The 2009/2010 electoral forecast for Democrats, according to the horse race pundit class, just keeps getting gloomier and gloomier. According to Larry Sabato, the Democrats may well lose the House, and even if Obama's approval settles into the mid-60s, and Dems have a ten-point lead in the generic ballot, they still will lose fifteen seats in the House.
Meanwhile, veteran analyst (and NN09 attendee) Charlie Cook is now saying that Democrats should be "terrified" about the potential for a GOP wave election in 2010.
In the past two weeks, however, there have been actual votes counted around the country, and the results have been far from disastrous for the Democrats:
- Curt Hanson held onto a swing legislative seat in southeastern Iowa, despite the fact that the Democrat was outspent by a 3-to-2 margin and the fact that an outside group (NOM) may well have spent more than either candidate trying to link the Democrat to the gay marriage issue.
- Democrat Norbert Chabert held onto a state Senate seat in inhospitable territory (Obama got less than 30% of the vote in the district), scoring a nine-point win.
- Democrat Robin Webb did one better, picking up a previously Republican state Senate seat in northern Kentucky, in a district that went nearly 3-to-2 Republican in last year's presidential election.
- Finally, although this one was not a general election, it was worth noting that the total vote in the special primary election to replace Ellen Tauscher in CA-10 broke down almost identically to both the Presidential and House partisan breakdown from 2008.
In other words, if there is a nascent Repubican wave in America, it hasn't been apparent over the past few weeks.
So, do these special election results completely kick sand in the face of the punditocracy? Rather than dire predictions of Democratic doom, do the recent results instead portend that Democratic hegemony in 2010 is the true order of the day?
Sadly, the answers are not really and...not really.
Special elections can occasionally be the canary in the coalmine, to be sure. The pair of Republican Congressional special election victories in 1994, in retrospect, should have tipped us off to the notion that the raft of open-seat challenges facing the Democrats in that year were going to go very, very badly for them. A decade later, Paul Hackett's near-miss in the rarely competitive OH-02 were the first real indicator that voter discontent with the GOP majority was a legitimate phenomenon.
More often than not, however, special elections are driven by individual dynamics and quirks that are unlikely to replicated on a national stage. They are the embodiment of the old Tip O'Neill admonition that "all politics are local."
This was true when Republicans picked off several special elections at the start of the year (leading to unjustified crowing in many cases from GOP advocates, and unnecessary rending of garments by some Democratic advocates), and it is true now.
Take the four results highlighted above. The Democratic victory in the Kentucky legislative special can be explained, in part, by the vocal support of the thoroughbred-racing industry in the state, who were collectively ticked at the GOP for putting the brakes on video gambling at horse tracks.
The broad Democratic majorities in CA-10 can be explained even more simply: Republican David Harmer had no legitimate opponents, while virtually all of the money and attention were on the Democratic side.
Special elections are also ordinarily low-turnout affairs (the Kentucky special saw a turnout that was less than half of the turnout in 2008). This makes them an even poorer predictor of what will happen in a general election, when the voters are more numerous.
So, is there any cause for joy, aside from hanging onto, or gaining, a state legislative seat here and there?
Actually, yes. Yes, there is.
The Republicans, in several of these cases, put all hands on deck. In Louisiana, not only did they bring in big guns like Governor Bobby Jindal to raise money for the Republican (Brent Callais), but they tried to nationalize a local special election by tying Democrat Norbert Chabert to President Obama's healthcare proposal.
The election in Iowa also wound up being nationalized (at least in a financial sense), when the National Organization of Marriage dumped a ton of money in the race on the behalf of the Republican.
In neither case did the GOP's political efforts yield dividends.
And, if there were a strong national anti-Democratic wave developing, one presumes that it would have surfaced, at least a little bit. Americans have been led to believe over the last month or so that the Democratic Party is in dire straits. Yet Democrats are still winning votes, even in these rather unpredictable microcosms of electoral politics.
By no means should the reader conclude that Democrats are in a stronger position than they were in 2008, nor should one necessarily even believe that Democrats will hold serve in 2009 and 2010.
It is reasonable to suggest, however, that there is (thus far) a real disconnect between what is actually occurring politically and what is being projected to happen very soon.
The evidence, thus far, seems to deny the existence of a wave in either direction. Both parties have suffered some lousy poll numbers, and both parties have won their fair share of special elections.
There needs to be some more evidence, it would seem, before either reassuring or frightening predictions about 2010 can be deemed legitimate.