I don't know about the rest of you, but it's still April (for a few more hours, anyway), and I'm already sick of seeing articles like this one, which are designed to have the effect of making Democrats and their supporters just sit at home on election night and let the Republicans coast to the control of Congress the punditocracy seems to be so eager to see. What's particularly frustrating to me is that I thought (or, at least, hoped) that the trend of these pieces would start to abate, now that Obamacare has happened and the Republic hasn't come to an end. If anything, they're getting worse--and they're doing so despite poll data that doesn't support the conclusion they're dying to jump to (sorry for the misplaced preposition).
The attempt to justify the landslide predictions now has only two legs: (a) traditionally, off-year elections have lower turnout, favoring Republicans, and (b) seven Senate seats currently controlled by Democrats in red states are on the ballot, giving Republicans a statistical chance at taking the Senate. I'll revisit (a) another day and focus for the time being on (b), since that is essentially the heart of Weigel's piece, and is a point that gets beaten to death in the press in any case.
But, of course, it can't truly be beaten to death, because it was dead from the very beginning. Here's why. It doesn't matter whether Obama was popular in the seven at-risk states for Democrats. In 2008, when he was at the height of his popularity nationwide, he lost every one of those states, with the exception of North Carolina. The Democratic Senate candidates in each of those states won, despite the fact that the votes chose John McCain (and, unfortunately, Sarah Gasbag) in the presidential contest. Red-state Democrats exist for a reason; they know how to run in red states. That's not an accident. And the fact that three of those states are having open contests without incumbents doesn't matter, either. Montana, for example, tends to send Democrats to the Senate even as it sends Republicans to the White House, while South Dakota tends to split its Senate delegation between the parties--and the other current Senator from the Mount Rushmore State, John Thune, is a Republican.
The fact is that Republicans would need a net gain of six seats to make Mitch McConnell the majority leader in the Senate--and that assumes that McConnell makes it past two formidable obstacles: a Tea Party challenger in the primary, and Alison Lundergan Grimes in the fall. If Grimes wins what now appears to be a very winnable election, the GOP would need a net gain of seven seats to take control--essentially, a landslide in the popular vote. I defy anyone, even Weigel, to find you or me a poll that makes it even look possible for that to happen at the moment.
And, I'll admit, I'm writing about the moment. Things could change. The GOP has financial and media firepower that Democrats and their supporters can only dream about. The economy could tank. There could be a major reversal of fortune overseas. But, by the same token, none of these things could happen. The economy could continue to grow. An extreme summer, or more domestic gun violence, could move the needle of popular opinion in the other direction. The bottom line: we live in a political and communications world where events and opinions move at the speed of light. It's certainly not the case that anyone's "doomed" right now.
And it's looking less and less likely that Obamacare will be a Democratic drag, as this shows. There might even be reason to think about Democrats making gains in the House. One thing's for certain: if Weigel is correct about a Republican Congress trying to "defund" Obamacare, I wish them the same luck they had with it last fall. It would certainly be an indictment of their own political bankruptcy.
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