Hoffman And The Failures Of The National GOP
Digg 
Stumble Upon 
Newsvine 
Slashdot 
Mixx 
Diigo 
Delicious 
Reddit 
Facebook
Comparisons between NY-23 and NY-20 can be overdone, but what I found interesting in Hoffman’s loss last night in northern New York was the similarity of his campaign to that of Jim Tedisco in the special election earlier this year. Both were put in the national spotlight by GOP leaders who wanted to use the candidates as examples of Republican revival; both districts were flooded with national money and advertisements that ignored all those “parochial” issues and made the contests into referenda on the national Democratic agenda. Perhaps not coincidentally, both failed in historically very Republican districts. To the extent that the national Democratic agenda had anything to do with these elections, the national GOP’s gambit backfired when the Democratic candidates who had aligned themselves with important parts of the administration’s agenda prevailed in traditionally hostile territory.
We should not invest any one or two House races with that much significance, but it seems somewhat telling that given the chance to put another effectively Republican representative in Washington there were not enough voters in deepest upstate New York willing to do it. At the level of state government, however, large, albeit skewed, electorates opted for anti-incumbency. That suggests that the taint of the national GOP does not extend to state parties and their candidates, but candidates for federal office who are embraced by national Republican leaders continue to face significant resistance even in places that ought to be their strongholds.
Tedisco had some additional advantages that he managed to squander. He was the Republican nominee, and he was a much better-known local politician than the rookie candidate Hoffman, all of which gave him a large early lead over Scott Murphy. Tedisco blew his lead, and Hoffman scarcely had time to establish one, but the flaws that marred both campaigns were very similar. Even though Hoffman was not as much of an outsider as his opponents made him out to be, he did everything he could to make himself out to be a carbon-copy national Republican with no feel for local concerns and no obvious interest in the place he was supposed to be represented. Murphy was a recent transplant to the area with connections to the district thanks to his wife, but despite Tedisco’s efforts to paint Murphy as a newcomer who knew little about the district it was the tone-deaf national Republican push on behalf of Tedisco that made him, the known quantity and well-liked local, seem as if he did not understand the voters and their interests. Nationalizing both races not only imported all of the toxic baggage the national party had acquired during the Bush years, but it also made candidates who could genuinely claim to be full members of their communities and turned them into something more like movement activist zombies.
The reassuring story that movement conservatives have been telling themselves last night and this morning is that the local GOP establishment in the district was to blame for creating the conditions for defeat. It is true that the irregular nomination of Scozzafava created an absurd situation for the district’s Republican voters, but it seems to be a bad sign for Hoffmanites that a district that routinely gives 60-70% of its general election votes to the Republican candidate could not muster a simple majority of special election voters for Hoffman. As we kept hearing, and as the Virginia and New Jersey votes do show, the off-year voting was skewed towards angry, mobilized conservatives and right-leaning independents. A special House election in an off-year ought to have magnified the impact of such voters. In other words, the conditions were quite good for Hoffman. Movement conservatives might like to say now that Hoffman has failed that the odds were always very long and victory improbable, but this special election was almost tailor-made for an activist-backed, slogan-repeating, box-checking, party-line mimic of every national Republican and movement conservative obsession. (Incidentally, the importance of Hoffman’s opposition to card-check in the usual GOP talking points on NY-23 is a rather odd and possibly significant indication of how far removed from their voters national Republicans have become.) It didn’t work. Hoffmania did not catch on among the GOP’s natural constituents in what is normally a safe district, so how likely is it that this brand of conservative politics will catch on elsewhere?
One thing that seems crucial to emphasize is how much this was not a “revolt” or an explosion of anti-GOP establishment fervor. I want to be very precise here. Many voters in NY-23 revolted against their local party leadership by backing Hoffman, but the outpouring of support for Hoffman came from the very center of what remains of the national Republican establishment. Viewed locally, Hoffman was not the establishment candidate. However, he was the national GOP establishment’s candidate, which is why I do not regard his defeat as such a great loss. During the last election we saw how movement and party leaders respond to real, threatening insurgencies from the right, and it was opposite of the warm embrace given to Hoffman.
To the extent that last night signaled the amount of right-populist discontent in the country, the establishment support for Hoffman represented yet another episode of the national party attempting to feed off of populist enthusiasm to sustain its own decaying body and to co-opt (and then ignore) populist themes while having no intention of ever governing in the interests of their constituents should they regain power. The prominence of the pseudo-populist Palin in all of this was significant. Her presence served as a reminder of how often conservative voters are pandered to rhetorically and symbolically and how uninterested Republican leaders are in serving the interests of their constituents once elections are concluded. Hoffman’s failure may mean that rank-and-file Republican voters in once-safe districts are no longer going to be taken for granted, and it could mean that their votes will have to be earned with policy proposals that address their concrete interests. The national and Congressional party has no clue how to do this, and so they keep failing. Candidates at the state level seem to grasp this basic idea and have started having some success.
