Time for a chill pill, Dems
by digby
The big liberal meme last week, particularly after the election nobody even knew was happening, was that Democrats are fucked pretty much forever because of our weakness in down-ticket and state houses. This follows up the other meme which says that the Democrats have a bunch decrepit old people leading the party and nobody teed up to take over. Everyone was in a tizzy. Maddow mentioned it last night in her forum and everyone once against started wringing their hands in despair.
Michael Tomasky took a look at this story and found that there’s less than meets the eye:
Is it really as bad as all that? No, it’s not. And here are the two main reasons why.
First: The party that controls the presidency for eight years almost always gets killed at the state level over the course of those eight years. And it stands to reason—if people are unhappy with the way things are going, which they typically are about something or other, they’ll vote for the out-of-power party.
So political scientist Larry Sabato has studied this question going back to FDR’s time and found that every two-term presidency (he’s counting things like the Kennedy-Johnson period from 1960-68 as a single two-term presidency) except one has taken a huge beating at the congressional and state levels. You’ve perhaps read recently that during Barack Obama’s term, the Democrats have lost 913 state legislative seats. That’s a hell of a lot, but it’s not that crazily out of line with the average since FDR/Truman, which is 576. Only Ronald Reagan managed to avoid such losses—the GOP actually gained six state legislative seats during his years, which was the time when the Dixiecrats and some Northern white ethnics started becoming Republicans.
Sabato’s piece, which ran last December in Politico, is even headlined “Why Parties Should Hope They Lose the White House.” You win at 1600, you start losing everywhere else. Granted the Obama-era losses are unusual. I’d suppose they’re mostly explained by the lagging economy and stagnant wages. Race has to have something to do with it, too, and Tea Party rage, and of course the fact that Democrats don’t vote in off-year elections. Indeed this last factor may be the biggest one, because the Democratic Party has become more and more reliant in recent years on precisely the groups of voters who have long been known not to participate as much in off-year elections—minorities, young people, single women.
So sure, it blows to look at a map like the one embedded in Yglesias’s piece and see all that red indicating total Republican control in some state capitals where that shouldn’t really be the case: Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio. And it blows harder for the people who live there, although obviously a majority of them don’t think so.
But I would make a couple quick arguments here. First, 2014 and especially 2010 were unique election years, with high unemployment in 2010 and high-octane right-wing fury in both. That flipped some state houses and executive mansions that will return to the blue column eventually, in more normal times.
Second, there are a lot of blue states that still elect Republican governors, whereas there aren’t many red states that will elect a Democrat. Three presidential-level red states have Democratic governors (Missouri, Montana, and West Virginia), and they’re about the only ones you could imagine doing so as you look down the list. Whereas nine blue states have Republican governors. Most of those governors are comparatively moderate, and it doesn’t really change the fundamental nature of Massachusetts that it elects a Republican governor some of the time.
This sounds right to me. The Obama years are unique for the two main reason Tomasky flags. Race — yes, Obama’ being the first black president drove turnout among the wingnuts. I don’t think that’s in dispute.
The second though is much more important: he took office during an epic recession. It was so bad that his entire term has been spent crawling out of it and the recovery happened with zero help from Republicans. In fact, they did everything they could to hinder it, obstructing almost every attempt to enact policies that could have helped and turning the process into a three ring circus. They spent the entire time throwing Obama’s promise to unite the country back in his face, blaming him for failing to magically fix everything. The 2010 gerrymander baked that whole dynamic into the cake for the following decade.
Anyway, I think Tomasky’s also right about this:
But—the party affiliation of the man or woman in the White House does change the fundamental nature of the United States. And that brings us to my second reason why the Democrats aren’t yet finished. They have the presidency. What did Elvis Costello say—“don’t bury me cuz I’m not dead yet”? Well, you’re not doomed yet as long as you’re living in the White House.
Let me ask you this question. Assuming this Sabato correlation between White House control and losses at other levels holds up, how many of you Democrats reading this would take this deal: Democrats lose the White House next year and in 2020 in exchange for, say, 1) retaking control of the House of Representatives in 2022 and 2) picking up 576 state legislative seats over the next eight years?
I guess some Democrats would take that deal, but I think a small minority, and rightly so. Losing the White House means a 7-2 conservative Supreme Court majority for 30 more years. That could well mean, would likely mean, a decision in the next few years overturning same-sex marriage, and a dozen other horrors, from campaign finance to corporate power to religious issues to civil rights matters to a number of Fourteenth Amendment-related issues including Roe v. Wade. It means, combined with GOP majorities in both houses of Congress, God knows what legislatively; the end of the federal minimum wage? A flat tax, or at least a radically reduced top marginal rate? Entitlement “reform”? And don’t forget not just what they’d do, but what they’d undo. It means repeal of Obamacare, legislation that effectively rescinds Dodd-Frank, all of Obama’s work on immigration and carbon ripped to pieces, and on and on and on. And, you know, like, another war.
Democrats must control one branch while the GOP is in the throes of its lunatic phase. The courts are at best a stalemate. The House is probably lost to the Dems for another five years at least and the Senate is unreliably swinging back and forth. The presidency is the only way to keep the lid on something really bad happening. And if you think it won’t just listen to the crazies who are running for president and remember that the GOP once put Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency.
On the other hand, I don’t think it’s necessarily a trade-off. If Democrats would wake up to the partisan battle that’s happening maybe they would realize that voting for Republican governors in blue states is a fools game that’s only making the right wing stronger. Maybe they would also wake up to the fact that they need to mobilize themselves permanently. There are billions of dollars floating around the political system being used for bullshit Super PAC ad buys that will amount to nothing. Maybe some of our friendly billionaires need to put some of that money toward effective Democratic electoral infrastructure. If politics is now a matter of getting your pet billionaires on board, this would be a very helpful project. It’s pathetic but that’s how our politics roll in a post Citizens United world.
In the meantime everyone should probably try to chill a little bit about this so-called Democratic fatal flaw. It’s the sort of thing that leads the party to start recruiting right wingers and saying we need to “compromise” on guns and abortion. They’re always looking for a reason to go right. I don’t think it’s going to work any better than it ever did, but it will certainly make the Big Money Boyz happy.
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