I take all polls this far out from an election with a shaker of salt, but you have to take heed of polls like this:
John Boozman will enter the Arkansas Senate race this weekend as the frontrunner. He leads incumbent Blanche Lincoln by an amazing 56-33 margin in our first poll of the race.
Lincoln’s approval rating has sunk to just 27%, with 62% of voters in the state disapproving of her. She’s at a middling 51% even within her own party and just 17% of independents and 9% of Republicans are happy with how she’s doing.
A look inside the health care issue gives a good indication of how Lincoln has managed now to get it from all sides. 61% of voters in the state oppose the President’s plan, and among those folks Lincoln’s approval rating is just 8% with 79% of them expressing the belief that she’s too liberal. But she’s managed to antagonize a lot of the people who support the Democratic health care plan as well- 36% of them think she’s too conservative and her approval with them is just 57%. Barack Obama’s at 95% with that same group of voters.
Now, I have two questions. If the “president’s plan” included a public option, would it be more or less popular in Arkansas. And, if Lincoln had been a champion of the public option instead of one of its most high-profile detractors, would she have a 95% approval rating among liberals, like Obama?
You can see where I am going with this. She tried to be ‘moderate’ or ‘centrist’ by seeking in a very public way to water down health care reform. In return, she’s won a 9% approval rating among Republicans and a 17% approval rating among Independents. We don’t know what those numbers would look like in the alternative universe where she was supportive of a public option, but they couldn’t be much worse. She got no bang out of her approach with the people you might predict would be pleased with it. Instead, she alienated her base. Just 51% of Democrats approve of the job she’s doing, and that is why she has no chance of winning reelection.
I think it is safe to say that prior to the health care debate Sen. Lincoln was a fairly popular low-profile senator. After the death of Teddy Kennedy produced a game of musical committee chairs, she was lucky to land in the chair of the Agriculture Committee. In that position, she is poised to do a lot of good for Arkansan farmers and businesses. Her reelection should be a no-brainer. But she did the absolute worst thing. She told everyone that the health care bill was too liberal and then she voted for it. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
The best way for Democrats in McCain states to survive is to make the president more popular in their states. You don’t do that by bad-mouthing his policies and then watering down their effectiveness and attractiveness. Making the bill as unpopular with the left as it is with the right and then voting for it and then having it not pass in part due to your hemming and hawing? The opposite of priceless.
Goodbye, Blanche Lincoln. You should have kept a low profile and voted for the robust public option that the president campaigned on. Your ‘centrism’ cost you a career that was set to blossom into something meaningful.
So here’s an important question:
How can we recruit INTELLIGENT people into running for higher office in our party?
And why is that such a small pool to begin with, sigh.
Boo, I almost wish you’d run. But you’re too valuable here, so I hope you don’t. But still – they should listen to you!!!
If I can be an optimist for a moment…
If you look at the senators we elected in 2006 and 2008, they are pretty good. None of them had a problem with a public option. Jim Webb has been shitty in some areas, and Mark Warner isn’t always where I’d like him to be, but overall, the new classes of senators have been pretty solid. I can nitpick on any of them, but our problems stem from the class of Democrats elected roughly from 1996-2004.
Landreu? Casey? Conrad? Nelson?
Landrieu was elected in 1996.
Bill Nelson was elected in 2000.
Ben Nelson was elected in 2000.
Kent Conrad was elected in 1986.
And Casey has been a surprisingly good vote on everything except stem-cell research and abortion.
That is heartening. I’d like to think that, with the information now available on the Internet, people are making better choices. And frankly, now that so many are unemployed, there’s no excuse for them not researching candidates. So maybe there’s a wonderful trend going on. I sure hope so.
We have a small bench in Arkansas in part because the Arkansas Democratic Party is still recovering from the murder (assassination?) of the chair of the Arkansas Democratic Party in August 2008.
And to some extent, the toxic legacy of the Clinton scandal.
We really need to get back to the 50-state strategy of building state and county party infrastructure that Howard Dean did as DNC chair.
In order to get intelligent people to run for higher office, you have to have intelligent people who win at lower office. Generally, US Senators are recruited from statewide offices such as governor, secretary of state, attorney general, or prominent state senators.
The other problem is that most intelligent people are not going to run for what they perceive as a lost cause. And the polling of Democratic matchups in Arkansas is giving that appearance of a lost cause.
Democrats dominate in Arkansas and the bench is very deep. It’s just that the Democrats there are very conservative and among white Democrats the president is very unpopular.
The best way for Democrats in McCain states to survive is to make the president more popular in their states. You don’t do that by bad-mouthing his policies and then watering down their effectiveness and attractiveness.
