I gotta say, even though I know I am going to be frustrated and disappointed in the Democratic trifecta at least some, and possibly even most, of the time these coming two years, I really like looking at this map:
And I like looking over the top of these maps, and seeing that we won over 52% of the vote for the second election in a row (we won over 52% in the House this year, too). In fact, 2006 and 2008 were the highest election totals for any party in any national election since 1990.
I have been looking at political maps since I was 13 years old back in 1987. The amps that were recent back then, just like the maps that were recent before this election, helped reinforce a sinking notion that most of the country just disagreed with you. Now that I can compare the feelings, it easily feels a lot better to think that most of the country agrees with you.
Winning is pretty cool. No matter what else happens, this feels good.
Jean Shaheen has entered the Senate race in New Hampshire. From what I am told, I am pretty sure this means both Katrina Swett and Steve Marchand will drop out. As for Jay Buckey, I honestly don't know, but I hope he stays in. Not only do I like Buckey, who is both an astronaut and a progressive (two of my favorite things), but the last thing Shaheen needs now is an uncontested primary. While polls show her ahead of Republican incumbent John Sununu by anywhere from 16-28 points, I do not have a lot of confidence that those enormous leads will hold. At the very least, Shaheen needs to be pushed to become a better campaigner in the primaries. Hopefully, such a primary will also force her to adopt a more progressive outlook (seriously, check out that link)
Now, even if he stays in, I am under no particular illusions that Buckey would have anything more than a moonshot to actually defeat Shaheen in the primary. However, to be perfectly frank, I feel like Shaheen is one of the many, many Democrats who first helped lead the party into simultaneous minority and pro-war status back in 2002-2003, but who is now capitalizing on the favorable electoral stage that was prepared mainly by the progressive movement during four years of intense guerilla warfare against conservatism from 2003-2006. While the Jean Shaheen's and Rahm Emanual's of the party were supporting things like the Bush tax cuts, the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, and legislation to support Terry Schaivo, it was the netroots who were doing the bulk of the heavy lifting in opposition to Republicans. I feel like they are capitalizing on what we rightfully earned, and both dissing us and preparing to destroy all of our work in the process. They are pretenders to the new Democratic majority.
Why am I so pissed at Democrats lately? Simply put, it feels like many Democrats are taking something that does not belong to them--their excellent 2006 and 2008 electoral advantages--and then thoroughly ruining it. And why am I so convinced they will ruin it? Because, as a progressive Democrat, I have already seen the blurring strategy on Iraq successfully used against my candidates by centrists from my own party. The most graphic example was Joe Lieberman against Ned Lamont in the 2006 Connecticut Senate general election. While nutmegers now regret falling for that strategy, it still worked, and Joe Lieberman is still in office. Now, with even Bush supposedly promising withdrawal by next summer, with the country grossly misinformed about withdrawal plans, with supposedly "anti-war" Republicans not being forced to vote on anything that will actually end the war, and with Republicans starting to capitalize on Democrats refusing to say how many troops they will leave in Iraq and for how long, I can see how it will broadly be used against progressives in 2008. Bush Dogs will be empowered. Progressives will find "moderate" Republicans much more difficult to defeat. Our chances for sweeping gains in the House might be wiped away. Even our advantage in the Presidency might disappear, as long as our nominee ends up supporting an indefinite amount of American troops in Iraq for an indefinite period of time. And so, like a nightmere version of Groundhog Day, those same, pretenders to the new Democratic Majority could very well lose because they shat on their base, and refused to take stronger stances on Iraq.
Sometimes I wonder if this problem is a combination of the progressive movement growing too effective too quickly, and Bush policies creating national and international disasters even more rapidly than expected. It takes a long time to build a bench. We are talking at least four years to build a member of the US House, and probably more. It takes ten years to build a US Senator, and often more. To build a President, it takes at least fourteen years, and often more. In the five year period from 2002-2007, the movement simply did not have enough time to build up a series of candidates and professional activists to replace the pretenders in Congress, in the party leadership, and throughout the progressive establishment. So, we set the table, but most of the people available to sit down and eat were the same Democrats who screwed everything up so badly from 1994-2004. And so, Jean Shaheen loses in 2002 while supporting the war and the Bush tax cuts, is floated as a "stop Dean" candidate for DNC chair in late 2004, but then gets to re-enter the Senate in 2008 largely because of the work of other progressives who she largely opposed. However, many other Democrats could easily end up losing in 2008 because of a blurring strategy on Iraq that Democrats like Shaheen will facilitate.
That, in a nutshell, is why I am directing so much vitrol at members of my own party right now. It feels like pretenders have usurped our new majority. Right now, I feel like a wave of primary challenges and trying to put an end to the blurring strategy is practically a last ditch effort to keep the situation from growing even worse. The Iraq blurring strategy is largely engineered by Republicans Bush Dogs as a means of keeping the conservative working majority in place. In order to break the conservative governing majority, that strategy must be smashed.
In his latest column, Peter Beinart argues that the DLC saved Democrats, and so now Republicans need one in order to get back on track. It is the most overtly anti-movement, and certainly anti-populist, pieces I have ever seen, essentially arguing that corporate elites need to save both parties from their bases by providing them with resources that can blunt the rank and file.
