Tuesday, at least on first blush, was a pretty bad day for Democrats. After losing control of the House, six seats in the Senate, a wide variety of governorships across the country, most Democrats across the country woke up on Wednesday like me, feeling like they'd just been kicked in the teeth. The news has gotten better in the days since, as almost all of the late races have either broken for the Democrat (like WA) or at least against the Tea Partier (like AK), but there's no denying that Tuesday was a bad day.
But how bad was it, really? And why was it so bad? Well, there was a day back in January when I felt pretty similar to the way I felt this past week, the day when Scott Brown took out Martha Coakley to win Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat. On first blush, that election looked like the death knell for the president's health reform plan, a result that could easily have crippled Obama for the rest of what would almost certainly be a single term in office.
The MA Dems came roaring back on Tuesday, though, and today's Boston Globe offers an interesting analysis of why. It could be relevant to what happened Tuesday.
Many commentators thought Brown's election was a turning point, that deeply blue MA was starting to turn purple, and toward that end the GOP and the Tea Party poured tons of resources into defeating the governor, winning an open congressional seat, and challenging at least three potentially vulnerable sitting members of congress. The GOP lost every single one of those races. Why? Because they didn't do the math on Brown's victory, so they misunderstood what had happened in January. I haven't done the math on last Tuesday, but I suspect that what happened nationally is pretty similar to what happened here in January.
John Walsh led Governor Deval Patrick's reelection campaign. When he went over the numbers for Brown's victory in January he found something interesting:
What Walsh saw was that Brown’s vote was not much stronger than the turnout for 2008 Republican presidential nominee John S. McCain. The problem wasn’t so much the Republican resurgence as the dearth of Democratic turnout.
Walsh did something unheard of: he counted. Here's what he says:
"What Scott Brown did effectively was turn out the Republican vote in January and we did not,’’ Walsh added. "If you look at community after community, you’ll see the Brown vote was the same as the McCain vote but the Democratic vote was not as robust as it needed to be.’’
Sound like the enthusiasm gap? It sure does to me.
Walsh did a number of innovative things to build enthusiasm and GOTV, most importantly by tapping existing volunteer networks in the state. I was surprised when about two weeks before the election I got a phone call from the Patrick campaign asking me to canvass my neighborhood the weekend before the vote. I'm pretty sure that contact came through the work I had done in an ultimately unsuccessful primary challenge to the turncoat Dem who represents my district. In the end, I gave the governor four hours last Saturday, knocked seventy doors, and talked to probably thirty voters, most of whom wound up voting for the governor. Here's how that contact looked statewide:
In the final weeks of the campaign, he pooled the party’s substantial forces, persuading all 10 members of Congress, all statewide candidates, and most legislative candidates to pool their voter lists. Rather than individually identifying potential votes and enlisting separate organizers, the candidates could tap a massive base of voters and volunteers. "We as Democrats had to absolutely cooperate with one another, which doesn’t always happen historically,’’ Walsh said.
The get-out-the-vote operation was massive. On Election Day, they estimated the number of volunteers reached a stunning 800,000. Walsh is thrilled to think that his brand of campaigning, unusually personal and interactive for the information age, was so effective that it probably will be replicated. "To me, that’s changing politics,’’ he said. "Everybody wants that. Scott Brown did it. Deval Patrick did it. It is possible and everybody wants it so let’s go try it.’’
The enthusiasm gap nationwide is well known, and I'm pretty certain if we were to do the math we'd find that Republican turnout was no greater on Tuesday than it had been in 2008. Democratic turnout, I'm certain, was a lot lower, depressed for a lot of reasons no doubt but certainly because a lot of us are disappointed in the sluggish economy and were repulsed by the sloppy, ugly, and even corrupt methods that were used to get weak-kneed Dems like Nelson and Lincoln to support health care reform.
In order to win in 2012, we need to address some of those policies issues at the national level. Obama has to lead us in the same way he led back in 2008, towards a progressive future in which the middle class can take back the ground the rich have stolen from us. But we also need a massive effort to organize our volunteers all over the country, to knock on doors, to engage our voters face to face, and to convince people that this election, like all elections, really does matter.
The GOP threaten the very nature of our representative democracy. Only by organizing ourselves and by sticking to our principles can we beat back their threat.