Here’s a question. With news that former senator Dan Coats is going to challenge Evan Bayh it looks like some of our most conservative Democrats are vulnerable to defeat in November. But, aside from the overall political makeup of their particular states, what makes them so vulnerable? Why is Blanche Lincoln less popular than a case of the clap? Why do Nevadans hate Harry Reid? It’s not like they’re crooks or sexual deviants.
Here’s what’s going on. Even where Democrats are still winning, they’re suffering from an enthusiasm gap. Democrats who stall the president’s agenda and badmouth him and the party are most likely to exacerbate this enthusiasm gap. In a purple or red state, combining a kind of inherent cyclical enthusiasm gap with a self-created one is enough to put your reelect number in the thirties.
Lesson? Stop tying to save your hide by bashing the left and embrace good policy. We talk a lot about why we hate the DLC and Clintonism. Well, the number one reason we hate them is because they’re political losers. It’s not centrist policy that is the primary problem. You work with the Congress you have, not the one you might wish for. But it’s the idea that you can win elections by bashing your own party and your own party activists. Listen to Blanche Lincoln complain about left-wing blogs. Do you think that wins her any votes?
please share that with the DNC as well.
Which brings us back to Kos:
If you abandon Democratic principles in a bid for unnecessary “bipartisanship”, you will lose votes.
If you water down reform in favor of Blue Dogs and their corporate benefactors, you will lose votes.
If you forget why you were elected — health care, financial services, energy policy and immigration reform — you will lose votes.
It’s even worse than losing votes. By bashing “left wing blogs” constantly, she’s also alienating the best volunteers and donors to her campaign. That exponentionally increases the votes lost.
I expected people to claim an “enthusiasm gap” is what caused the low turnout in the Illinois primaries, but our primaries always suffer from low turnout. On the Democratic side it has more to do with it being a non-presidential year full of negative campaigning in the senate and governor’s races than anything that happened in Washington. The GOP side doesn’t really fit the narrative either. We were told that the teabaggers would be fired up and make a strong showing but more votes were cast on the Democratic side than in the Republican races.
Where is Bayh’s primary challenger from the left? Or, are we just gonna let Coats jump into the race and push Bayh further right without encouraging a true progressive to run against him?
Meh.
Yep. If you don’t know where 4500 signatures are coming from, how will you ever get the 750,000-1,000,000 votes to dump Bayh and the probabaly 1.5 million votes to prevail in the general?
Popping up two days or so before the filing deadlines without building a statewide organization is why progressive challengers have difficulty in primaries and general elections.
If you want to counter money power, you have to do it with people power. You can’t build that over the course of a single campaign. Especially one for national office.
Wow. Another reason the Hoosier state sucks. In Illinois you need 25,000 valid signatures to run, but I don’t see that per district requirement.
Its about how the game is played. I just think of the conservative senators in our caucus as politicians who are slow to adapt to new realities. Our political landscape has evolved and they seemed trapped in time when Clinton and Dole were hammering out deals or even earlier, Reagan and Tip O’Neal. Like an aging pitcher who can never believe his go-to fastball is now hittable, they cling to what worked to get them first elected (playing the moderate, centrist card in red state and distancing themselves from the left wing of their caucus).
Now that the political landscape has shifted since the MA special election, their fallback option is to punch the hippies. As you point out, its bad politics.
I think the reasons why the netroots so vehemently dislikes the conservatives like Bayh and Lincoln (im leaving Lieberman out of this post of course) really has little to do with ideology. They’re just bad politicians who are bringing down the entire party and no one likes dead weight on their team. The health care and stimulus bill were sufficiently watered down for conservative’s likings. I can live with our bills getting watered down in order to keep the tent big enough so everyone on the dem side is happy. But tactically, the correct play is for our conservative caucus members to be team players, not hippie punchers. Like the kid glove treatment McConnel gives Snowe and Collins, I’m fine giving them all sorts of passes on tough votes. But they can’t be allowed to obstruct and fight the party line (something Collins and Snowe never even thought about doing when the GOP was the majority).
This all comes back to a point I make early and often here: that the Dem party is at a crossroads now given that the GOP has evolved into a parliamentary-style party. The Dem party can make a similar move in terms of top-down party line discipline or it must embrace institutional reforms that lubricate the legislative gears that the GOP’s parliamentary mutation has mucked up (eliminating filibuster, campaign finance reform, changes to senate rules, etc).
To a great extent, tough votes are self-defined.
Folks will give politicians a pass for standing up for what they believe in even if they disagree. The problem with the centrists is figuring out what they actually believe in.
It’s why a lot of Democrats voted for Jesse Helms instead of centrist Democrats (Jim Hunt and Harvey Gantt being the exceptions–Jesse had to work to win those). The line was “I don’t always agree with him, but I know where he stands.”
Today in Congress Tom Perriello (VA-05) has been doing the same thing with regard to Obama’s agenda. In his town halls, folks are quoted saying the same thing about him. It’s no wonder Virgil Goode doesn’t want a rematch.
I think it translates further to something like “at least s/he cares about something besides getting elected.” It’s better to think our representative cares about us or our country, no matter how misguidedly,than just about himself.
I’m so so glad I worked my ass off for Perriello. He won by a margin of less than 1,000 votes I believe. It was like 0.01% of the vote or something.
Go, Tom!
Thank you. And get ready to go do it again. It’s going to take enthusiasm in a not-so-enthusiastic year to make sure that some dark elephant Republican doesn’t do the Scott Brown/McDonnell routine in that district.
People like to vote for people who get things done. Getting things done includes standing up and getting good bills passed and standing up and preventing bad bills from getting passed. People are also OK with pols who make good, strong, deals for their side. Nobody has any patience for self-divided neurotics who constantly sabotage themselves because they’re too weak and frightened to understand the game. Which is exactly what pols who start out defining themselves as “centrists” or “moderates” are — they’re just clinging desperately to a pathetic delusion.
When does Feinstein come up for reelection? 2012? I’d love for Jackie Speier send her into retirement.
That would be sweet. I never understood why CA Dems put up with her.
DiFi has managed to vote often enough on the liberal side on just enough issues in the past to keep her above water with most Dems, especially as she seems to do most of her liberal positioning closer to election time, when most voters begin to pay attention. Also, her strong personality has mostly worked in her favor.
There also might be a feeling with CA Dems that we’ve got our true blue liberal in Boxer, so we have the luxury of not getting too upset over some of DiFi’s center-right attitudes.
That said, I’d love to see her primaried, if she runs again, by a liberal pol like Speier.
Probably because her corporate pals gave her the money to be able to afford an expensive race like CA. The state parties love crap like that. So they can save money for other things, no matter how bad someone like Feinstein is.
Feinstein will be 79 in 2012. It might not take much to encourage her to retire.
It’s time to rebuild the bench in California. Moving Speier into the Senate would open up her district for a fresh face in Congress.
If Boxer holds on this year, she will be 76 in 2016 and should probably retire if there is some younger person who can match Boxer’s liberal positions.