Barack Obama is the best thing to happen to the GOP since Ronald Reagan.
Provocative but true.
In 2008, with the weight of war and economic crisis on its collective shoulders, the GOP faced not just loss, but disgrace and looming irrelevance. A young, eloquent and historic president-elect, with a Democratic super majority in Congress, suddenly had the rare opportunity to realign American politics for the next half century with a new brand of progressive governance.
And they blew it.
Big time.
In the lead up to November 4th, President Obama memorably said that his policies were on the ballot. Last Tuesday, the American people took him at his word and delivered a stunning rebuke that touched national, state and local races from coast to coast. Almost despite itself, the GOP has seen a resurgence unlike any in the modern era.
The US Senate: the GOP decisively won the three races where Republicans were considered vulnerable. When the counting is done, after the long-suffering Mary Landrieu is dispatched on December 6th, the GOP will have added 9 seats to its caucus, taking a 54-46 majority.
In winning, the GOP beat (or will beat) five Democratic incumbents and add four Democratic open seats to its majority. It is the best showing for the Senate GOP since 1980, when Republicans captured 12 seats in the Reagan Revolution. The new GOP majority will be just one shy of its largest caucus historically, the Republican Senate majority in 2004.
It is 20/20 hindsight that had the national GOP invested in VA instead of the perpetual “Lucy with the football” in NH, Ed Gillespie – who lost by only 17,000 votes of over 2 million cast – would be joining the new GOP majority next year.
The US House of Representatives: with seven races still too close to call (as of this writing) the GOP is on track to have its largest majority since 1928, with 247 seats (+13).
The Governors: 12 GOP governors were up for re-election, and all but one – Tom Corbett of PA- won. Republicans will control 31 gubernatorial seats in 2015, up three from before the election. But the total tell only part of the story.
The GOP picked up three governors mansions in three deeply blue states; IL, MD and MA. In addition, Republicans kept control in the deep blue states of WI, MI and ME. This despite Democratic and union efforts to oust Scott Walker in WI that were particularly ferocious, and unsuccessful. The GOP retained control in four battleground states; FL, IA, NC and OH.
OH deserves special mention. In this perpetual battleground state, which no Republican has ever lost and still won the presidency, John Kasich, Ohio’s governor, won the election with a stunning 63 percent of the vote.
Keep an eye on this man as a future national leader.
In addition, the national election results lay bare the charge of critics that the GOP lacks diversity.
Among the winners on Tuesday were Nicki Haley, the Indian American governor of SC and Susan Martinez, the Latina American governor of NM. Tim Scott became the first African-American elected to the US Senate from a state of the old Confederacy since Reconstruction, with his win in SC. Mia Love becomes Utah’s first African-American to represent the state in the House of Representatives. In addition, the youngest woman in the House will be a Republican, elected from NY.
State Legislative Elections: the real impact of Tuesday is most dramatic at the state level. There are 99 legislative chambers in the US (Nebraska has only one, unicameral, nonpartisan legislature). After Tuesday, the GOP will control 68 of them, across the country and across the red-blue divide. It is the largest majority of state legislative bodies held by the Republicans in 94 years. Republicans now hold more than 4,000 state legislative seats, the largest majority since 1928. The GOP will now have both executive and legislative control in 23 states, a new record.
To put this in context, consider this. The Great Depression and FDR’s sure-footed leadership exiled Republicans from the national debate for 20 years. It is thus the great irony of our times that the Great Recession and Obama’s ineffectual leadership may have the same impact on his own party for the next 20 years.
The Polls: accurate public polling is another casualty of the 2014 elections. Using the RCP final average against actual results shows that polling outfits were way off the mark in far too many contests.
The KS Senate seat with Pat Roberts? Greg Orman, the challenger was actually up .8 percent going into Tuesday. He ended up losing by 10.8 points. Or VA where Mark Warner was up nearly 10 points, but ended up winning by a little more than 1/2 a percent. Mitch McConnell was already pulling away from Grimes on Election Day, but the polls completely missed the totality of McConnell’s victory. The likely new Majority Leader was ahead by seven in the pre-election polls, but won by 15.5 points. Tom Cotton, in AR, was ahead by McConnell’s margin but won by 17 points. In GA, Perdue out-performed the polls by nearly 5 points. In IA Ernst outperformed the polls by 6.2 percent. In NC, the pre-election polls had Hagan up. Tillis won by 1.7 percent.
