2010 Will Not Be Like 1994
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Reading another Politico article on the 2010 midterms, I found the treatment of the ‘94 elections tremendously unsatisfying. Cook writes:
It is the 1994 election that actually draws the greatest comparison with 2010. As was the case 15 years ago, there is a charismatic young Democratic president engaged in a long, messy battle for health care reform. And the Democratic numbers in Congress are eerily similar now to what they were then. Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 with 258 Democrats in the House and 57 in the Senate. Obama was elected last fall with 257 House Democrats and 57 Democratic senators.
Countless articles have been written that in some way touch on the elections in 1994, but one thing almost all of them have in common is their consistent omission of any mention of the impact of NAFTA on Democratic turnout and voting that year. In the wake of losing the NAFTA battle, unions and their members were disaffected going in to the midterms, and this compounded the problems that national Democrats were already having thanks to numerous retirements and their own complacency in the face of a serious Republican electoral threat. If one goes looking, it is nonetheless possible to find reports that detail the effect this had on Democratic electoral fortunes:
In the 1994 midterm election, a year after the NAFTA vote, union activists, stung by losing that fight to Clinton and by the president’s failure to get a Democratic Congress even to vote on his promised health care reform, deserted their posts. Phone banks went unmanned; the turnout of union families plummeted; 40 percent of those who bothered to vote backed GOP candidates, and the Democrats lost the House for the first time in 40 years.
One of the things that distinguishes 2010 from 1994 is that the White House and Democratic leaders are not pushing through any new free trade agreements. The major legislative item that concerns major unions is EFCA, which the current majority has not been able to pass, but this is still not a case of an administration trying to force an undesirable bill on its own recalcitrant partisans in Congress. That suggests that unions will be much more likely to play their role in turning out Democratic voters next year, and union voters may be more energized if the GOP makes its opposition to EFCA a major theme of the election. Emphasizing that certainly did nothing to help Hoffman*. The union factor has been important for turnout in both of the special elections in New York this year, and the unions have delivered for the Democrats and put two new Democrats into the House. That is not going to be the case in every district, but it is a reminder that Democratic House and Senate candidates will have solid support from unions that their counterparts lacked in 1994.
* Another example of national GOP messaging at odds with local interests was Hoffman’s anti-earmark pledge, which was crazy in a district that relies on Fort Drum for a significant part of its economy and a perfect expression of the Washington-oriented blindness that has afflicted the national party leadership for years. It is another expression of the absolutely unfounded notion that the public turned against the GOP because of spending and especially because of earmarks. The (mostly rhetorical) hostility to earmarks is a more general form of national GOP contempt for local district interests, whose representation in Congress Boehner et al. have decided to equate with corruption and wastefulness.
Filed under: politics
SIR – the biggest contributor to the GOP sweep in 1994 was the number of retirements or vacancies in Southern seats. WIth the lost of multi-decade incumbents (in many cases), the ideological sorting was completed, with conservative Democrats replaced by even more conservative Republicans. Since the sorting is largely completed (save for the usual suspects of the Nelson-Landrieu-Bayh variety), to expect similar gains for the GOP is probably foolish, especially given the greater number of Senate seats in which Republicans will be playing defense next year.
I don’t think that Republicans can count on being able to nationalize another by-election so long as they present nationally as the Confederate party. What draws whoops from Tulsa and Birmingham and Columbia cuts less ice in, say, NY-23.
Consider this, though: though it is still developing, the Democrats have been confronted with a conundrum on the Stupak Amendment. In all, 23 Democrats voted in favor of it in the House, and the issue has the likelihood to inflame in the Senate and conference committee. Like NAFTA, Stupak is wildly unpopular with a significant segment of the Democratic base — in this case, women. Should Stupak make it into the final healthcare measure that the president signs, we could well have the analogue that drives a significant number of Democrats to stay home, not work the field and not work the phones as Election Day 2010 approaches.
Interesting point. You may be right that this could depress turnout on the Democratic side, and it could definitely hurt fundraising. I doubt it would have an effect on the same scale. As pro-choice activists are discovering, their numbers and clout may not be as great as they (and a lot of conservatives) assumed them to be.
On the other hand, the Stupak amendment could be a problem for Republicans in a different way. After all, a significant part of the party’s turnout machine and a large percentage of its activists are social conservatives, who have been scared year after year into voting Republican on account of abortion. Now a Democratic majority has come closer to doing something to restrict the availability of abortion in one year than the GOP has done in 30. Catholic and socially conservative downscale voters, many of whom have economic populist or at least “moderate” views, might have a hard time remembering why exactly they vote for Republicans, and they might not bother this time. What the Stupak amendment is likely to do is to create primary challenges against its supporters from the left. That could help the GOP some, but it would come at the expense of seeing pro-life House members on the Democratic side getting purged from their party.
“different way. After all, a significant part of the party’s turnout machine and a large percentage of its activists are social conservatives, who have been scared year after year into voting Republican on account of abortion. Now a Democratic majority has come closer to doing something to restrict the availability of abortion in one year than the GOP has done in 30. Catholic and socially conservative downscale voters, many of whom have economic populist or at least “moderate” views, might have a hard time remembering why exactly they vote for Republicans, and they might not bother this time.”
This I doubt. I just don’t see people who’ve voted GOP for 20-30 years switching that fast, without an active event (and refusing to cover abortions in subsidized healthcare isn’t such an event; it’s closer to the status quo).
IMHO, the biggest thing is the economy. In timing, the Obama administration is closer to Hoover than to FDR; in stimuls, they’re inadequate; in leadership, also inadequate. In fall, 2010, the economy is going to s*ck really, really hard for a lot of peole (i.e., those who are not in the top 10%), and the Obama administration is going to have done far more for Wall St. than for Main St.
The GOP will be well-positioned to take advantage of that anger (the fact that they’re far more pro-Wall St/f*ck Main St than the Democratic Party is mere truth, and irrelevent).
Also, unions are not nearly as strong as they were in the 80’s and 90’s. The reason why republicans can expect gains in 2010 is because of turnout. Many young liberals simply don’t vote in the mid term elections…they often aren’t even aware that such elections exist(I know zillions of these people.) 2006 was an exception to this because of the war in Iraq as well as a big media push to drive the republicans out of congress and because conservatives were so disappointed with Bush and republicans that they didn’t bother to show up. However, it will be a case of the tortoise and the hare. The democrats coming off their big wins in 2008 will be asleep at the wheel. Do you really expect all those first time voters who went for Obama to vote in an election when they have no idea who is even running in their district?
Now it could be that the numbers demographics of the country are trending democrat fast enough to offset a low percentage turnout(how many new hispanics turned 18 and became eligible for voting vs the number of WASPs that have died off in the last two years.)