Just how bad could things get for the Democrats when voters head to the polls in November?
Two years after they handed President Barack Obama a sweeping electoral victory -- and four years after turning control of Congress over to the Democrats in frustration over Bush Administration policies -- the president and his party are now the source of an even deeper frustration for a growing number of Americans.
Anger over the stalled economy, the soaring deficit and, to some, the seemingly reckless expansion of government is boiling over throughout the country. The odds that the Democrats could lose control of one or even both houses of Congress are soaring too. That would make it more difficult for Obama to advance a legislative agenda and significantly complicate his 2012 reelection plans.
As the campaign kicks into overdrive for the two month post-Labor Day sprint towards election day, the biggest question of this political season appears to be: ‘How big the GOP victory and is there anything Democrats can do to contain it?’ Democrats understand that they are in trouble; they simply hope that it is not as bad as advertised. They are hoping that the string of bad news they received in August can be partially offset by a strong campaign in the fall, when more people begin paying attention to politics.
“There are a whole bunch of folks in Congress who are in tough races this year who stood up and did the right thing, without a lot of fanfare, knowing that they were going to be making themselves politically vulnerable,” the president said recently at a Washington fundraiser for Senator Patty Murray, one of those endangered Democrats.
But many experts believe that there is little that the president can do at this point to salvage the situation. "The numbers are eye-catching. Republicans are dramatically gaining in all categories," University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato told McClatchy Newspapers. "It's generated by a rotten economy and a strong conservative reaction against President Obama."
And Republicans know they have hit a vein with their attacks on the president’s economic policies. Recently House Minority Leader John Boehner suggested that the President fire his economic team. "President Obama's agenda represented 'change' once, but now it is time for him to change course, abandon his job-killing policies, and find himself a new economic team," said Boehner in a statement issued Friday after the Labor Department announced that the unemployment rate had hit 9.6 percent for August.
Worried Democrats are pushing the president to focus far more sharply on the economy as the elections near. Aides have packed his schedule with events this week, starting with a Labor Day speech in Milwaukee. On Wednesday he’ll be in Cleveland, where he is expected to propose several new measures aimed at spurring job growth, including a reduction in taxes for businesses that invest in research and development. Of course, it’s far from clear that he’ll have enough support in Congress to win passage of the measures—and even if he does, it’s far too late to change the trajectory of the economy by November. Still, Democratic strategists hope the moves will at least convince voters that the Administration is doing all it can to get things moving again.
Going into the summer, it seemed that the real challenge for Democrats was to prevent sure defeat from turning into outright disaster. But the most recent polls suggest that they have failed at the task.
In a particularly upbeat note for the GOP, Republicans hold a 10- point lead over Democrats among likely voters who were asked which party’s candidate they preferred in November. That margin is the largest for the GOP since 1942, and the collapse has been swift: at the Fourth of July Democrats still led in Republicans on this question, if only by a single point, 47 percent to 46 percent.
There is very little hopeful data Democrats can point to against the notion of a GOP tidal wave this November. In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll released Sept. 3rd, 78 percent of respondents said the country was headed in the wrong direction. That is a level of disaffection that exceeds the 2006 mid-term elections, as well as 1994, when the intensity of voter outrage produced huge swings in the congressional balance of power. In 2006, Republicans lost 30 seats in the House of Representatives and six in the Senate; in 1994 Democrats lost 51 seats in the House and 14 in the Senate. In both cases the opposition party took control of the Congress.
The economy remains the biggest problem for the Democrats, thanks to anemic growth and stubbornly high unemployment. President Obama’s job approval ratings have fallen below 45 percent.
But the antipathy toward Obama and the Democrats also stems from the White House’s failure to convince voters that the achievement of such signature goals as health care reform, financial regulatory reform and the giant economic stimulus package has been good for the country.
Obama and his advisors may argue that the stimulus saved the economy from complete collapse – a view that many independent economists share. But Republicans have done a far more effective job convincing voters that much of the money has been wasted by an overreaching, underperforming Federal government. With the jobs picture especially gloomy, the wait for tangible results continues among average Americans.
“A year that began with Americans bracing for a jobless recovery has instead turned into a full-blown search for both jobs and a recovery,” Boehner said Friday, “We need a Congress and a White House that will listen to the American people, who are asking ‘where are the jobs?, and help end the uncertainty for small businesses.”
The scorecard of Democratic misfortune and missteps so far suggests that the House may already be lost and the Senate is more in play each day. There are now predictions that Democrats, who currently control 255 of the 435 seats in the House, could lose upwards of 50 seats this fall. The question is no longer the size of the defeat, but the scale of the disaster. Will it look like the Republican rout of 1994 or the Democratic whupping of 2006?
In wishful Democratic circles, the hope is that 2010 looks like 1982, when high unemployment and low job approval ratings of a first-term president threatened the future of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Instead, Republicans lost a modest 26 seats in the House and none in the Senate. Reagan went on to win reelection by the largest electoral-vote margin ever (525-13).
Over the last four years, Democrats have picked up 55 seats in the House and 14 in the Senate. Republicans need 39 Democratic seats to regain control of the House. In the Senate, the magic number is ten. While that remains a difficult and unlikely task, it is now regarded a much more doable than just a few weeks ago.
On Sept. 4th, non-partisan analyst Charlie Cook, of the highly-regarded Cook Political Report declared that control of the Senate was now within GOP grasp.
“To be sure, a 10-seat gain for Republicans remains hard. Eighteen Senate seats could plausibly turn over -- a dozen held by Democrats and six by Republicans,” Cook wrote.
A few of those Democratic seats are irretrievably lost: Opens seats, where there is no incumbent on the ballot, in South Dakota, Indiana, and Delaware are already being counted as Republican pickups. Democratic incumbents in Arkansas, Colorado and Washington are trailing their GOP opponents in the latest polls. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, a two-term Democratic incumbent in Arkansas, is behind her Republican challenger, Rep. John Boozman, by almost 30 points in the most recent polls.
Meanwhile, the GOP’s open seats in Missouri, Ohio, and Kentucky seem safe, while the open GOP seats in Florida and New Hampshire still hold little promise for Democrats. “None of the Republican leads in these five states is insurmountable,” writes Cook, “but at this point, you would rather be the GOP nominee than the Democratic one in each place.”
And that in the end may the story of the 2010 midterm elections: it is better to be the Republican than the Democrat.
Obama’s current circumstances recall those of another troubled first-term Democrat, Harry Truman. He lost control of Congress in 1946, when ineffective government tinkering with a bad economy left him with a 32 percent approval rating. Democrats lost 12 seats in the Senate and 55 in the House that year.
After that election, one writer in TIME Magazine observed: “…there was no mistaking the fact that the majority of Americans had cast a protest vote. It was a cold but nonetheless angry voice raised against many things: price muddles, shortages, black markets, strikes, Government bungling and confusion, too much Government in too many things. The majority of the people were fed up with all that.”
Democrats are about to find out just how fed up people are with all this.
The good news for Obama is that, against the odds, Truman won reelection in 1948.
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