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Special Elections

Special elections give the party out of favor more opportunities to buck the national tide than they will have when all 435 seats are up in November. That is not to say that repeated losses shouldn’t temper Republican triumphalism — after all, they indicate that even in this tough environment there is a path to […]

Special elections give the party out of favor more opportunities to buck the national tide than they will have when all 435 seats are up in November. That is not to say that repeated losses shouldn’t temper Republican triumphalism — after all, they indicate that even in this tough environment there is a path to victory for Democrats in the kind of districts Republicans need to win to retake the majority. But it won’t be as easy to replicate these one-off successes when the entire House is up for re-election this fall unless the national political climate changes [bold mine-DL]. ~Jim Antle

One of the things that ought to temper Republican triumphalism is the recognition that it is their party that is still the party more out of favor with most of the public. This is something that I don’t think a lot of conservatives and Republican fully appreciate: voters have a more unfavorable view of the GOP than they have of Democrats. The difficulty for the GOP is that Republicans have been losing special House elections when the Democrats have been riding high in 2007, 2008 and early 2009 and when the Democrats have been struggling and losing support in late 2009 and now. When presented with golden opportunities to take advantage of a smaller, more engaged electorates to pick up House seats, they have failed every time. Part of this is the failed nationalizing strategy I discussed yesterday, but another part is the mistaken assumption that the public rejected the GOP because of excessive spending and all that the party has to do to win them back is to declare their hostility to all forms of new spending. Republicans have spent the last sixteen months addressing a grievance that most of the voters who turned against them in the last four years do not have.

Let’s remember how many activists and pundits enthused over Jim Ogonowski’s better-than-expected showing in his loss to Nikki Tsongas three years ago as a sign of imminent Republican revival, or at least a “reversion to the norm.” One of the people making that argument was Patrick Ruffini, he of the 70-seat 2010 “gut” prediction. Ruffini said in late 2007: “2006 was a killing field. 2007-8 is not.” This was impressively wrong. Regarding Senate elections, 2008 was even worse. Conservative activists and pundits have consistently overestimated Republican chances during bad cycles and many have grossly overestimated their chances in better cycles, which is why I find it hard to take seriously arguments that it is now no problem that an election so many on the right were saying was neck-and-neck and a possible pick-up turned out to be something of a blowout for the other party. Like the absurd predictions of huge Republican gains in the fall, it was always pretty unreasonable to think that Burns had a chance of winning in a district as heavily Democratic as PA-12, but that didn’t stop a lot of people on the right from talking up Burns’ chances as if they were realistic.

This is a significant problem for Republicans: they continually set unrealistic expectations of success and naturally cannot meet them, and then they are forced to explain away the “failure” to achieve the impossible that they should have never claimed they could achieve. That doesn’t mean that PA-12 was not a “must-have” win. Just as everything had to go right for the Democrats to pick up all the seats that they did in 2006 and 2008, absolutely everything has to go right for the Republicans to win control of the House, and that includes winning seats in traditionally Democratic territory when those seats are open and the district’s voters are strongly against the administration. So far, that isn’t happening.

It would equally be a mistake to overinterpret a special election result in a district that Democrats should have won all along, but special elections should help the party that gains the most advantage from lower turnout. That party is the Republican Party. These are elections in which Republican candidates have their best chance to steal seats that they normally have no business contesting, and they aren’t getting it done. Antle mentions that the DCCC will not be able to devote as many resources and people to every competitive race as they devoted to PA-12, and that’s true, but it’s equally true for the NRCC, which continues to trail its Democratic counterpart in fundraising and cash on hand.

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