As most readers probably know, one of the most relentless narratives of the 2014 election cycle was the claim that the Republican Party had “moderated” itself after its Tea Party-influenced bout with government shutdowns and other tokens of extremism, and was now operating under a “pragmatic” party leadership determined to govern, not obstruct. Not missing a beat, GOP and MSM opinion-leaders have carried that narrative into post-election spin.
But you know who isn’t buying it? Rank-and-file Republicans, as reported in a new Pew survey that I talked about at Washington Monthly today:

[The] new numbers from Pew…asked self-identified Democrats and Republicans if they’d prefer that leaders work with the other side “even if it disappoints” some party members, or instead “stand up” to the other side, even if that means “less gets done in Washington:”

[O]nly about a third of Republicans and Republican leaners (32%) want to see the GOP leadership work with Obama if it disappoints some groups of Republican supporters. About twice as many (66%) say GOP leaders should stand up to Obama even if less gets done. This reflects a shift away from wanting to see their leadership work with Obama in the wake of his reelection two years ago, but is little different than opinions among Republicans after the party’s 2010 midterm victory.
In contrast, about half (52%) of Democrats and Democratic leaning independents say Obama should try as best he can to work with Republican leadership even if it results in some disappointment among Democrats, while 43% say he should stand up on issues important to Democrats at the risk of less productivity in Washington.

There’s more of the same flashing signals elsewhere in the survey:

By a 57% to 39% margin, more Republicans and Republican leaning independents say their party’s leadership should move in a more conservative, rather than more moderate, direction. These views are little changed over the last four years.
And, as in the past, Democrats are more likely to say their party leadership should move in a more moderate direction (52% say this) than a liberal direction (41%). Yet the share saying the party should move in a liberal direction is now higher than it was following the 2010 midterms (41% today, up from 34%).

So the party whose rank-and-file wants the most conservative Republican Party in history to become more conservative, and also wants the most obstructionist congressional cadre in history to obstruct more, is the support base for all those “pragmatists” heading to Washington who want us to believe they’re determined to “get things done” come hell or high water.

My guess is that all the “pragmatism” talk is just positioning in order to blame Obama and Democrats for the gridlock just ahead. Yeah, Republicans may be more “disciplined” than before, but only in the service of a conservative movement bent on turning back the clock as soon and as far as it can.

In my last post here, I basically called for a renaissance of Democratic strategic debate as an urgent priority, and am gratified it got a robust response.
Probably the best way for me to encourage this debate along at this point is to note some real obstacles to clear-eyed strategic thinking. And I’m afraid we’ve been offered one by a Democratic senator who very nearly lost a “safe seat,” Mark Warner of VA, as I noted today at Washington Monthly.

Anybody who paid close attention to Mark Warner’s 2001 gubernatorial campaign probably remembers it as a strategic masterpiece. Facing a Republican with a Richmond-area base, Warner spent a lot of time in rural southwest Virginia, where no statewide Democratic candidate had done well for quite a few years. He won these areas, and no, the legends of Mudcat Sanders notwithstanding, he didn’t do it by sponsoring NASCAR race vehicles or even by putting up those ingenious “Sportsmen for Warner” yard signs festooned with hunting rifles and fishing gear (which I remember distinctly as a resident of rural Piedmont Virginia at the time). He won by spending a lot of time in the area and talking convincingly about how technology could enable poor and isolated rural areas to escape their geographical limitation and even leapfrog cities in growth and prosperity. It was pretty inspiring, actually, and it worked. Until it didn’t.
Four years later Tim Kaine ran to succeed Warner, and in part because his opponent had his own base in SW VA, he adopted an entirely different strategy focused on metro suburbs, and that worked just as well as Warner’s. A year later Jim Webb, a guy far better positioned to appeal to Scots-Irish mountain people than Warner could ever have been, won almost entirely by winning traditional Democratic urban/suburban areas. By the time Creigh Deeds–himself from rural central Virginia–ran for governor in 2009, Democrats were just getting killed in rural areas, as they were pretty much all over the country. And then Terry McAuliffe broke VA Democrats’ brief losing streak by concentrating on turning out “base” voters in the cities and the NoVa suburbs probably more than anyone ever had, and won narrowly.
I cite all this history as prologue to a comment by Mark Warner this week (as reported by WaPo’s Jenna Portnoy and Rachel Weiner), when he was asked why he didn’t emulate T-Mac’s strategy of focusing on Democratic “base” areas in a campaign where turnout was everything:

“My path has been very different from Terry’s or Tim’s or others’,” Warner said in an interview with The Washington Post before the election. “To the annoyance of some of my so-called staff, I’m going to Abingdon and Russell County now because Southwest Virginia gave me a start, and I’m not going to cede one part.”
The counties in that region voted for Gillespie, sometimes by more than 30 points over Warner.

Even the most brilliant strategy becomes a millstone when it’s not adapted to changing political circumstances. So beware of anybody’s iron “model” from the past on how to win elections. More often than not, the real lesson taught by successful political strategies is to remember that yesterday’s audacious and innovative approach can become today’s stale CW and tomorrow’s upset loss.

