Republicans won in a blowout. Why?
I believe it is because Democrats did not give their supporters anything to vote for. Republicans did.
It is true that Obama is pretty unpopular. But Obama was not running. The election was not a referendum on Obama, it was a referendum on his policies. It turns out, Obama’s policies have been pretty successful and popular, but you’d never know it from this election.
Examples below the fold.
Exhibit A, Obamacare. People have been told for four years that it is a disaster, that it is the worst thing to happen to America since the Civil War, etc, and most people have bought into that message. In fact, Obamacare is quite successful. Of course, there are a few people who are worse off than they were before, but there are multitudes of people who are better off. Remember when Obamacare first came out, after the website debacle, Republicans started trotting out people who had been screwed by Obamacare. But in almost every case, reporters found out that these people were either better off, or could have been if they had bothered to go through the process. Pretty soon, Republicans stopped producing actual people who had been screwed—they were too hard to find. Instead, they created fictional ones for their ads.
If you ask people on the street how they feel about Obamacare, most will say that they don’t like it. If you then offer an alternative program and describe the features of Obamacare, most people say, “Yes, that’s what I want!” It turns out Obamacare is pretty popular. What is unpolular is the word “Obamacare.” Why? They have been conditioned to believe it. But they like what Obamacare actually is.
But when Republicans attacked Obamacare, did the Democrats defend it? No! Instead, they said, “I don’t like it either, but it can be fixed.” As a result, the general population does not know what a great success Obamacare is. Democrats abandoned their most significant legislation in decades.
Republicans will still try to repeal it. Why? They simply do not believe that health care is a fundamental right, and that we should have a system that provides it to people who cannot provide it for themselves. Most Americans disagree. Further, the Republicans do not have anything to replace it with. They will pass the legislation, and send it to the President, because they know he will veto it. But if they really had a chance to repeal Obamacare, they would never do it, because people like what it provides.
Exhibit B, Gun Control. Everyone agrees that bad guys should not have guns. Almost everyone agrees that no one should be able to buy a gun without the seller finding out if the buyer is a bad guy. There are only two groups that disagree with the previous sentence: the NRA, and anyone running for office. This is a winning issue for Democrats. But find me a Democrat willing to state the obvious. There aren’t any. Everyone is scared shitless of the NRA.
Exhibit C, The Economy. This is another case like Obamacare. Republicans have repeated so often that the economy is in the dumps that people have begun to believe it. But in reality, Obama has accomplished most of what any Republican would want: Gas is under $3 a gallon, unemployment is under 6%, the stock market is breaking records. Now, I’m the first to admit that the President has precious little to do with economic performance. For years presidents have been unjustly blamed or credited for bad or good economies. But this is the first time in my memory that a president has been blamed for a bad economy when it wasn’t!
Did the Democrats jump to Obama’s defense? Nope. The general population thinks the economy is bad because the Republicans say it is, and the Democrats do not respond. It’s their own fault if the population is upset at the good news.
Now there is another reason why the general population is upset: they deserve to be. All that economic good news enriches the rich, but ordinary citizens have not seen an improvement in their standard of living for decades. The reason is Republican policies.
Look at it this way. Rich people are rich. They have the money they need to buy whatever they want, and to hire whomever they want. Giving them more money will not cause them to buy more stuff or hire more people. They will only sock it away in the stock market or the Cayman Islands. The Job Creators do not create jobs simply because they have more money. They create jobs when their businesses need more people. And giving tax breaks to Job Creators does not make their businesses need more people, hence, no more jobs, and no trickle down to the middle class. Don’t take my word for it—we have been doing this experiment for the last 30 years, and the result is crystal clear: tax breaks for the rich makes rich people richer, and poor people poorer.
But if you give poor people more money, they spend it. They buy more pizza and hamburgers, causing Pizza Hut and McDonalds to hire more people, who in turn spend their money, etc., etc. The economy booms. Again, you don’t need to take my word for it. Last year Seattle raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour. Republicans and business people threw a fit, predicting all sorts of layoffs and an economic disaster. But many of the people who said they would have to lay off workers have instead hired more. The economy is booming.
Who supports raising the minimum wage, giving a boost to the lower and middle class? Democrats (and most of the people). Who opposes it? Republicans. This is another winning issue for the Democrats, which did receive some air time this fall, but not nearly enough.
Exhibit D, Immigration. Another winning issue for the Democrats that we fumbled.
Every couple generations there is a wave of immigration to the US. Think of the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, etc. In every case, the people who are already here are worried sick about the newcomers. They don’t speak English, they all stick together, they eat funny foods, they are taking our jobs, they smell bad, they are unhealthy and unsanitary and generally bad for the country. In a couple generations, these immigrants are fully assimilated and proceed to treat the next wave exactly as their grandparents were treated. They work really hard to make sure that no one else gets the same opportunities they had. The current wave is no different, except that their native countries and ours are connected by land, so there is much more opportunity to enter the country without going through the proper channels.
The Republican solution is to wall off the country with ever higher fences, and to treat the people who are already here like shit, perhaps in the hope that they will decide to leave. Democrats are intrinsically more welcoming, but candidates in this electron were falling over each other to propose bigger fences. Obama had a proposal to make immigrants’ lives better; at the request of Michelle Nunn, Mary Landrieu, and Kay Hagan, he held off implementing it in order to attract more swing voters. As it turns out, the swing voters stayed home, and the Democratic base, at least the Hispanic part of it, naturally did too. None of those candidates won.
Exhibit E, Competence
This is the only issue that worked to the Republicans’ advantage, and they made full use of it. It is unfortunately true that the current administration looked especially bumbling. It is not clear that they were in fact any worse at running the country than other recent administrations, but they had a knack for revealing their instances of incompetence at the worst possible times. Maybe this was what Obama meant but more openness in government.
The bottom line is, Democrats lost because they ran a shitty race. They allowed the Republicans to frame the issues and tried to win on their turf. As Bill Maher has pointed out, if you give the electorate a choice between a real Republican and a Republican-lite, they will choose the real one. Democrats lost because they stopped being Democrats.
After the 2012 election, where Republicans got blown out, there was much angst among them. Many said that the party was doomed unless they pitched a broader tent, appealing to young people, gays, women, Hispanics, African-Americans, all those folks who carried the Democrats to victory and who are becoming an ever larger part of the electorate. Other Republicans said that they lost because they were not conservative enough—they had to play even more vigorously to their base. In the past two year, we have seen the latter strategy play out, and it worked, because mid-term elections play to the base, and the Republican base was charged up while the Democratic base was not. But this same strategy, in my opinion, dooms them to losing every four years, when the rest of the electorate comes out, both because the Democratic base is larger than the Republican base, and because most people agree with the Democrats on the issues. The Republicans did not win over very many young people, gays, women, Hispanics, African-Americans; all they did was convince them to stay home. In the long run, this is not a winning strategy.