Politics is cyclical, and Scott Brown’s victory in last night’s special Senate election in deep-blue Massachusetts proves that 2010 will be nothing like 2008.
Since Barack Obama has taken office, the Democrats have lost control of the governor’s offices in Virginia and New Jersey, forfeited the opportunity to control the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and now the United States Senate seat previously held by Ted Kennedy.
For the Democrats, there is no nice way to spin the loss. Massachusetts does not have a single Republican House member, and the party is virtually an endangered species in the state legislature. It is not a “purple” or competitive state – Massachusetts is Democrat country, and yet the incumbent Attorney General could not win a race that should have been a walk in the park.
The party in power brought this debacle on themselves.
Consider how different today’s political environment would be if Democrats had steered a centrist course since they took control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. What if they had moved a stimulus bill that could garner a hundred Republican votes in the House, perhaps by making some of the Bush tax cuts permanent. And, instead of “cap and trade,” they moved a bill aimed at incentivizing green, low emissions energy technology.
What if the Democrats’ health care bill had been narrowly tailored to specific failures of the health care system, instead of the massive big government approach that has caused this “must pass by August” legislation to languish into the New Year?
If the Democrats had chosen this course, with a likely 100 (or more) Republican votes for each of these solutions, the President’s approval numbers would likely be in the high 50’s, we would have still won Virginia but lost New Jersey, and Republicans would be divided between those who voted for Obama’s agenda and those who opposed it.
And Democrat Martha Coakley would be packing her bags for Washington.
Yet instead of this centrist course, we have seen the Democrats misinterpret the results of 2008, wrongly assuming the Obama/Democrat win was a mandate for policies far more liberal than the American people are comfortable with.
Here in California, we can see the manifestations of the same political trends that led to the results in even-more-blue Massachusetts. Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat was just named to analyst Charlie Cook’s list of nine seats held by Democrats that are now “in play.” Meanwhile, the Democratic Governor’s Association is so concerned about Jerry Brown’s ‘campaign’ for governor (not yet even declared) that they last week announced an independent expenditure campaign to bail him out.
The momentum generated by the Scott Brown victory comes early enough in the cycle to influence candidate recruitment for 2010 in California, where a number of Democrat-held seats are vulnerable to the right Republican challenger. Candidate filing for the June primary opens next month, and forward momentum generates a deeper candidate bench.
This dramatic shift in the political dynamic since 2008 is due in part to a major shift among independent voters. Before the Obama/Reid/Pelosi health care bill made it onto the national stage in July, independents favored Republicans by just one point, 43% to 42%, according to Gallup.
Today, the one point Republican advantage among independents has swelled to 22%, driven in large part by rejection of the Democrats’ health care prescription. Independent voters will determine who the next Senator and Governor in California are.
Like Massachusetts, independents constitute a large part of several key California districts. The shift of independent voters toward Republicans in an otherwise "blue" state provides proof positive that it can be done, and that independents are thinking and voting differently than they did in 2006 and 2008.
This all begs the question of how the Democrats will react. Will they pull a Bill Clinton and tack to the center in response to public rejection of the Democrats’ agenda, even in Massachusetts?
That’s unlikely. There is simply too much institutional pressure within the Democrat establishment for a course correction to the center. Barack Obama has surrounded himself with hard core liberals (no Clintonian “New” Democrats to be found in this White House), and Democrat committee chairs who control the power structure in Congress are hard nosed liberals from bulletproof districts. They’re not likely to give up their big opportunity to ram through their agenda, regardless of what that agenda means for the centrist “blue dog” Democrats from Republican districts who actually do have to worry about re-election in November.
Is it 1994 yet? That remains to be seen. Certainly the political forces are lining up in a very similar way, but those forces can only be fully expressed when there are sufficient open (and therefore, competitive) seats in Congress. The Republican revolution of 1994 was possible due to the large number of retirements that cycle, and thus far we have not seen a similar number of retirements from this Congress.
Yet, we do see a Democrat leadership that seems bent on moving forward with their (unpopular) agenda, regardless of the problems it will cause for the members of their own caucus who are going to have to struggle to hold on to their Republican-leaning districts, won in the Obama wave of 2008. As that agenda moves ahead, it creates more opportunities for Republican pickups.
What is fairly certain is that Republicans will pick up substantial numbers in both chambers, plus state legislatures, in virtually any scenario.
In the meantime, Scott Brown’s election means “cap and trade” and forced unionization “card check” are dead, and the Democrats’ big government health care plan is on life support. The Senate numbers alone now mean Democrats will have to work with Republicans to get anything done, an approach they should have taken in the first place.