Yeah, this was a bad midterm election. We’ve known all along that the Senate landscape was terrible–uniquely terrible–and that the midterm turnout patterns virtually guaranteed major Republican gains, just as they did in 2010. We also knew the history of second-term midterms, and the impact of poor presidential approval ratings–which were especially poor in the Senate battleground states.
But the strong quality of some individual Democratic Senate campaigns, and a belief in the potential of the Bannock Street Project which aimed at changing the very nature of the GOP’s large midterm structural advantage, led a lot of Democrats to expect a lot better.
It didn’t happen. But the main analytic task at the moment is to figure out how much of this bad midterm was due to inevitable “fundamental” factors that cannot be changed in the immediate future and how much is attributable to Democratic mistakes that can be corrected. That in turn will help determine the extent to which the Democratic road to recovery requires a fundamental change in strategy and tactics or a more modest turn to take advantage of presidential cycle opportunities–and new leadership.
You can make a pretty good case that turnout patterns alone dictated most of the 2014 results, particularly if you think more conservative members of pro-Democratic demographic groups showed up disproportionately at the polls. But then again, if Democrats are ever to govern again, they cannot simply wait out every midterm and hope for temporary redemption in the following presidential election.
So this is a very important period for Democratic strategic thinking and discussion. We don’t need a “struggle for the soul” of the party so much as a struggle to think clearly and avoid the temptations of self-delusion or despair.

As we sort through the various voter suppression measures being deployed by Republicans in the several states, it’s important to remember that pretty recently it was Gospel Truth that everyone should vote. That tradition has slipped away, to be replaced by a number of disreputable ideas, as I discussed today at the Washington Monthly:

There’s an age-old conservative ideological argument often embedded in the contrary presumption against universal voting–I discussed it at some length here. But people naturally are reluctant to fully articulate the belief that only those who hold property or pay taxes should be allowed to vote; that’s why such beliefs are typically expressed in private, with or without a side order of neo-Confederate rhetoric.
More often you hear that poor voter turnout is a sign of civic health. Here’s an expression of that comforting (if not self-serving) theory by the Cato Institute’s Will Wilkinson in 2008:

[L]ower levels of turnout may suggest that voters actually trust each other more — that fewer feel an urgent need to vote defensively, to guard against competing interests or ideologies. Is it really all that bad if a broad swath of voters, relatively happy with the status quo, sit it out from a decided lack of pique?

First of all, everything we know about the people least likely to vote is not congruent with an image of self-satisfied, happy citizens enjoying a “lack of pique” or trusting one another too much to resort to politics. But second of all, nobody’s asking anyone to stop living their lives and raising their kids and going to work in order to become political obsessives. Voting, and even informing oneself enough to cast educated votes (or to affiliate oneself with a political party that generally reflects one’s interests), requires a very small investment of time relative to everything else. And if the concern here is that voting interferes too much with “normal” life, shouldn’t we make it as convenient as possible?

The big issue here is that the presumption that universal voting is a good thing has been gradually replaced by the presumption that Americans must prove their worthiness to vote. And that’s a big deal:

Hedging on the right to vote takes you down a genuinely slippery slope that leads to unconscious and then conscious oligarchy and even authoritarianism. And so to paraphrase Bobby Kennedy, we should not look at eligible voters and ask why they should vote, but instead ask why not? There’s no good answer that doesn’t violate every civic tenet of equality and every Judeo-Christian principle of the sisterhood and brotherhood of humanity.

Restricting the franchise is a old and disreputable idea whose time has nonetheless come once again. It’s important to throw it right back once again.

As we near election day, after months of speculation about U.S. Senate races, it’s good to remember there are important downballot elections, and not just for statewide offices. State legislative races are hanging fire, too, and I wrote about them today at Washington Monthly:

Governing‘s Louis Jacobsen had an update of his unique race ratings just last week. The landscape is a lot like that of the U.S. House, and for a lot of the same reasons: Republicans will benefit from turnout patterns and redistricting, but their gains will be limited by Democratic under-exposure (when you’ve recently lost a lot of seats, there are far fewer marginal seats to lose).
Jacobsen shows a total of 18 chambers at some risk of changing party control, 11 from D to R and 7 from R to D. The biggest disruption could occur in Colorado, where Democrats control the governorship and both legislative chambers; all three are up in the air at the moment, with a shift to all-mail voting creating a lot of uncertainty. Republicans could gain total control in Arkansas by winning the governorship and hanging onto the House. Democrats hope finally to gain control of the New York Senate. And there will be some states where big shifts short of a change of control could be significant: e.g., in California, where Democrats are in danger of losing a supermajority in the Senate, and in North Carolina, where the backlash against a GOP legislature could give Democrats significant gains in both chambers.
As always on and after election night, beware of assessments of shifts in total state legislative seats, since those are wildly overinfluenced by the 400-seat New Hampshire House, where Republicans are very likely to make significant gains.

As the dust slowly settles, we’ll have a sense of the extent to which Republicans have consolidated the strong position they achieved through redistricting in many states, and the implications for policy ranging from abortion and voting rights to Medicaid expansion and economic development.