Remember, these are the RCP averages of polls taken over a period of weeks. The actual, stand-alone polls published at the very end of the race created the expectation of tight races nationally that was not reflected in the results.
Voter Participation: turnout is always lower for a midterm, and this year was no different. 36.4 percent of eligible voters participated. But that alone does not explain Democratic losses. Turnout in individual states with competitive elections, contests that the GOP won, was over 50 percent. See here.
POTUS’ Reaction: surreal. There is no other word for it. Humility, contrition, responsibility and reconciliation are the keys to picking up the pieces after a crushing midterm for the President’s party. Each president goes about it in their own way.
“We were held accountable yesterday, and I accept my share of the responsibility in the result of the elections.” ~ President Bill Clinton (1994)
“I’m obviously disappointed with the outcome of the election, and as the head of the Republican Party, I share a large part of the responsibility.” ~ President George W. Bush (2006)
But not President Obama. His post-election press conference was an a startling display of objective denial and stunning hubris.
“As president I have a unique responsibility to try and make this town work. So to everyone who voted, I want you to know that I hear you. To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too.” ~ President Barack Obama (2014)
Despite a historic electoral rebuke, POTUS now improbably implies that had the other 2/3rds of voters participated, he and his policies would have been vindicated, though no such assertion can be reasonably confirmed. Instead of focusing on the election that he decisively lost, Obama is going to focus on an election that did not happen. Worse, it appears that this conclusion will drive his presidency for the last two years with its alarming and provocative course of exercising executive authority to circumvent the legislative process.
This, not the new Republican majority, is the greatest threat to constructive progress in the next 800 days.
What it All Means: for now, the most compelling and conclusions come from analysts at different ends of the political spectrum; Charles Krauthammer and Harold Meyerson:
“Memo to the GOP. You had a great night on Tuesday. But remember: You didn’t win it. The Democrats lost it.
The defeat — “a massacre,” the Economist called it – marks the final collapse of Obamaism, a species of left liberalism so intrusive, so incompetently executed and ultimately so unpopular that it will be seen as a parenthesis in American political history. Notwithstanding Obama’s awkward denials at his next-day news conference, he himself defined the election when he insisted just last month that “these [i.e. his] policies are on the ballot — every single one of them. They were, and America spoke. But it was a negative judgment, not an endorsement of the GOP. The prize for winning is nothing but the opportunity for Republicans to show that they can govern — the opportunity to seize the national agenda.” ~ Charles Krauthammer
“Dig a little deeper into the public’s economic fears, though, and you might conclude that the Democrats should have had a good election night. Sixty-three percent of respondents told pollsters they believed that the U.S. economic system generally favors the wealthy, while just 32 percent said that it is fair to most. And a wave of ballot measures to raise state or city minimum wages carried wherever they were put before voters — from deepest-blue San Francisco and Oakland to solid-red Nebraska, South Dakota, Arkansas and Alaska…When 95 percent of the income growth since the recession ended goes to the wealthiest 1 percent, as economist Emmanuel Saez has documented, voters view reports of a recovery as they would news from a distant land.” ~ Harold Meyerson
This is the key – the crossroads. Voters have decisively rejected Obamaism, but they have not embraced or endorsed a conservative approach. They are searching for a different path that simply produces results.
Six years of Democratic governance has artificially enriched the “1 percenters” at the expense of a disintegrating middle class. Two distinct generations – those entering or graduating college in 2008, and those experienced workers in the late 40s or early 50s in the same year, have been hollowed out of the workforce. The demographic implications of so many under-employed or unemployed are grave.
An explosion of government debt, Federal Reserve easing and enormous deficit spending, have done nothing to fix the structural challenges of the American economy or to provide the conditions to allow American workers to succeed.
In the new Congress, Republicans must rebuff “mandate madness” and keep focused every day on passing legislation that will revive the American economy, create quality, higher paying jobs and create the condition for investment and risk taking that can build lasting, tangible wealth.
However, if the next two years end up as a replay of the last two, with all the recrimination and finger-pointing, the 2016 election will be an earthquake for both parties.
This is our last chance.