Reading another Politico article on the 2010 midterms, I found the treatment of the ’94 elections tremendously unsatisfying. Cook writes:

It is the 1994 election that actually draws the greatest comparison with 2010. As was the case 15 years ago, there is a charismatic young Democratic president engaged in a long, messy battle for health care reform. And the Democratic numbers in Congress are eerily similar now to what they were then. Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 with 258 Democrats in the House and 57 in the Senate. Obama was elected last fall with 257 House Democrats and 57 Democratic senators.

Countless articles have been written that in some way touch on the elections in 1994, but one thing almost all of them have in common is their consistent omission of any mention of the impact of NAFTA on Democratic turnout and voting that year. In the wake of losing the NAFTA battle, unions and their members were disaffected going in to the midterms, and this compounded the problems that national Democrats were already having thanks to numerous retirements and their own complacency in the face of a serious Republican electoral threat. If one goes looking, it is nonetheless possible to find reports that detail the effect this had on Democratic electoral fortunes:

In the 1994 midterm election, a year after the NAFTA vote, union activists, stung by losing that fight to Clinton and by the president’s failure to get a Democratic Congress even to vote on his promised health care reform, deserted their posts. Phone banks went unmanned; the turnout of union families plummeted; 40 percent of those who bothered to vote backed GOP candidates, and the Democrats lost the House for the first time in 40 years.

One of the things that distinguishes 2010 from 1994 is that the White House and Democratic leaders are not pushing through any new free trade agreements. The major legislative item that concerns major unions is EFCA, which the current majority has not been able to pass, but this is still not a case of an administration trying to force an undesirable bill on its own recalcitrant partisans in Congress. That suggests that unions will be much more likely to play their role in turning out Democratic voters next year, and union voters may be more energized if the GOP makes its opposition to EFCA a major theme of the election. Emphasizing that certainly did nothing to help Hoffman*. The union factor has been important for turnout in both of the special elections in New York this year, and the unions have delivered for the Democrats and put two new Democrats into the House. That is not going to be the case in every district, but it is a reminder that Democratic House and Senate candidates will have solid support from unions that their counterparts lacked in 1994.

* Another example of national GOP messaging at odds with local interests was Hoffman’s anti-earmark pledge, which was crazy in a district that relies on Fort Drum for a significant part of its economy and a perfect expression of the Washington-oriented blindness that has afflicted the national party leadership for years. It is another expression of the absolutely unfounded notion that the public turned against the GOP because of spending and especially because of earmarks. The (mostly rhetorical) hostility to earmarks is a more general form of national GOP contempt for local district interests, whose representation in Congress Boehner et al. have decided to equate with corruption and wastefulness.