P.S. Perhaps it isn’t nice to kick them while they’re down, but it’s worth noting that Owens’ victory is another in the growing list of Democratic pick-ups at least partially engineered by the Club for Growth.
Filed under: politics
15 Responses to “Hoffman And The Failures Of The National GOP”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
The NRCC funded Scozzofava to the tune of nearly $1 million dollars. If that doesn’t make her candidacy was pretty solidly establishment, I don’t know what does. Most of the national figures like Pawlenty didn’t jump on board until after Palin (who is not popular in DC circles) endorsed Hoffmann AND after it was clear that Scozzofava was a disastrous pick who was going down in flames.
Whatever one wants to make of the election, it has forced the NRSC to disavow involvement in open primary campaigns, as it has in Florida. That alone is a rather crucial victory.
As for the Club for Growth, well, they really didn’t have much to lose. Owens was arguably a better candidate for them than Scozzofava.
The one point that I think really hurt Hoffmann is his McCainish stand on immigration. I think that probably did more damage than supporting card check.
What I can’t believe is that a traditionally Republican district, having seen the Presidency and the Congress go to the Democrats and having seen the proposals that the Democrats have put forward regarding climate change, health care, etc., decided to ELECT ANOTHER DEMOCRAT and strengthen the President and the Democratic majority in Congress!
I don’t think the Democrats realize how mainstream they have become. They need to lose their trepidation and move forward with their agenda. The American public largely supports it.
Opposition to card check, and other union-supported legislative fiats designed to preserve the power and influence of unions where regular political activity has failed is not one of the problems with ‘movement’ GOP members.
Perhaps I’m missing something here and someone could help me out. Does Mr. Larison support the EFCA and it’s awful arbitration and secret ballot destroying provisions?
I think we’ve seen time and time again that unions of today are committed to accomplishing with legislation what their members and especially leaders could never convince a skeptical public to accept.
It is patently preposterous to do away with the secret ballot. Most moderate democrats I’ve talked to agree. The EFCA has other items that will damage 90 percent of workers to favor a well-connected 10 percent. I’ll call this ‘movement obsession’ a principled stand.
In an area where a significant number of GOP members are union members, opposing their pet issue is generally a bad idea.
It is patently preposterous to do away with the secret ballot.
It does a lot a good at companies that like to fire and intimidate union supporters prior to votes. The cards do have to be verified. If 51% of the employees have signed cards, then why should they have to vote, other than to give the employer time for intimidation?
It should be obvious, but a secret ballot allows workers to anonymously, and without intimidation from either the employer or the union organizers, vote their conscience and opinion.
To put it in a way that follows your own logic precisely, If 50 percent of the employees can’t be persuaded to vote anonymously and safely for something that is so overwhelmingly to their advantage, then why have card check, other than to give the unions time for intimidation?
Most of the argument for card check seems to be based on the assumption of heavy-handed employer intimidation. If this is so out of control, then why not refine the laws that define what an employer can and cannot claim or say to its workers.
Card check, union favoritism, and the various ways that todays discredited unions are trying to achieve their goals of more money for workers and more power for union stewards aren’t worth ignoring for the sake of convenience. One needs look no further than the Transit Workers Union in Philly shutting down the city in spite of a generous offer, UAW’s repeated strong arm tactics to extort unfundable health care benefits, or the Boeing machinists unions antics to see why unions can no longer persuade normal people to join or the public at large to support their cause.
“movement activist zombies” – love the phrase. By all means, kick the Club for Growth when they’re down. What have they done to deserve anything but contempt? Speaking of phrases, “Club” sounds terrible, combine it with “for Growth” and it becomes cabalistic, obscene, and/or about gardening.
Great analysis, you need a booking agent to get on TV.
NY-23 is a perfect example of the merits of Instant Runoff Voting – that we in St. Paul, MN approved for municipal elections on Tuesday.
Fast Jimmy – “Most of the argument for card check seems to be based on the assumption of heavy-handed employer intimidation. If this is so out of control, then why not refine the laws that define what an employer can and cannot claim or say to its workers.”
It’s assumed because it’s true! The problem is employers routinely break the laws currently on the books. And just how do union organizers intimidate their fellow workers without any power to do so? The dreaded union evil eye?
