The special election in Massachusetts next week to fill the late Edward Kennedy’s Senate term is rapidly becoming the national Republican Party’s maximum goal. The occasion–a low-turnout-special election in which Republicans are pre-mobilized and many Democrats are indifferent–is highly favorable to the little-known GOP candidate, Scott Brown. The stakes are very large. Aside from the symbolism involved in winning Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat in the home state of Barney Frank and John Kerry, Brown could and would personally derail final passage of a health care reform conference report in the Senate.
The polls on this race show Brown closing on Democrat Martha Coakley, but only if turnout follows a heavily pro-GOP pattern, much like the pattern Republicans hope for all across the country this autumn. As Nate Silver notes today, a Rasmussen poll showing a virtual dead heat also shows likely voters in this race giving Barack Obama a 57% approval rating. So it’s clear: Republicans are nationalizing this contest among Bay State voters; so, too, should Democrats.
If they do, and there’s any sort of decent Democratic GOTV effort, then GOP hopes for winning this race will probably turn out to be no more than Massachusetts Dreamin’.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 20: What Biden Should Say If He “Steps Aside”
In all the talk about whether Joe Biden should “step aside,” there hasn’t been enough discussion of the rationale he should present if he does so. So I offered one at New York:
The Democratic Party’s semi-public bickering over what to do with Joe Biden needs to come to an end very soon, lest it turn into a horrific party-rending conflict or a de facto surrender to Donald Trump. While he can technically be pushed out of the nomination, it would be nightmarishly difficult to do so given his virtually unopposed performance in the primaries and the lack of precedent for anything like a forced defenestration of a sitting president. It would also express disloyalty to a brave and dedicated leader. But Biden has already lost the united, confident party he needed to make a comeback. He’s trailing in the polls right now. And even more importantly, his own conduct and fitness for office will command center stage for the rest of the general-election campaign, which is precisely what he cannot afford given his poor job-approval ratings and the sour mood of the electorate.
So Joe needs to go of his own accord, and it needs to happen quickly before Republican and Biden-loyalist claims of a “coup” become all too credible. But it’s obviously a humiliating exercise. So if Biden comes to realize the futility of going forward, what can this proud and stubborn man say that will make him something other than an object of derision or pity?
I have a simple answer: He can tell the truth.
The truth is that Biden’s firm commitment to the pursuit of a second term, despite his advanced age and increased frailty, hardened into inflexible determination when Trump made his own decision to launch an initially unlikely comeback. When Biden took office, Trump was a disgraced insurrectionist whose very defenders in his second impeachment trial mostly denounced his conduct, even as they urged acquittal on technical grounds. The 46th president was in a position to serve one distinguished “transitional” term and retire with a wary eye on his fellow retiree festering in anger and self-righteousness in Mar-a-Lago. But as Trump slowly recovered and eventually reemerged as a more dominant figure than ever in a MAGA-fied Republican Party, Biden became convinced that as the only politician ever to defeat Donald Trump, he had the responsibility to do it again and the ability to remind voters why they rejected the 45th president in 2020.
As this strange election year ripened, Biden had a perfectly plausible strategy for victory based on keeping a steady public focus on Trump’s lawless conduct (including actual crimes), his erratic record, and extremist intentions for a perilous second term. The polls were close and Biden wasn’t very popular, but these surveys also showed a durable majority of the electorate that really didn’t want to return Trump to power, particularly as economic conditions improved and the consequences of Trump’s Supreme Court appointments grew more shockingly apparent each day.
Then came the June 27 debate, and suddenly Biden lost the ability to make the election about Trump. He needs to look into a camera and say just that, and conclude that just as the threat posed by Trump motivated him to run for a second term, the threat posed by Trump now requires that he withdraw so that a successor can make the case he can’t make as he’s become the object of endless speculation about his age and cognitive abilities. Biden does not need to resign the presidency, since his grounds for withdrawing his candidacy are about perceptions and politics rather than any underlying incapacity. Biden would be withdrawing as a weakened candidate, not as a failed president.
For this withdrawal to represent a stabilizing event for his administration and his party, it’s critical that Biden not equivocate or complain, and that he show his mastery of the situation by clearly passing the torch to the vice-president he chose four years ago. For all the talk of an “open convention” being exciting (for pundits) and energizing (for the winner), the last thing Democrats need right now is uncertainty. No matter what the polls show and how badly his old friends want him to succeed, it’s the prospect of 100 days of terror every time Biden makes unscripted remarks that is feeding both elite and rank-and-file sentiment that a change at the top of the ticket is necessary. The fear and confusion needs to end now, and Biden effectively made his choice of a successor when he made Kamala Harris his governing partner. The president needs to reassert his agency now, not look like he is abandoning his party and his country to the winds of fate.
A straightforward and honest admission of why Biden 2024 is coming to an end could go a very long way toward enabling Harris and other Democrats to shift the nation’s gaze back to the ranting old man whose acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention showed that he has not mellowed or moderated at all. Of course Biden wants to solidify and extend his legacy over the next four years. But right now, the clear and present danger is that it will be extinguished altogether. He alone can address that threat, not as a candidate, but as a president and a patriot who recognizes his duty.
One last point. We tend to hold it as gospel truth that once in power, a party can no longer motivate its base by attacking the opposition. That attitude is all myth and no substance. We may not be able to attack Bush as directly now as we did back then, but we can, and should, ruthlessly, attack the Republicans in Congress who are doing their damnedest to block everything President Obama wants to do for America.
We took Congress in 2006 largely by attacking Republicans and their policies, and we won the White House in 2008 again largely by attacking Republicans and their policies. Are today’s Republicans any different than the Republicans we attacked last year? You’re darned right they’re not. We either persistently attack Republicans as the problem they continue to be, or risk that voters will conclude that Republicans have somehow ceased to be the problem, and start thinking that maybe we Democrats have become the problem. The best way to ensure that voters don’t make that mistake is to campaign against the Republicans with the same strategies, tactics and aggressiveness that worked so well for us in 2006 and 2008.
An Obama team and Democratic Party that was so successful in 2008 should not have to struggle to win races like this one in Massachusetts.
Yes, health care, jobs and other legislative initiatives are important, but considering that we can only do as much as we’re strong enough to do, elections need to be equally important.
Losing the Governorships in New Jersey and Virginia should have been enough of a wake-up call for our Party leaders. The possibility of losing our 60 seat Senate majority next week should be the last call they should need.
Obama was a community organizer. We broke all kinds of records in voter registration and GOTV in 2008. It’s time that our entire Party, from our Leaders down to our lowliest bloggers understood that in order to do what we want to do, we need to be in campaign mode all year, every year.
I hope we’re wise enough to spend at least as much time and attention between now and November plotting exactly how we will win more seats in the House and Senate (which, contrary to what too many of even our pundits are saying is quite possible), than we spend immersed in long legislative battles like health care and the upcoming jobs push.
The best way to get an unmotivated base energized is to put us to work. I hope our party leaders start doing that soon, at least with regard to our most dedicated members, so that come November we can focus more on winning than on not losing.