How bad will 2nd November be for the Democrats? It’s hard to tell from the opinion polls
The only question about the midterm elections is how awful they will be for the Democrats: catastrophic or merely bad. On 2nd November, all the seats in the house are up for election, as are 37 of the 100 seats in the Senate (and 39 governorships.) In early September, a Gallup poll showed the Republicans achieving an unprecedented lead of 10 per cent—a result which would see the Democrats lose control of both houses of congress. But this was a generic poll in which likely voters were just asked which party they preferred. More recent state-by-state polls have given the Democrats hope—the numbers indicate that they could hang on to the house and even cling to a narrow majority in the Senate. And, most importantly, Barack Obama has at last come out fighting. He is planning an intense burst of autumn campaigning and the Democrats have finally started targeting money at key seats, so it could yet turn out to be bad but tolerable.
At such moments, it is always worth keeping an eye on the smart money—and that is hedging its bets. So far this year, the financial industry has made just under $200m (£130m) in campaign donations: 51 per cent for the Democrats and 49 per cent for the Republicans. Four of the top ten recipients of Wall Street largesse are Republicans: Carly Fiorina in California, Marco Rubio of Florida, Rob Portman of Ohio and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. Fiorina took in $250,000 from the finance sector in June alone; her opponent, incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer, only pulled in $104,000 that month from the same source.
The Republicans are waiting nervously for Obama’s October surprise, the vote-winning rabbit to be pulled from the hat. The one they fear most is that Obama takes away one of their biggest issues and announces he’s not going to scrap the Bush-era tax cuts. But that shows they have not been listening to him. In his campaign, he pledged not to increase taxes for families earning less than $250,000 a year. The soundbite of his autumn campaign will be a variation on the one being road-tested by press secretary Robert Gibbs: “Our position is tax cuts for the middle class. Theirs is tax cuts for millionaires.”
The other two potential surprises they fear are so unlikely that they say more about Republican paranoia than about real politics. The first would be to announce a precipitate withdrawal from Afghanistan, using as an excuse the Karzai government’s plan to block international investigation of corruption in his regime. The second is to bomb Iran—to which the only sane response is to ask whether any president would want to go into an election with oil costing $300 a barrel.
THE RACE FOR ENTHUSIASM
But Obama is going to have to do all the work himself if he is to reverse the grim trend of his disapproval ratings being consistently higher than his approvals. The grand army of 8m volunteers that he had in 2008 seems to have disappeared due to White House and party neglect. Two years ago, there were over 6,000 staffers maintaining the volunteer effort through the parent body Organising for America. Today there are 300, and worried employees are grumbling that fundraising has not raised enough for the next payroll.
The massively inflated expectations that greeted Obama’s election were always going to be a problem as the messy reality of governing set in. But the real surprise of the past two years has been the way the Republicans have regrouped and revitalised themselves and won what is now being called the “enthusiasm primary.” It’s not just a matter of Tea Party events, Glenn Beck rallies and the popularity of the pastime of calling Obama a European-style socialist. The enthusiasm gap can now be counted in votes. Two years ago, 37m votes were cast in the Democratic primaries, compared to just 21m in the Republican contests. Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia has added up the votes from all primaries this year until the end of August, and calculated that over 3m more votes were cast in the Republican elections (16.6m) than Democratic ones (13.4m). And the Republicans were not just generating enthusiasm in their core states but were also creating more excitement and more votes in toss-up states like Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan and Colorado and even in “safe” Democratic states like Washington on the west coast.
The only compensation for Democrats is that the Republicans are now going to face their own problem of inflated expectations. And this will happen as the party’s own civil war between the Tea Party enthusiasts and the establishment (to put it another way, between the Sarah Palins and the Mitt Romneys) gets into high gear ahead of the next presidential primaries.
HILLARY DREAMS ON
Talking of primaries, Renegade has never swallowed the line that Hillary Clinton has put her presidential dreams behind her. It is hard to exaggerate the degree of nostalgia in the party for those halcyon Clinton days when the economy was booming and unemployment was below 5 per cent and the federal budget was in surplus. A Democratic meltdown in November would not just raise the question of whether Obama can be re-elected, but whether he can even be sure of winning re-nomination.
