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Thursday, September 02, 2010
What’s Coming
For quite awhile now, we’ve been reading prognostications about what the election results in November might look like. The serious ones have usually be prefaced with the caveat “if nothing changes between now and November.”
Well, we’re quickly running out of time.
In order to understand what’s going to happen in a few month’s, it’s important to know what dynamics shape midterm elections. Sean Trende at RealClearPolitics has done an able service of outlining them:
- What is the economy like?
- What do voters think of the President and his agenda?
- What is the size of the majority (if the incumbent party has one) and how recently was it established?
For those keeping score at home, the worst-case scenario looks like this:
- The economy is in the toilet
- The President’s agenda was over-ambitions and very unpopular
- The incumbent party has recently acquired a large majority
If you’re thinking that worst-case scenario gives a pretty accurate description of what’s happening this year, you would be absolutely correct. In truth, we have not seen the stars align in this way for any election in living memory. By many counts 1932 would qualify, although if we dismiss 1932 then we would have to revisit the 19th century to find an environment as bad for the incumbent party as this year is. In 1932, the Democrats rode Franklin Roosevelt’s wave to a 97-seat pickup in the House of Representatives, the closest any party has come to a triple-digit gain.
Could we see a similar defeat for the Democrats this year? I have hesitated to say so publicly until now, but my opinion is an emphatic yes!. One major caveat is that the Republicans will not be riding a resoundingly victorious presidential candidate into office. Such presidential candidates have very real effects on the outcome of elections, for two (related) reasons:
- A well-liked presidential candidate can serve to mask unpopular candidates beneath him because he is the focus of attention and his party label matters to voters. In 2008, voters who were excited to elect Barack Obama also elected candidates whom in other years they would have rejected, like Alan Grayson or Al Franken.
- The presidency is unique among American offices in its ability to set the agenda and produce change. For that reason, even presidential elections involving an incumbent are often forward-looking in nature. In contrast, Congress’s subordinate role in agenda-setting means midterm elections are by nature reactive to the record of the incumbent Congress.
Point (1) would seem to be a net negative for Republicans this year, while point (2) would be a net positive. Notice, however, that the policy platform of the opposition nor their campaign cash nor their television presence has so far entered the debate. This will prove a crucial point as the media gears up into full “horse race” mode in the fall.
In a midterm election, the views of the opposition mean little if nothing on the whole. The views of individual candidates can certainly have an effect on those races, but distributed over roughly 450 federal races and countless state and local races nationwide, those effects will tend to even out. Unless the challenger is particularly controversial or well-known for other reasons, the incumbent in races below the statewide level (governor and senator) will maintain a significant name recognition advantage all the way to Election Day more often than not. Even today, with all the news about the elections, we see results like this:
- AZ-1: “Despite Representative Ann Kirkpatrick having 95 percent name ID (with a 42 to 37 percent favorable-unfavorable rating) compared to challenger Paul Gosar’s 46 percent (23 to 6 percent favorable), Gosar leads on the ballot by a 47 to 41 percent margin.”
- CA-11: “Despite Representative Jerry McNerney having 93 percent name ID (with a 41 to 34 percent favorable-unfavorable rating) compared to challenger David Harmer’s 47 percent (19 to 8 percent favorable), Harmer currently leads McNerney on the ballot by a razor-thin 45 to 44 percent margin.”
- CO-4: “Despite Representative Betsey Markey having 98 percent name ID (with a 37 to 50 percent favorable-unfavorable rating) compared to challenger Cory Gardner’s 57 percent (23 to 13 percent favorable), Gardner leads on the ballot by a 50 to 39 percent margin.”
First, these are truly horrific numbers for the Democrats, but notice how low the challengers’ recognition levels are compared to the incumbents’. By Election Day, it will be a safe bet that more than 46% of voters in AZ-1 will know who Paul Gosar is, but it is also safe to say that percentage will likely be lower than 95%. More importantly, if 95% of the district already knows who Ann Kirkpatrick is and still wants to vote for someone else, how much good will all the advertising money in the world do? Harry Reid will face this same problem, and this is why months of negative advertising against Sharron Angle have at best put him in a tie with her. Finally, notice two of the three Democrats above are losing despite decent favorable ratings. This is some of the first evidence I have seen that we will be in an anti-Democrat year rather than an anti-liberal year.
There is very little, other than some kind of positive personal event for Obama, that is going to change any of these dynamics in the next two months. The economy is not bouncing back, and Obamacare is not going to become suddenly more popular. For those who enjoy electoral history, you are most likely going to witness a slice of it in just a few months.
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