The major problem with Beinart's column are the issues it lists, since they were not the issues that led to the 2006 Democratic takeover. The DLC simply cannot be considered responsible for the latest Democratic salvation if it did not impact Democratic stances on the major factors that swung the election: Iraq, social security, Katrina, and corruption. Of those four, Beinart never mentions three of them, and only lists Iraq once. Of course, when he does list it, it is equivocated with several other issues, "Iraq, stem cells, global warming, health care," and he also fails to mention that the DLC has been consistently out of touch on Iraq as well. Here are the other issues he lists in article:
welfare and crime… Iraq, stem cells, global warming, health care… universal health care, a cap on greenhouse gases and a stem cell… stem cells… abortion… welfare… evolution… crime… tax… welfare reform and capital punishment… global warming and universal health care
Now, had the 2006 election turned on welfare, stem cells, health care, crime and global warming, Beinart might have the semblance of a point, albeit an extremely elitist one. However, I don't remember living in a country where those were the major issues that switched control of Congress. Republican approval ratings began to drop when they tried to privatize health care social security, continued to drop because of Iraq, dropped rapidly because of the disaster after Hurricane Katrina, and stayed low because of Iraq. Through it all, several unexpected seats began to free up because of corruption (MT-Sen, OH-Gov, TX-22, OH-18, NC-11, CA-11, PA-10, etc), and then some more sucky Iraq news sealed the deal. Among other issues I did not mention, I can't image that flat wages made the middle class feel any better, either. Further, Beinart clearly is unaware that Democrats improved more from 2004 to 2006 by exciting and turning out their own base than they did by appealing to Independents. 2006 was as much of a Democratic base victory as it was an example of Democrats capturing swing voters.
Republicans are not losing because of their stances on universal health care, global warming or stem cells. They might lose one day because of those, but they are not losing because of that right now. Beinart lists some Republican Governors who are doing well on those issues, but Governors do not deal with foreign policy or Social Security. The Republican held Congress could have passed universal health care, a carbon tax, and overridden Bush's stem cell veto, and they still would have been wiped out at the federal level in 2006 without any changes on how they dealt with Social Security, Katrina, corruption and Iraq. Moderation issues not at the forefront of the electorate's mind don't win elections. As such, when one considers that the DLC was not at the forefront of the national Democratic position on any of the issues that swung the election (the DLC was regularly for the war and, at least in the past, for privatization of social security), it doesn't make any sense to argue that they are the reasons Democrats have taken back power and Republicans are in complete freefall. Beinart seems to be operating in some sort of strange, centrist issue bubble that ignores the major issues that have recently swung federal elections, not to mention the infrastructure improvements, including the netroots, that the nascent progressive movement has provided to assist Democrats. Ezra Klein agrees.
Now, with all that said, I am entirely with Beinart when it comes to strengthening any sort of Republican Leadership Council. The strength of the DLC-nexus in the Democratic Party is one of the main reasons why there is still a working conservative majority in Washington, even though Democrats narrowly control Congress. If there is a rising, progressive Republican organization that could potentially weaken the conservative movement's control over the Republican Party, that would be one of the most important developments for Democrats and the progressive movement alike in decades. If the conservative movement is in control of neither major party, then progressive governance will become much, much easier no matter what the partisan make-up of Washington might be. If the conservative movement controls neither, and the progressive movement controls one, then progressive governance will be virtually assured.
By now, we have all heard about how the great Independent swing toward Democrats from 2004 to 2006 was the key to Democratic victory. This is something many of us saw coming for quite some time, and we even dubbed it the "Indycrat" phenomenon. The first article I saw on this was a June 2005 post by Jerome Armstrong. During the rest of that year, it was a topic that was discussed other places like Donkey Rising, Survey USA and many other election focused outlets.
However, at Yearly Kos I briefly chatted with Simon Rosenberg who asked me to look into whether, from 2004 to 2006, Democrats received a greater vote swing from self-identified Democrats or from self-identified Independents. The reason he asked me to do that is because he believed Democrats actually received more of a boost from self-identifying Dems than they did from self-identifying Independents. While I was skeptical of this at first, I just looked into it now, at it appears Simon was right. Comparing 2004 and 2006 exit polls, here is the estimated swing Democrats received according to partisan self-identification:
Overall Dem vote increase: 5.15%
Growth from Dem's: 2.41%
Growth from Ind's: 2.08%
Growth from Rep's: 0.66%
This is rather surprising, but it does seem to be the case that Democrats won 2006 just as much by exciting the rank and file as anything else. I am actually kicking myself right now for not realizing this sooner, as it is the sort of statistic I pride myself on digging up. This would have been extremely useful to combat the post-election narrative that Democrats won in 2006 by being centrist, conservative, or in anyway breaking from their own party. The independent swing was important, but the swing they managed to pull off through an excited base was just as important, if not more so. Democrats stuck with their own party more often than Republicans, and then turned out at higher rates. Without this swing from their own base, Republicans would certainly still be in the majority in the Senate, and probably still be in the majority in the House.
The role of the Democratic base in winning the 2006 election has been extremely under-reported. This is disturbing, because the power centers one uses to win an election almost inevitably end being the power centers to whom ones caters after the election. If Democrats are unaware that there own base was largely responsible for their victory then, well, that might actually explain the way we have governed to date. There are quite a few Democrats, such as these congresscritters listed by Howie, who don't think they owe their own base anything, and they are voting accordingly. I think it would be useful to find a way to remind them who helped put them in office / the majority.
(This is a really useful analysis of the real fluidity in our political system brought by Bush's unpopularity. Basically, he's turning a lot of red areas blue, and potentially putting a whole bunch of seats in play. There is a big role we could potentially have here. - promoted by Matt Stoller)
I started out my last diary two months ago stating that "Bush has been holding steady at record low approval ratings for the past four months." At the same time that I wrote those words, Bush was poised at the edge of a precipice; he took the leap and continues to plunge through the upper 20s in approval.
So let's see that new approval map for the month of June:
Click to enlarge.
As I said last time, as long as Bush remains unpopular, *there are no more safe Republican House seats.* Bush's approval ratings do matter. Below, more details on state-level approval ratings, and adding in the effect of money in House races to the relationship between Bush's approval ratings and votes for Republicans.
STATE BLOGS
