By any reasonable historical standard, the Republicans should control the House of Representatives for the remainder of the decade. The districts are gerrymandered six ways to Sunday. The Democrats just won the national popular vote in House races by well more than a half a million votes and still came up 17 seats shy of taking control. Very few of the races the Democrats lost were even remotely close, meaning that there is little hope of winning more than a handful of those seats in the near future.
Add to this that the party of a two-term president is normally not just beaten in the sixth-year of his presidency, but completely decimated. It happened to Truman, Eisenhower, LBJ, Nixon (Ford), Reagan, and the Lesser Bush. The only exception was Clinton, and that is explained by the public’s backlash against the impeachment proceedings that were underway at the time. The Democrats should expect nothing better than disaster in November 2014.
But the Republicans are probably going to screw it up.
People are going go to be pissed when we go over the Fiscal Cliff. They are going to be pissed when the Republicans continue their obstruction next year. They won’t like their refusal to address climate change in the face of Superstorms and powerful hurricanes and unprecedented droughts. They’ll be furious when the House refuses to pass any gun control laws in the wake of the Newtown Massacre. They will flip out when the Republicans mess with the Electoral College in a desperate effort to stave off demographic doom. They’ll hate them when they mess with the debt ceiling again. There will be a backlash against the anti-union laws. There will be a price to pay for refusing to do anything about immigration reform. The war on women will continue in the states, and the resistance will build.
More and more Republicans will disassociate themselves from the national party.
ObamaCare will kick in and people will like it.
I think by November 2014, it will be pretty clear that the only way for the country to move forward is to give the Democrats control of the House. The gerrymandering has created a nice seawall for the Republicans, but it is probably going to be inundated much like the Atlantic Coast was during Superstorm Sandy.
The behavior of Democrats during the same time period will determine whether the public sees them as a reasonable alternative. Me too-ism will be suicidal for Democrats in Congress. So maybe 2014 is also the year of the Democratic primaries or a viable third party in some states. The amount of disruption you are anticipating is sufficient to make either of those as strongly possible.
The gerrymandering will be fixed by (1) capture of the state legislatures and rejiggering districts (Tom Delay proved that you don’t have to wait until census years) or (2) revision and standardization of the way that the US does elections that specifically removes gerrymandering as a tactic. The second could require a general principle as a Constitutional amendment that could prevent legislative or judicial reversal of anti-gerrymandering legislation and implementing legislation for non-partisan commissions.
It will not be sufficient to just take back the House. Non-Republicans with a sense of public purpose must take back close to all of the legislatures as well.
you are hot for Constitutional Amendments today. You know, the GOP would have to vote for them.
Your priorities are backwards.
Precisely. That’s what makes them a wedge issue. There is broader support for getting money and lobbyists out of Washington than there is individually for gun control, climate change mitigation, and all the other policies that the majority of the people say they want but Congress won’t deliver.
And until you change the process, you will not get the policies. Is not that what we’ve learned over the past four years?
We have not had that mythical watershed election yet. If it doesn’t come soon, we are in a mell of a hess.
Yes, I’m big on Constitutional amendments today because I don’t see legislation going anywhere before 2014 and business as usual delivers the House and Senate to GOP control.
And I’m tired of the Democrats I voted for ignoring me because of their ties to specific pots of money.
and it doesn’t appear that gop attempts to gerrymander presidential electoral votes will suffice to get them the white house, even if they all do it.
It seems to me that this GOP effort to end winner-take-all and apportion electoral votes by their gerrymandered districts would help them a lot. Not last election with Romney, perhaps their worst candidate since Goldwater, but perhaps with a different more telegenic orator as candidate. A fix is a powerful help as the House has shown.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen particular episodes lead to defections from the Republican Party, like the Terry Schiavo episode, Social Security Privatization, and the 47% comment.
More recently, we’ve seen longtime gun rights stalwarts come around on the issue since Newtown. This suggests to me that there could be a meaningful shift in the electorate.
Stalwarts come around? Perhaps it is Senators you are talking about. The gun owning voters I know are digging in their heels. And the Ohio AG, I beleive it was, has proposed mandatory gun carrying by all teachers, an idea that ABC says is likely to spread. With, I calculate, about 1.5 million gun carrying teachers, how many other horrors will this create? Remember, it was a teacher giving gun access to a nutcase (her son) that is ultimately responsible for Newtown.
no, it turns out she was not a teacher – though we still don’t know much. she was supported on alimony
I’m sure it is only a small segment of the total population that’s changed, but it was only a small segment that peeled off during each of those earlier episodes, too. Still, it made a difference.
Heh.
I love bedtime stories with a happy ending! Goodnight Boo.
I agree with your analysis completely but harvesting the benefits will not be automatic or easy. This is the reason I was so disappointed in Obama for even the thought of giving away progressive crown jewels of Social Security because it has the potential to kill the momentum for the very people we’re going to need for this harvest.
One thing that the Republicans might not anticipate is highly directed outrage. If a concentrated grass roots effort is made in as many as possible house districts held by Republicans to hold these individual members accountable for the pain that will be suffered by their constituents, they lose those seats. If we get the talking filibuster in the Senate, endless sound bites will emerge on the national stage. Nothing like a little panic in the market and pain of cuts to things that people never thought was in jeopardy to magnify that outrage not to mention the host of other things where they are on the wrong side of issues even Republicans support, like gun violence control measures. The task is to direct that outrage. Under those circumstances I think individual targeted House Republicans will do anything to salvage their political careers including an awkward exit from their clown car.
If this works the fever is broken so maybe we don’t have to wait another two years to begin the repair of our broken economy.
2014: Republicans attack Obama and Democrats for cutting Social Security benefits via chained CPI.
And what’s this focus on 2014 when we just had an election? The pending Obama/Republicans deal is looking bad, with the president already conceding on the $250K threshold for higher marginal rates. Let’s concentrate on that now, and put the speculation about the future off for six months, at least.
2014: Republicans attack Obama and Democrats for cutting Social Security benefits via chained CPI.
I remember people assuring me that the Republicans were going to attack the Democrats in 2012 for putting chained CPI and a higher Medicare age “on the table.” Not so much, as it turned it. Or, actually, at all.
They were too busy with “cut medicare.”
Which he actually did, though in a way that didn’t hurt people. More effective attack probably.
there are many things that could synergistically produce that result.
In 2008 I thought the same thing would allow the dems to hold onto the house in 2010, but sadly we saw or at least it was percieved by the voters necessary to assure that, the same thing we are getting a dose of now outta Obama and Pelosi as well.
It’s unlikely to be achievable if the dems inject major doses of disappointment and despair into the ranks of those needed, and the current budget BS likely isn’t the only ethusiasm-killing medicine we’ll see between now and then. For example, it isn’t getting much notice now because of all the rest, but what about the NDAA/detention stuff?
Adding it all up, “disassociation” could be a problem at this rate that both parties suffer, resulting in the maintenance of the current status quo in terms of the house.
What will piss of the world will be Boehner’s presser where he explains why we went over the cliff. Lots of talking about freedom, liberty, principles, and how it’s Obama’s fault.