I’m not a union member, but I’ve never seen the problem with card check. We sign up for all kinds of things, I don’t see why signing up for a union is any different. Union are private organizations, not public governmental institutions. The government doesn’t really have any business telling workers how they sign up for unions, whether it be card check or elections, as long as it is done fairly and openly, without corruption. Clearly there’s corruption in unions already, and in their elections. I don’t see that it would be worse with card check. It could reasonably be said to be better. But again, telling private unions that they can’t choose to unionize through card check rather than elections seems like the kind of intrusion into the private sphere that conservatives usually abhor. Imagine how they would react if the government forced shareholders in corporations to use standard elections protocols like one man, one vote, or completely anonymous voting. If corporate shareholders don’t have to vote anonymously, why should we force workers to? It seems like the deck gets stacked against working people every step of the way, and in favor of the wealthy and powerful. How exactly is that a conservative social or political philosophy?
What Dick Armey’s army doesn’t seem to understand is that Republicans north of the Mason Dixon line are not and don’t want to be Texans. If they prevail the Republican party will remain a party of the old confederacy.
I agree with that point, conradg. It seems backwards, somehow. If you’re a millworker in, like, Steubenville Ohio, you probably think the union is a pretty conservative institution, actually. It at least tries to keep your job in America, in your hometown. It keeps you and your neighbors middle-class and sending your kids to decent schools, or at least it used to. It’s what made the job you have today something your dad could be happy and proud to pass on to you. Anyway, I’m sure someone else could go on and on about the socially conservative properties of unions. That doesn’t mean that cardcheck is right, or that unions can’t be corrupt or mindlessly Democrat – just maybe that conservatives shouldn’t consider unions the archenemy, as we do today. And maybe we could consider both sides of a union issue like cardcheck before we decide it’s a plot to assassinate the Romanovs.
A major similarity between Hoffman and Tedisco was that they, and their Republican analysts and advisers, were fooled about the nature of their districts by the long Republican histories and lopsided Republican registrations these happened to have.
Any careful look at recent elections in these districts would have shown that the real federal level partisan voting split in both had narrowed to very little. Both districts had long time Republican House incumbents who would normally win 65-35 against token challengers. But U.S. Senate and Presidential elections statewide weren’t terribly competitive either the other way. The consistent higher federal Democratic performances in those and subtle Democratic trends in the districts got discounted.
Apparently a few Democratic analysts looked closely at all the numbers and saw that if/when there was a hard partisan shakeout, the Democratic and Democratic-leaning percentage would add up to at least the middle or mid-high forties. That meant opportunities for a win against an incumbent gone bad (Gillibrand/Sweeney), an opponent with illusions of having a safely Republican district when it was actually already 50/50 (Murphy/Tedisco), or a split Republican field (Owens/Hoffman&Scozzafava).
As a union brother, I cannot tell you how touched I’ve been over the past year to hear Republicans to passionately defend the rights of workers to hold a secret ballot to decide on union representation, when for the last thirty years Republicans have fought tooth and nail to prevent any kind of ballots on union organizing whatsoever.
This is similar to the recent vociferous Republican defences of the Medicare program(!), and indicates the extent to which progressives are succeeding at framing the issues.
“Does Mr. Larison support the EFCA and it’s awful arbitration and secret ballot destroying provisions?”
In fact, I don’t support EFCA. I mentioned the odd focus on card check in this special election because I don’t think most voters understand Republican objections to the legislation, and I am fairly sure that voters who get most of their information about this legislation from unions will see die-hard opposition to card check as nothing less than opposition to the rights of labor to organize. As commenter jamie notes, the GOP does not exactly have a reputation of defending the interests of labor. Emphasizing how hostile their candidate was to card check ensured that Scozzafava and her husband could drive labor voters into the Democratic camp very easily.
Let’s just be honest: Republican opposition to card check is simply part of their general opposition to unions, and to anything that would make it easier for unions to organize workers. If card check made it harder for unions to organize, Republicans would be all for it, regardless of whether it did away with “secret ballots” or not. And the same is true for Democrats. They are in favor of card check because it makes it easier to organize workers into unions, that’s all. The real issue with card check is whether we want to encourage or discourage union organizing. It’s got little to nothing to do with secret ballots versus an open process. Both sides are simply being practical in pursuing their particular interests, which in the case of unions are diametrically opposite one another. That’s why the issue is so polarized, and why pro/con arguments about the actual specifics of card check hardly matter, and always break back down to pro/con attitudes towards unions. If you think labor unions are bad for the country, chances are you’re going to be against card check, and vice-versa, regardless of the nature of card check itself. It’s not really that complicated. As Daniel notes in NY-23, if the electorate is composed of sizable numbers of union members and their families, it’s very hard to Republicans to win elections while opposing card check. There’s nothing mysterious about this. Owens took advantage of this, and Scozzafava helped emphasize this. In a different kind of Republican district, with fewer unions members, the issue would not have helped Democrats at all, and would likely have hurt them.
Fast Jimmy, on November 5th, 2009 at 12:25 am Said:
“It should be obvious, but a secret ballot allows workers to anonymously, and without intimidation from either the employer…”
Please stop lying.