Just to remind everybody that there is a seasoned alternative with positive approval ratings, Clinton’s first public remarks after the election season started on Labour Day contained this intriguing riff: “I think that our rising debt level poses a national security threat… it undermines our capacity to act in our own interests and it does constrain us where constraint may be undesirable. And it also sends a message of weakness, internationally.” Normally it’s the Republicans who charge Obama with being weak on national security; with friends like the Clintons…
The only question about the midterm elections is how awful they will be for the Democrats: catastrophic or merely bad. On 2nd November, all the seats in the house are up for election, as are 37 of the 100 seats in the Senate (and 39 governorships.) In early September, a Gallup poll showed the Republicans achieving an unprecedented lead of 10 per cent—a result which would see the Democrats lose control of both houses of congress. But this was a generic poll in which likely voters were just asked which party they preferred. More recent state-by-state polls have given the Democrats hope—the numbers indicate that they could hang on to the house and even cling to a narrow majority in the Senate. And, most importantly, Barack Obama has at last come out fighting. He is planning an intense burst of autumn campaigning and the Democrats have finally started targeting money at key seats, so it could yet turn out to be bad but tolerable.
At such moments, it is always worth keeping an eye on the smart money—and that is hedging its bets. So far this year, the financial industry has made just under $200m (£130m) in campaign donations: 51 per cent for the Democrats and 49 per cent for the Republicans. Four of the top ten recipients of Wall Street largesse are Republicans: Carly Fiorina in California, Marco Rubio of Florida, Rob Portman of Ohio and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. Fiorina took in $250,000 from the finance sector in June alone; her opponent, incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer, only pulled in $104,000 that month from the same source.
The Republicans are waiting nervously for Obama’s October surprise, the vote-winning rabbit to be pulled from the hat. The one they fear most is that Obama takes away one of their biggest issues and announces he’s not going to scrap the Bush-era tax cuts. But that shows they have not been listening to him. In his campaign, he pledged not to increase taxes for families earning less than $250,000 a year. The soundbite of his autumn campaign will be a variation on the one being road-tested by press secretary Robert Gibbs: “Our position is tax cuts for the middle class. Theirs is tax cuts for millionaires.”
The other two potential surprises they fear are so unlikely that they say more about Republican paranoia than about real politics. The first would be to announce a precipitate withdrawal from Afghanistan, using as an excuse the Karzai government’s plan to block international investigation of corruption in his regime. The second is to bomb Iran—to which the only sane response is to ask whether any president would want to go into an election with oil costing $300 a barrel.
THE RACE FOR ENTHUSIASM
But Obama is going to have to do all the work himself if he is to reverse the grim trend of his disapproval ratings being consistently higher than his approvals. The grand army of 8m volunteers that he had in 2008 seems to have disappeared due to White House and party neglect. Two years ago, there were over 6,000 staffers maintaining the volunteer effort through the parent body Organising for America. Today there are 300, and worried employees are grumbling that fundraising has not raised enough for the next payroll.
The massively inflated expectations that greeted Obama’s election were always going to be a problem as the messy reality of governing set in. But the real surprise of the past two years has been the way the Republicans have regrouped and revitalised themselves and won what is now being called the “enthusiasm primary.” It’s not just a matter of Tea Party events, Glenn Beck rallies and the popularity of the pastime of calling Obama a European-style socialist. The enthusiasm gap can now be counted in votes. Two years ago, 37m votes were cast in the Democratic primaries, compared to just 21m in the Republican contests. Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia has added up the votes from all primaries this year until the end of August, and calculated that over 3m more votes were cast in the Republican elections (16.6m) than Democratic ones (13.4m). And the Republicans were not just generating enthusiasm in their core states but were also creating more excitement and more votes in toss-up states like Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan and Colorado and even in “safe” Democratic states like Washington on the west coast.
The only compensation for Democrats is that the Republicans are now going to face their own problem of inflated expectations. And this will happen as the party’s own civil war between the Tea Party enthusiasts and the establishment (to put it another way, between the Sarah Palins and the Mitt Romneys) gets into high gear ahead of the next presidential primaries.
HILLARY DREAMS ON
Talking of primaries, Renegade has never swallowed the line that Hillary Clinton has put her presidential dreams behind her. It is hard to exaggerate the degree of nostalgia in the party for those halcyon Clinton days when the economy was booming and unemployment was below 5 per cent and the federal budget was in surplus. A Democratic meltdown in November would not just raise the question of whether Obama can be re-elected, but whether he can even be sure of winning re-nomination.
Just to remind everybody that there is a seasoned alternative with positive approval ratings, Clinton’s first public remarks after the election season started on Labour Day contained this intriguing riff: “I think that our rising debt level poses a national security threat… it undermines our capacity to act in our own interests and it does constrain us where constraint may be undesirable. And it also sends a message of weakness, internationally.” Normally it’s the Republicans who charge Obama with being weak on national security; with friends like the Clintons…
