Republicans Peak Too Soon, Reach Too Far

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from the blog at the DesMoines Register: http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/dmr/index.php/2010/10/10/republicans-peak-too-soon-reach-too-far/


Simon Rosenberg of progressive think tank – we have those too, just not as well funded as the righty ones – offers a must-read argument that Republicans peaked too soon in this year’s mid-term elections. Key points: (http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=democratic_upswing)

# “You’ve got trend lines where one party is dropping and one party is gaining — it’s indisputable at this point. If you’re a Republican right now, and you look at this environment, the party that’s dropping a month out usually loses. ”

# “As the Republican ads go up on the air, it’s going to motivate Democratic voters because it’s going to remind the Democrats how much they hate the Republicans. ”

# But Democrats are in part responsible for their own mess: “Part of what went wrong with the Democrats in the last two years is that too many Democrats have political Stockholm syndrome. Many Democrats grew up in an era with a conservative politics that was ascendant and center-left politics was in decline. What happened in 2008 was the conservative jailers left, and were defeated, the door to the ideological jail opened up, the sun was shining, the Democrats could leave, and they didn’t leave. ”

Rosenberg’s analysis goes hand in hand with James Carville’s narrative from earlier in the week that Republicans have overplayed their hand in recent weeks. The Great Bald One offers a positive prognosis for Barack Obama and the Democrats, saying this year’s climate looks less like the Armageddon of 1994 and more like the disaster that wasn’t in 1998:

“In the 1998 election, we conducted national polls starting in September to see if Democrats could push back against the Republican overreach on Ken Starr and impeachment, as Democrats faced the prospect of historic losses in both the House and Senate. Only two weeks before the election did the plates shift and a Democratic counter-message on impeachment became effective in our polls. In the end, Democrats lost no net seats in Senate, gained five House seats and Newt Gingrich resigned.”

The key word here is “overreach.”


read: http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/dmr/index.php/2010/10/10/republicans-peak-too-soon-reach-too-far/