If the Democrats hold onto the Senate this year, we’ll hear a lot about the brilliant Koch brothers strategy. But I would argue that it will have more to do with the mood of the electorate. Very simply, the national political environment is slowly but steadily improving for Democrats.
Just a few weeks ago, some pundits were still suggesting a Republican wave. Those days are gone. While most prognosticators still believe the GOP has a better than 50% chance of taking the senate, that has more to do with individual races than a collective anger at the Democrats. Republicans had a banner recruiting year and fended off Tea Party challengers, while Democrats’ chances in places like Montana collapsed when they failed to field strong candidates.
The environment is getting better for Democrats because Republicans have lost any unifying message and because the economy is getting increasingly stronger. The GOP’s Obamacare strategy has bottomed out. They overplayed their hand on the issue. They said the health care law would cause an economic collapse. They said that massive numbers of people would lose their insurance. And they assured us that we would all see our premiums get so high that we couldn’t afford insurance. None of it happened.
Instead, premiums don’t seem to be going up much faster than normal and in some states they’re even going down. The economy didn’t collapse. It’s getting stronger. The number of uninsured people is going down, not up. And governors who expanded Medicaid are faring better than those who didn’t.
And while Obama’s not too popular, he’s also not hated except by the people who have always hated him. Instead, there’s a general dissatisfaction led by a slow recovery and disturbing events around the world. While nobody likes brutal Islamic terrorists or Russian bullies, nobody wants to go to war over them either.
After years of a general economic malaise following the Great Recession, folks are finally feeling better about their personal economic situations. Consumer confidence hit a seven-year high and we’ve had six straight months of employers adding at least 200,000 jobs. The funk over the American public is finally lifting.
The change in the political environment has been slow but steady. It may not change fast enough to lift all Democrats to victory, but it already has changed fast enough that the quality of candidates and their campaigns will have more to do their success or failure than the general mood of the electorate.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
One possible scenario is for Republicans win the Senate while McConnell loses his Kentucky Senate seat.
That’ll be interesting, to use the most overused political phrase around.
Presidential years always favor democrats.
And this time the contards will control two of the three branches of government, so they’ll be even more crazy.
America doesn’t like Crazy.
All right on, Thomas. But that may not stop some commenters from weighing in with the usual talk-radio-spurred rants against Obama, or the slow recovery, or ACA, or the Dems on social issues, or whatever.
I think the Dems holding the Senate is unlikely, as you say not so much because of an anti-Dem uprising in the electorate, but only because the GOP was able to prevent too many crazies in their midst from winning primaries, and because the particular 33 senatorial races happening in 2014 are not, as a group, especially helpful/kind to the Dem Party.
If it becomes a GOP Senate, things will be a bigger and more polarized mess than now. Lots of crap will pass Congress and move to Obama, which he will veto. Those vetos won’t be overridden, so not much will get done legislatively (again). There could be an impeachment fiasco, but the GOP will put the nation through that only at great risk of ending their party’s legitimacy and credibility in a majority of the American voters minds.
Nevertheless, the Senate would stand a very good chance of swinging back to Dem rule in 2016.