Most of the talk regarding the state of American politics recently has been about how the results of the 2012 election indicate that future elections will be difficult for the Republicans if they don't change their policies. They're right, but not, I think, in the way the Democrats and the liberal press think.
Truth is Republicans have a bigger problem going into 2016 than they imagine. The problem isn't with winning the Presidency, it's with winning the Senate. Before 2012 Democrats held a 4-vote majority, and now they have a 6-vote majority. In normal election years, even when Presidents are elected, the opposition usually picks up 1 or usually 2 seats in the Senate. It happened with Nixon. It happened with Reagan. And it even happened with Clinton. If that had happened to Obama, the Democrats would now have a 2 vote majority. What does this matter? Republicans are well placed in a number of Red states to pick up Senate seats in 2014, but with the current 6-vote margin Republicans will really need to take six to eight seats to win control. That's the not so good news. The bad news comes in 2016.
Only 1/3rd of the Senate seats come up every two years, and the reason Republicans didn't take over the Senate in 2010 is because they already had a majority of those seats contested that year. Well these are the same seats that will be contested in 2016 and Republicans now hold 24 of those 34 seats, which means that even if Republicans win the Presidency in 2016 they're not only not likely to win any more of the Senate, they're actually likely to lose a couple seats. So unless they pick up 8 seats in '14 (which is really big for 1 election) the Democrats will almost certainly control the Senate after the 2016 election, EVEN if Republicans win the White House.
And this assumes Republicans win their 6 in 2014. If they fall short of 6 next year, Republicans will have to run in 2016 on the assumption that Democrats will still be in charge in 2017, fundamentally changing the dynamic of the next Presidential race. They won't be able to run a partisan campaign. If Republicans had gained 2 instead of losing 2 in 2012, the Democratic majority would have almost certainly been defeated in 2014, regardless of Republican weaknesses and they'd have been a good bet to hold the Senate in 2016 assuming they won the Presidency.
Now things look bleak. Republicans didn't lose to Barack Obama due to changing demographics as so many have assumed last year. The election was won in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Iowa, Colorado, and New Hampshire. In 3 of these states the minority vote is negligible. In Colorado the Hispanic vote is significant but not yet the swing vote, and in Florida that vote is even smaller. In Virginia, the Black vote is smaller than in most southern states and there is no guarantee they'll give just any Democrat the same support they've given President Obama. Republicans could easily have won the election last year.
But on top of this challenge they now face really long odds on being able to promise partisan solutions in the 2016 election.
And the reason for all this is that in 2012 Republicans lost 4 seats in states that Romney carried for President. Their real deficit is with Independent voters in these mostly Western and Midwestern Republican states. If Republicans do poorly there again in 2014 they'll almost have to forfeit the 2016 election to have any chance of governing in the near future. In fact, should she run, Hillary Clinton would be able to run on the assumption that Democrats are a better bet to retake the House than Republicans are to take the Senate.
The Deck is now stacked against them.
No comments:
Post a Comment