So with polls showing a very close Senate race in Massachusetts, the President’s decided to go campaign for Democrat Martha Coakley this Sunday, two days before the special election.
He will be second-guessed for this decision, on grounds that he will now “own” the results. But I don’t think he really has any choice.
Special elections are “about” turnout, and there’s zero question that only a highly disproportionate turnout rate between Ds and Rs can produce a win by Republican Scott Brown. There’s nothing quite like presidential involvement to raise the stakes of an election for voters, and I doubt seriously Bay State GOPers can get any more motivated than they already are.
Sure, you can say that Coakley’s languid campaign got her into this position, and that Democrats nationally, including the President, don’t deserve any of the blame if she loses. But anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that a Brown victory would be widely interpreted as a personal setback for Obama–not to mention an immediate problem in terms of enacting legislation in the Senate–isn’t really thinking this through.
We’re getting to the point where the president is no longer in a position to hoard political capital; he needs to create some. And Massachusetts is one place where he could and should be able to do that.
TDS Strategy Memos
Latest Research from:
Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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October 23: Four Fear Factors for Democrats
I figured this was as good a time as any to come clean about reasons Democrats are fretting the 2024 election results despite some quite positive signs for Kamala Harris, so I wrote them up at New York:
One of the most enduring of recent political trends is a sharp partisan divergence in confidence about each party’s electoral future. Democrats are forever “fretting” or even “bed-wetting;” they are in “disarray” and pointing fingers at each other over disasters yet to come. Republicans, reflecting the incessant bravado of their three-time presidential nominee, tend to project total, overwhelming victory in every election, future and sometimes even past. When you say, as Donald Trump often does, that “the only way we lose is if they cheat,” you are expressing the belief that you never ever actually lose.
The contrast between the fretting donkey and the trumpeting elephant is sometimes interpreted as a matter of character. Dating back to the early days of the progressive blogosphere, many activists have claimed that Democrats (particularly centrists) simply lack “spine,” or the remorseless willingness put aside doubts or any other compunctions in order to fight for victory in contests large and small. In this Nietzschean view of politics, as determined by sheer will-to-power (rather than the quality of ideas or the impact of real-world conditions), Democrats are forever bringing a knife to a gun fight or a gun to a nuclear war.
Those of us who are offended by this anti-intellectual view of political competition, much less its implicit suggestion that Democrats become as vicious and demagogic as the opposition often is, have an obligation to offer an alternative explanation for this asymmetric warfare of partisan self-confidence. I won’t offer a general theory dating back to past elections, but in 2024, the most important reasons for inordinate Democratic fear are past painful experience and a disproportionate understanding of the stakes of this election.
Democrats remember 2016 and 2020
It’s very safe to say very few Democrats expected Hillary Clinton to lose to Donald Trump in 2016, or that Joe Biden would come so close to losing to Donald Trump in 2020. No lead in the polls looks safe because in previous elections involving Trump, they weren’t.
To be clear, the national polls weren’t far off in 2016; the problem was that sparse public polling of key states didn’t alert Democrats to the possibility Trump might pull an Electoral College inside straight by winning three states that hadn’t gone Republican in many years (since 1984 in Wisconsin, and since 1988 in Michigan and Pennsylvania). 2020 was just a bad year for pollsters. In both cases, it was Trump who benefitted from polling errors. So of course Democrats don’t view any polling lead as safe. Yes, the pollsters claim they’ve compensated for the problems that affect their accuracy in 2016 and 2020, and it’s even possible they over-compensated, meaning that Harris could do better than expected. But the painful memories remain fresh.
