaming the next president for any problems related to Obamacare.
It is going to take decades to recover from the Bush years, if we ever do. Tax cuts are nice, but fiscal responsibility means we have to pay our collective bills. When the tax cuts passed in 2001 I sent my $300 to the Concord Coalition–a bipartisan group that works for balanced budgets. I knew where it was going to lead.
Beyond, this, much of what we face are not problems that can be readily solved, but predicaments–knotty situations that need to be adjusted to and lived with. Not a happy prospect. In the meantime, I suspect we will throw the rascals out, when the current party in power can’t seem to get done. If Republicans win big this time, we will toss them out in 2012 when they haven’t made much progress either.
It’s interesting that when someone criticizes the failures of the right, the apologists respond that it’s because it was never fully implemented despite being the path we followed for 20 of the last 30 years. OTOH when Obama hasn’t produced an economic miracle in 17 months and has had furious opposition at every step, it is because it is a flawed policy.
Lotta truth in the last 2 posts, it often takes years to recover from the damage done by one administration. For example, we’re still suffering from the damage done by FDR, Truman, LBJ, Carter, Bush 1, Bush 2, Clinton, etc. It’s harder to find a President that didn’t do lasting damage than one that did.
Speaking of health care, did you guys hear Obama is waffling on his claims it’ll lower costs? Gee, musta took a genius to figure that one out.
I sincerely hope that Brian’s predictions are correct. You can’t fix everything overnight. Pres. Obama’s policies haven’t been given enough time to work yet. The best possible solution is to keep Reid and Pelosi in power for two more years. If the situation hasn’t improved by then, give them another four years.
Whenever you start to feel that things couldn’t possibly get any worse, remember two things:
1) Yes, they can and probably will get worse and;
2) It’s all Bush’s fault.
On health care, the current verdict (from the administration itself) is highlighted here on NPR: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/09/09/129745911/health-overhaul-won-t-tame-costs
There was a “front page” story as well. Indications are that costs would be lower without the bill. More folks will be insured perhaps but your costs will be higher. That is fine. But to have sold this bill as one that would reduce everyone’s costs was dishonest at best. And to attack those who tried to point out that this will not reduce costs was unfair as well. The president went after them with the same vitriol as we often see in DC.
Dave for now it looks like the Health Care issue was not handled well. Was it worth the trillion dollars it will cost over the next decade? It doesn’t look like it to me.
Dave, why has the president still done nothing to deal with Freddie and Fanny who we all know now (despite democratic rhetoric in the past) was at the heart of the housing collapse that triggered the economic meltdown? Like I tried to tell you (remember the NYT article and the quotes by democrats I posted) republicans tried to deal with that, but they were blocked by house democrats and lobbyists from the home builders association. Dave, you can continue to delude yourself with the “blame everything on Bush” ideal but at some point it just doesn’t hold water. The most damaging thing that Bush did was to increase government spending, this new guy has taken that to a whole new level.
A blog, I see, is a great equalizer. From the posts here, I see no clear winner between those who complain about Obama and those who put the blame on Bush. Except that I do not agree with those who blame Obama. Obama has done bravely, nobly, to accomplish the closest things to his ideals and promises that he could, against a sort of opposition that has been, in my opinion, dirty and unstatesmanlike, willing to lie and mislead the public to prevent a success which would be the country’s success. There would be no question about this election, but for the astute and dirty performance of the opposition and its unprecedented partisan media and their combined willingness to lie by sound-byte. The people of this country don’t know what hit them. The polls are junk artifacts. As if, God help me, the Republicans and even Tea Partyists, had they been burdened with the huge responsibility of forestalling an incomprehensibly huge economic collapse, would not have opted for “stimulus,” for “bailout!” What cynicism, what shameful conduct, Boehner and McConnell! Your party above your country! Discipline above honesty! Carramba, how can there be two views of this? Does anybody really, really believe that a modern world power can be run with a shrunken government and a dog eat dog moral and economic system? Buffalo equals Calcutta? Really, you all, we’re no better than the daily news, which seems always to give us two jerks of opposing ideologies to listen to. I hereby bow out, since I’m no better than average at providing information rather than opinion, and since I despair of a genuine conversation here. I will grant the blog this, though: it isn’t all on one side. But this is faint praise when the better information and the greater humanity (not to mention honesty) are on Obama’s and the liberals’. So it has always seemed to me, since the days when think tanks deserved the nickname.
Dang Tim, do you write socialist propaganda in your off hours?
Sometimes I just don’t get it. Folks like Tim like to saddle all the dishonesty and blame on one set of folks and call another set of folks that are being dishonest “brave and noble”.
Like I just said above the department of health and human service has put out a report that says that the “affordable care” act is going to make health care MORE expensive for all Americans. Our brave and noble leader told us that it was going to reduce our costs. The folks criticized above told us that it was going to increase our costs. How can the ones who told us the truth be the dishonest ones???????