The last hurrah?
Recently, The Des Moines Register's David Yepsen wrote a piece cautioning Democrats to not overanalyze Bush's reelection and the further erosion of Democrats in the House and Senate. Yepsen ties it in with Iowa Democrats making substantial gains in the Iowa House and Senate. You can read the full article here.
The single most important factor in determining which party wins a legislative seat is the quality of the contenders. Some 80 percent of Iowa's legislative districts can be won by either party, provided they field the better of the two candidates.
Today, Iowa is become more urban and suburban. That means Republicans can no longer go out and recruit mossbacks or gentleman farmers and hope to win the Legislature.
Republicans have to offer more appealing candidates. Democrats did that this year and won. For example, Democratic recruiters actually looked for some pro-life Democrats to run in heavily Catholic or evangelical districts. While this prompted great angst among the purists on the left, it was pragmatic...
Future GOP prospects are tough. Bush only carried Iowa by five votes per precinct, a fact that will again make Iowa a battleground in 2008. When Jim Nussle gives up his eastern Iowa congressional seat in 2006 to run for governor, Democrats will be favored to win it back. The same thing will happen whenever Jim Leach decides to retire.
At the national level, religious conservatives risk overplaying their hand. They are now savaging Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter for not being conservative enough on judicial appointments. Imagine that. The guy who grills Anita Hill to a medium rare in order to get Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court is now not conservative enough?
Great. Run the Arlen Specters out of the GOP. Jim Jeffords already left. That 55-seat majority in the U.S. Senate will evaporate quickly if GOP seats in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania or Maine are ever handed to Democrats. (If the Deep South is trending Republican and Southern Democrats are an endangered species, then the reverse of that could happen in the Northeast. Blue-state Republicans could become a thing of the past.)
Bush won by a slim majority, and Democrats could easily come storming back in four years with a candidate who understands average Americans and the role of religious faith in their lives...
Republicans must also remember that a party that can win three presidential elections in a row is a rare thing in recent American history. Bush's win was narrow. Democrats won't always offer feckless opponents...
Instead of looking at Bush's re-election as ushering in a new Republican era, we could look back at the 2004 election as another 1928 - the last GOP hurrah before a Great Crash.
2 Comments:
It's interesting to look at the parrallels between what happened on the state level in Iowa and Colorado...and then look at the direction the national GOP is heading. It makes me almost hopeful that if (a great big IF) the Democrats could act like a reasonable alternative, the GOP may just self cumbust nationally the way they have in Iowa and Colorado -- through overzealously ideological, rather than rational, governance.
Thanks for posting this, Zach.
It often makes me sad that David Yepsen is the only major political commentator in my home state, in part because he's so conservative, and in part because I don't think his analysis is good enough for the fine people of Iowa. In this case, having watched really terrific candidates who ran great campaigns lose races in the last two election cycles, I seriously dispute his hypothesis that Democrats have been running crappy candidates in the past. At least part of the blame falls on the disintegrating effectiveness of the Iowa Democratic Party's ground game.
Having said that, I think there are a couple of larger points worth noting here. First, Iowa's congressional balance should be better than it is, and if the Dems are smart, they should be supporting Nussle's gubernatorial hopes and rallying behind an awesome Congressional candidate to run for that seat (and, as Yepsen suggests, a pro-life Catholic might not be a bad profile to start with). Second, Iowa's process for redistricting every ten years is one every state should adopt--legislators are basically rubber-stampers on a computer-generated redistricting model. That's how the state can continually have legislative (and, other than the 5th, Congressional) districts that can be genuinely competitive cycle after cycle.
Finally, I'd add Minnesota to the list of states that saw Democratic gains at the state level--while I don't know for sure what the explanation is for those gains, I'd guess that at least part of it is that the DFL did a pretty good job here of laying the blame for state-level policy problems squarely at the feet of the Republican party, and explaining what their policy alternatives were (as Shayna rightly points out we must do). It would be interesting to delve more into these case studies and see what, if anything, we can apply at the national level.
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