It’s the weakest McCain state in one respect. Hillary would have wiped the floor with McCain in Arkansas. So as you say, white Democrats are popular there. And as to the second part of that statement, that’s the problem with most all the Blue Dogs/DLC types. They don’t care to make Democratic policies(or in this case, Obama) popular in their district or state. It’s not what they do. Look at Gene Taylor during the summer tea-party season). Did he take time to educate his constituents? Hell to the no!!
So tell me how this translates into Democratic victories for national office. If no one wants to run, the domination of state offices doesn’t matter. Can players who don’t want to play be considered on the bench?
looking at poll numbers, including the president’s, I wouldn’t be eager to run as a Democrat in Arkansas at the moment. But they have many well qualified state-wide elected officials to choose from.
Would you be eager to run in Massachusetts as a Republican?
Oh, they did that already.
Can you tell I’m a little bit PO’d by the attitude that just because someone at one time called something a red state that the Democratic Party should just write them off or that progressives should be afraid to test to see just how populist the electorate really is? This business as usual is driving me nuts; Menendez takes a bunch of Senators to Miami (including Kay Hagan) to hobnob with lobbyists. And this is supposed to help Democrats win in November? As I’ve said before, the yellow dawgs just get uglier and uglier.
well, who are you mad at?
You want some progressive to run against Lincoln? Okay. It could well happen.
It really has escaped the consciousness of Democrats in Congress that a good healthcare reform bill that was in place and available to people in June of 2010 or so would be more popular than a bad healthcare reform bill that is still stuck in Congress. And a whole lot of Democrats went out of their way to make the Senate healthcare reform bill the worst possible in length, complexity, and bennies for insurance companies. As one of those Blanche Lincoln is paying the price. If Republicans had someone to put up in Indiana, Evan Bayh would also be paying the price.
The fact that Max Baucus dragged out the process made people feel like this was going to be a bad bill. Which made the Tea Party protests in August plant the seeds of doubt about any healthcare reform bill.
Polling in the summer showed a substantial majority of folks in Arkansas favoring the public option. As time wore on, that majority disappeared. And when the public option disappeared, opposition to the healthcare reform bill jumped.
Your last sentence has it exactly right.
If this poll can be believed, Arkansans hate anything to do with health care reform, except forcing insurance companies to cover people with preexisting conditions.
I believe on January 24, 2010, that is an accurate poll. But people’s opinions are not immutable. Pass a bill and let people experience it and then repoll the same questions, you will get much different results.
That poll reflects what people have absorbed from what they have been told about the healthcare reform bill.
What they experience when a healthcare reform bill is in place will override what they have been told.
Pass single payer as Medicare-for-all, start enrollment in June 2010, claims and payouts before September 2010, and Democrats will win. And all that talk about government takeover of healthcare will suddenly subside. Conservatives in the South say they are against government programs, but they are among the first in line to enroll.
Not only that, but why did they need 60 votes on the end bill anyway? Didn’t Reid(or someone else) say to these guys, “Hey, wait a minute!!”? Break the filibuster and let Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln vote against the final bill? And if not, why not?
you know the answer, so why do you ask?
Reconciliation is an imperfect tool.
Which sounds great. I hope it comes with a free unicorn on your first visit, too.
So how do you get it through the Senate?
Stands to reason, when all they hear is the teabagger crazies and poor limp little Blanche apologizing for her party’s attempt at healthcare reform. “Centrism” is a scam that ultimately damages the candidates that try it and the party that they disfigure by their membership. With creepy crawlers like Lincoln in the way, real Democrats are inhibited from fundamental attacks on the silly objections from the right because to do so would be to show the uselessness of their own party’s senator.
If Arkansas had decent Dems there would be some chance to let them know why just trying to regulate the existing insurance monopolies can’t do much by itself. When all you see on the local news is turncoat Dems parroting teabagger talking points, yeah, you’re probably going to think teabaggers are the “center”.
I think DailyKos did a poll last year showing that the public option was actually popular in Arkansas. For sure it was very popular amongst Democrats in Arkansas.
Lincoln ignored those polls and basically shot herself in the foot. I’d be interested to see what Mark Pryor’s approval rating is. He has taken a low-key approach to the issue.
Nelson and Landrieu have sabotaged their own political fortunes with their grandstanding.
All they had to do was stay out of the spotlight, don’t make crazy demands that piss off your base, and make sure you have some consistency.
I think Nate Silver said the smart move would have been to vote for cloture and against the bill itself, along with a clear explanation of your vote. No Cornhusker Kickbacks that make you a national laughingstock, no demonizing your own party and president, none of this stuff that has basically made Nelson and Lincoln unelectable in their own states.
Truly two of the stupidest politicians in America.