Democrats fear Trump 2.0 more than Republicans fear Harris
If you believe the maximum Trump ‘24 message about Kamala Harris’s intentions as president, it’s a scary prospect: she’s a Marxist (or Communist) who wants to replace white American citizens with the scum of the earth, which her administration is eagerly inviting across open borders with government benefits to illegally vote Democratic. It’s true that polls show a hard kernel — perhaps close to half — of self-identified Republicans believe some version of the Great Replacement Theory that has migrated from the right-wing fringes to the heart of the Trump campaign’s messaging, and that’s terrifying since there’s no evidence whatsoever for it. But best we can tell, the Trump voting base is a more-or-less equally divided coalition of people who actually believe some if not all of what their candidate says about the consequences of defeat, and people who just think Trump offers better economic and tougher immigration policies. While the election may be an existential crisis for Trump himself, since his own personal liberty could depend on the outcome, there’s not much evidence that all-or-nothing attitude is shared beyond the MAGA core of his coalition.
By contrast, Democrats don’t have to exercise a lurid sense of imagination to feel fear about Trump 2.0. They have Trump 1.0 as a precedent, with the added consideration that the disorganization and poor planning that curbed many of the 45th president’s authoritarian tendencies will almost certainly be reduced in 2025. Then there’s the escalation in his extremist rhetoric. In 2016 he promised a Muslim travel ban and a southern border wall. Now he’s talking about mass deportation program for undocumented immigrants and overt ideological vetting of legal immigrants. In 2016 he inveighed against the “deep state” and accused Democrats of actively working against the interests of the country. Now he’s pledging to carry out a virtual suspension of civil service protections and promising to unleash the machinery of law enforcement on his political enemies, including the press. As the furor over Project 2025 suggests, there’s a general sense that the scarier elements in Trump’s circle of advisors are planning to hit the ground running with radical changes in policies and personnel that can’t be reversed.
Only one party is threatening to challenge the election results
An important psychological factor feeding Democratic fears of a close election is the unavoidable fact that Trump has virtually promised to repeat or even surpass his 2020 effort to overturn the results if he loses. So anything other than a landslide victory for Harris will be fragile and potentially reversible. This is a deeply demoralizing prospect. It’s one thing to keep people focused on maximum engagement with politics through November 5. It’s another thing altogether to plan for a long frantic slog that won’t be completed until January 20.
Trump has been working hard to perfect the flaws in his 2020 post-election campaign that led to the failed January 6 insurrection, devoting a lot of resources to pre-election litigation and the compilation of post-election fraud allegations.
Though if you look hard you can find scattered examples of Democrats talking about denying a victorious Trump re-inauguration on January 20, none of that chatter is coming from the Democratic Party, the Harris-Walz campaign, or a critical mass of the many, many players who would be necessary to challenge an election defeat. Election denial in 2024 is strictly a Republican show.
If Harris wins, she’ll oversee a divided government; if Trump wins, he’ll have a shot at total power
As my colleague Jonathan Chait recently explained, the odds of Republicans winning control of the Senate in November are extremely high. That means that barring a political miracle, a President Harris would be constrained both legislatively and administratively, in terms of the vast number of executive-branch and judicial appointments the Senate has the power to confirm, reject, or simply ignore.
If Trump wins, however, he will have a better-than-even chance at a governing trifecta. This would not only open up the floodgates for extremist appointments aimed at remaking the federal government and adding to the Trumpification of the judiciary, but would unlock the budget reconciliation process whereby the trifecta party can make massive policy changes on up-or-down party-line votes without having to worry about a Senate filibuster.
Overall, Democrats have more reason to fear this election, and putting on some fake bravado and braying like MAGA folk won’t change the underlying reasons for that fear. The only thing that can is a second Trump defeat which sticks.
I voted for her, but I think Martha Coakley was a terrible choice and a terrible candidate. She was smug, puffed up with a sense of entitlement, unable to articulate her positions clearly or defend them credibly. If she’s the best candidate we can field for a critical seat at a critical time, we should prepare ourselves for another generation or two of kleptocratic crony capitalism under a Republican administration.
Question for Imn2Paine: why is forking over to rich freeloaders OK while taking care of the poor and supporting the middle class is not?
Imn2Paine,
As you stand against our paying to provide for the poor, you might consider that no one chooses to be poor. Contrary to popular opinion, we human beings do not have a free will to be and do as we would like. Our genes (nature) and our past experiences (nurture) completely determine who we are, and what we will or will not do.
