PA-12 and The Single Greatest Pushback in American History
This race should serve notice to Democratic officeholders everywhere that no seat is safe and that voters will not accept business-as-usual. ~Michael Steele
PA 12 simplified: GOP tried to nationalize the race. Health care, Obama, etc. Democrats localized it (and the Dem candidate ran against Obama). And the DCCC put 200 people on the ground there in the last week. Meaning: Dems can be competitive in races if they run the right candidates the right way. And Republicans aren’t gonna cruise to victory in the fall. ~Marc Ambinder
There are many things about the PA-12 special election that are unique to that race and district, but one thing that ties it to many of the other Republican special election losses over the last three years is the party’s obsession with nationalizing House races that might have conceivably been won by appealing to local issues and concerns. In NY-23 we saw Hoffman scoffing at “parochial” issues, and in NY-20 Tedisco ran a disastrously bad campaign that frittered away all of his advantages as a well-liked local representative and re-made himself into a robot repeating the national party’s message. Before that we saw several failed attempts in IL-14, MS-01 and elsewhere to run against “Pelosi-Reid,” when the real competition came in the form of effective candidates with strong local connections. As I said last year in connection with the NY-23 race:
Something I don’t understand about the national GOP’s elevation of the NY-23 race to such a high profile is why they think nationalizing House races favors them. Nationally, the GOP remains toxic and its party ID continues to be very low. Nationalizing the race gains the GOP nothing in a traditionally supportive district, but it potentially saddles their preferred candidate with all of their baggage from the past several years. It is also mimicking the absolutely failed Republican tactics of almost every special election of the last three years. With depressing regularity, GOP attack ads have warned voters against such-and-such a candidate siding with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, when most people outside of Washington don’t know and couldn’t care who these people are.
There are two major problems with the Republican approach to these House elections. The first is that they tend to ignore or dismiss the interests of the specific district where they are competing in order to make a statement about national party agendas. The national GOP wants these elections to be mandates against Pelosi/Reid’s agenda or Obama’s agenda, and the Democratic committees and party leadership are more concerned with winning the election contests. The second problem is that they don’t seem to understand that even in districts where Obama is not particularly popular and where most voters did not support him in 2008, such as PA-12, most voters are not interested in vindicating a pre-scripted anti-Obama narrative. So long as the Democratic candidates can present them with a more appealing message of continued government funding and the promise of economic support, they are not automatically going to rally behind the candidates of the more unpopular, discredited party.
Obviously, Steele has to spin a loss in a potentially winnable open seat as best as he can. The reality is that the NRCC sank $1 million in a district carried narrowly by McCain and no longer represented by a veteran Congressman and the GOP candidate managed to win a little over 44% of the vote in a low-turnout special election. That is slightly better than the Republican nominee Russell did in 2008 in a much smaller electorate that ought to have favored the Republican. Burns and Critz will face each other again in November, but it will be that much harder to dislodge Critz once he is a member of the House. Far from showing that no seat is safe, it showed that when it came time to deliver on overblown predictions of massive Republican gains this year the GOP failed. I don’t expect Republican leaders to announce this to the world, but if they are to have any chance of coming close to their goals of winning back the House they have to contest House elections differently than they have been doing over the last few years.
P.S. Nagourney reports on the special election:
Tom Davis, a former Republican House member and top party campaign strategist, saw the win by Democrat Mark Critz, a former aide to Mr. Murtha, over Republican Tim Burns as a serious blow to the Republican claim to be within reach of the 40 seats needed to recapture the House.
“If you can’t win a seat that is trending Republican in a year like this, then where is the wave?” asked Mr. Davis, who said Republicans will need to examine what went wrong. “It would be a huge upset not to win this seat.”
7 Responses to “PA-12 and The Single Greatest Pushback in American History”
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[...] Larison is the only person I can find who is suitably acerbic about last night’s Republican fuckup in PA-12. As they did in the other recent special [...]
