Here’s my quick take on the elections yesterday. Virginia is a red state again. The race for governor was a blow out. In New Jersey the Republican defeated the highly unpopular incumbent and in New York the Democrat won the special election for the House. What does it all mean?
Without Obama on the ticket it’s tough to get the Democrat base out to vote. Democrats will not be successful in battleground states if their party is perceived as the tax and spend party. The GOP is a joke. They picked Dede Scozzafava to run in the special election in New York and when she dropped out she endorsed the Democrat. If the GOP had picked Hoffman there’s a better chance he would have won. It says a lot about what the choices facing voters in the Northeast. They can either pick a Democrat or a Republican who is actually a Democrat.
New Jersey is purely a local election. Republican Chris Christie defeated incumbent John Corzine because New Jersey is a corrupt mess. I’ll stick with what I said on Monday. There’s not much to learn from an election like this, but the nation is looking more like 2004 than 2008,
In 2005 centrist Democrats won key races in the mid-term elections. It was a signal of things to come in 2006. The Democratic Leadership Council found moderate Democrats to run for office against incumbent Republicans. The Democrats successfully ran against the Republicans under the banner of fiscal responsibility. This is a real problem for the Democrats in future elections. Here is what I wrote back in November 2005:
If the Democrats become a majority party again, it will not be a liberal party. To win, Democrats must run as moderates. If that is the case, the conservative movement is winning. If the country is moving to the right it would make sense that the opposition party is moving to the right as well.
I was dead on in this analysis and it’s the problem facing the Democratic Party leadership. The leaders in Congress are mostly liberal and they owe their majority to Democrats who ran as fiscal conservatives in 2006. The vast majority of Americans are for lower taxes and fiscal responsibility. Democrats are in large part in favor of more entitlements and higher taxes. The congressional race in New York (no matter the outcome) is evidence that Americans are getting tired of Republican and Democrats. There’s a large opportunity for a real fiscally conservative leader to emerge out of the big government Republican wreckage.
As I said in 2005, it’s difficult to draw too many conclusion from off-year elections. However, some trends can start to emerge. The AP is already spinning tomorrow’s election. Today’s AP headline: “GOP victory Tuesday won’t erase party’s problems.” Is this news or an opinion? The answer is easy and the press bias is laughable.
So even if political winds start blowing harder behind them and even if they can capitalize on Democratic missteps, Republicans still will have a long way to go over the next year because of the party’s own fundamental problems–divisions over the path forward, the lack of a national leader and a shrinking base in a changing nation.
Sounds a lot like the Democrats circa November 2005.
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