If the Mass. race is not about Coakley, it’s also not about health care. It’s more fundamentally about the basic premises upon which we have created our society. One of them, the belief that we humans have the power to freely choose who we will become and what we will thereafter do, is as false as the literal belief in an Adam and Eve, and a Garden of Eden, or the belief in a flat Earth.
It’s unfortunate that so much of politics is predicated upon an aspect of our world that science fully understands (except, of course, those scientists whose religious or philosophical beliefs over-ride their scientific background and reasoning), and the rest of us are almost completely ignorant of.
This is, or course, not the Democrats, or the Republicans, or anyone else’s fault. I’m not sure we can even rightly say its God’s or the universe’s fault. It is just the way our world has come to be at this point in time.
If and when humanity finally overcomes this insidiously harmful notion of free will, you might better understand the logic behind our tending to those least fortunate among us.
By the way, if you’d like to read a good book that explains in clear scientific terms how it is actually unconscious processes that are responsible for EVERY choice we make, you might consider Harvard psychologist Daniel M. Wegner’s 2002, The Illusion of Conscious Will.
BTW
I am a Coakley supporter.
My comment above was relative to the voice of my moderate and conservative (Reagan Democrats) brothers.
I dislike the notion of a Brown victory.
The race is not about Martha Coakley! She may be what the Republican dominated/produced media/frame portrays her to be (common/not dynamic/victory expected), but the voters here are tired of forking out to the less advantaged.
Section 8 is a better deal than working for a living! Illegals do better than or equal to middle income citizens! You want health coverage? …FOR FREE [working folks and income (the “ownership society”) folks alike pay for it]!!!
A better gig for who?
Democrats in Mass. are moderate and don’t want to fork over for freeloaders, which is what may yield.
God help the Democrats!
If Brown wins, Obama and our Democratic Leaders deserve the blame, not Coakley. They should have been much more invested in her campaign from the very beginning. That’s their job.
If Brown wins, Obama and Reid have a simple choice before them; They can allow Republican Senators to filibuster all major legislation during 2010, which is not a choice at all since it would spell disaster for Democratic candidates in both the Senate and the House in November, or they can change the senate rules on filibusters through means as simple as one recently advanced in a New York Times Op-Ed by Tom Geoghegan;
“The president of the Senate, the vice president himself, could issue an opinion from the chair that the filibuster is unconstitutional. Our first vice presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, felt a serious obligation to resolve the ties and tangles of an evenly divided Senate, and they would not have shrunk from such a challenge.”
Or through the strategy Jamie Court described in The Huffington Post;
“Rule 22 of the Senate, governing filibusters, can be changed or eliminated by a simple majority according to the US Supreme Court in U.S. v. Ballin (1892). Senate rules call for 67 to change the cloture rule, but Democrats should be able to rewrite the rules since they control the Rules Committee. Rule 22 can go out the door all together or be modified. Republicans under Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist threatened to blow up the filibuster in 2005 with far fewer numbers.”
Or they could rely on the “Nuclear,” or “Constitutional” option. A 2005 report by Betsy Palmer highlights how this would be done. This strategy would have to wait until the new Congress convenes in 2011, and would therefore represent a retributive rather than a pre-emptive response to Republican obstructionism. Palmer describes it;
“One example of the “constitutional” or “nuclear” option revolves on the argument that, on the first day of a new Congress, Senate rules, including Rule XXII, the cloture rule, do not yet apply, and thus can be changed by majority vote.”
If Coakley wins, Democrats can pass major legislation in 2010. If Brown wins, Republicans have the choice in 2010 of allowing Obama to address our pressing concerns like jobs, education and climate change, or block these efforts and thereby force his and Reid’s hand. If Brown wins and Republicans continue to obstruct the Democratic agenda, Obama and Reid will have every good reason, and no reasonable choice but, to change the filibuster rule.
In fact, it might actually work out better in the long run if Brown wins and the Democrats are then forced to change the filibuster rule.
If Massachusetts voters, having passed health insurance reform for themselves, vote to deny it to the rest of Americans, I won’t be able to think of words bad enough for them.