First of all, who cares? Whether a Republicans or Democrats won will have zero effect on national policy. Whether a Democrat or Republicans won, either one would have been as big a pork barrerler, deficit spending idiot as the other.
Daniel, until you have describe a process that will keep the Republicans competitive in national elections given the massive demographic changes doing on in the U.S., worrying about irrelevant elections is pointless. IN the long run, the Republicans Party or any conservative party in the U.S. is unsustainable. The only issue in politics these days is what are the Democrats doing and in what direction are they taking the country.
Nitpicking the irrelevant Republicans may make Daniel popular with the leftist websites but is really just a waste of time.
It is amazing that Steele even has a job at this point (he of the “Ron Paul has no future in this party” persuasion.) How can anyone take anything he says seriously? Assuming the allegations are true, folks like him and the jerk-off from Indiana only help perpetuate the image (and substance) of a party of hypocrites.
Peace be with you.
“IN the long run, the Republicans Party or any conservative party in the U.S. is unsustainable.”
Then what’s the point of a conservative criticizing the Democrats? It’s not like Dems are going to pay attention to anything Larison has to say, so why should be bother?
Mike
Whether a Democrat or Republicans won, either one would have been as big a pork barreler, deficit spending idiot as the other. …. In the long run, the Republicans Party or any conservative party in the U.S. is unsustainable.
You have to do a bit better than bolstering Trilling’s observation that right wing notions are to a large extent “irritable grumbling resembling thought”.
As long as we have a population that requires government programs to soak up the deferred social costs that emerged when segregation came apart (removing barriers for the white underclasses much as the black one), yet refuses to allow itself to be taxed in a way that pays for these measures, there will be deficits.
As long as the country consists of a grab-bag of high wealth production areas mostly post-industrial that have to subsidize the oh-so-virtuous but underproductive agrarian and misindustrialized regions, there will be pork barreling.
There will always be a conservative party in the U.S. It just can’t viably be a party that truly conceives of the country as an Anglo-Saxon corporation-based colonial enterprise writ large. Or as a cultural survival of pre-Modern Europe. Or as an experiment in government-based entertainment reflective of the whims of the most adamant egotists and revanchists. It can talk that way, it just isn’t permitted to actually be that anymore.
J,
You write that post and you complain about the ramblings of others. If you look at virtually every large, urban area is a currently single party state that does not have a functional conservative party. As the demogrpahics of the U.S. becomes more like the demographics of Los Angeles, El Paso, and Detroit, the idea that a conservative party will survive is laughable.
Also, does the election of a single congressman ever affect policy. Does a blue dog pork barreling Democratic really do anything differently than a pork barreling Republican.
As long as the U.S. has a massive racial-industrial complex that specializes in grievances, the U.S. will continue to fail as a country and continue to become a third world country. If you want to see the future, visit El Paso, Texas. The lack of white faces should be a clear sign of what the future holds along with the absence of a functional conservative party.
There’s actually a good reason why the GOP leadership tries to nationalize local congressional and senate races even if it isn’t a good strategy for winning them. It’s because the GOP only cares about races like this to the extent that they can use them as talking points in debates on the national level that allow them to claim that “ordinary folks” are behind their agenda. They don’t care about winning these races for their own sake, by which I mean for the purpose of governing effectively. They see these races and their candidates as pawns in the “Great Game” of modern American political history, which they want to be the grand wiziers of, so they are constantly sacrificing their pawns in the hope of gaining greater position in the overall strategy. Of course, this is a game you win only by having your pawns actually succeed, so it’s kind of a dumb strategy, but that’s the rationale at least. The hope is that if they can actually win a few of these, they can then use them to claim some kind of “movement” in their favor, and they hope that creating the illusion of momentum will actually translate into real momentum and an electoral swing. It’s pretty damn stupid, but that’s what the GOP has invested itself in of late – grand propaganda and image-making as if pretending to be popular will actually make you popular. I think we all knew kids in high school who played that game. I just don’t remember anyone who actually succeed in becoming popular as a result.