The Democrats are poised to win a broader, deeper Congressional majority this fall
The news that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is trailing his Democratic opponent Bruce Lunsford in a new Rasmussen poll ought to be sobering for Republicans To be sure, McConnell's own poll shows him leading Lunsford by 50 percent to 39 percent. But even this result isn't exactly heartening, given that McConnell is a very familiar figure in the state and Lunsford is a two-time failed gubernatorial candidate who has been dogged by corruption charges for years and is bitterly disliked by many Kentucky Democratic partisans. (One wonders if a mummified corpse would do better in head-to-head match-ups.)
And according to the Washington Post's Christopher Cillizza, McConnell's seat is only the 9th most attractive Senate opportunity for the Democrats. Though few Democrats will say so out loud, the party could come within striking distance of a filibuster-proof majority this November. In the House, Democrats have won a string of special elections in profoundly hostile territory -- in Denny Hastert's old district, a sprawling mix of Republican-friendly exurbs and rural areas in northern Illinois; in Baton Rouge and its environs; and, perhaps most remarkably, in a deep-red district in Mississippi. Assuming Barack Obama is the Democratic presidential nominee, he will likely endanger literally dozens of Republican seats, as Nicholas Beaudrot has suggested. This is the kind of toxic political environment for Republicans that could encourage panicked party-switching of the sort that we saw among Democrats in the wake of the 1994 GOP sweep.
At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, it is worth considering what this Democratic tide might mean for the future of the party. Lunsford, for example, is a decidedly eccentric Democrat who actually endorsed the Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2003 after he lost the Democratic nomination. The Democrats, shrewdly, have sworn off ideological coherence in favor of a more decentralized strategy. In the Deep South, they've run as economic nationalists opposed to the Iraq War, mass immigration, and free trade. In affluent suburbia, they've run as pragmatic cultural liberals staunchly opposed to the cruel vagaries of the Alternative Minimum Tax.
Obama has managed to bridge this still-emerging divide, by drawing on the language of anti-war Midwestern populists as well as the soothing tones of the foreign policy establishment. This balancing act is what makes Obama a political virtuoso. But these divisions and contradictions, similar in some sense to those that divided the Democrats at their political zenith, will prove difficult to manage once something tangible is at stake. If, as looks increasingly likely, increased minority turnout and youth turnout contribute to a sweeping Democratic win, we will see newer generational and cultural tensions that will undoubtedly shape the future of American involvement in Iraq and the welfare state.
This is, of course, an enviable position for a party to find itself in. One imagines Republicans would love to face the growing pains that come with truly transformational political victories, as opposed to the fierce recriminations that inevitably follow defeat. The great failure of the Republican Party after its historic victory in 1994 was in failing to articulate a truly national message, one that would resonate in the northeastern suburbs as well as in the Old Confederacy. Instead, they mimicked the transactional politics of the Democratic majority that preceded them, and in the process grew fat and lazy. A vocal and influential minority of Democrats believe they can do better, that consensus on the social issues can be sacrificed in service to a vision of a reinvigorated welfare state. And perhaps they are right. But one is hard pressed to imagine, say, a national healthcare system that satisfies both a devoutly pro-life stay-at-home mom from Alabama and an unmarried and ardently pro-choice professional from Brooklyn -- or a strategy to combat global warming that pleases affluent, green-minded liberals on the Coasts and blue-collar Democrats in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain states. Which is to say, the next few years will be very interesting to watch.
Reihan Salam
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
