Mark Rozell, a longtime observer of the conservative movement and professor of public policy at George Mason University in Virginia, predicts that the 2010 congressional election is “going to be a sea-change election.”

The Republicans, Rozell said in an interview with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner on September 13, “are very well-poised to take majorities in both the House and the Senate.”

Rozell conceded that “the Senate is much more up for grabs right now, but there’s a lot of discontent out there in the public” that has manifested itself in “the re-energized political right and the rise of the Tea Party movement.”

‘Blame the party in control’
Moreover, he added, the president’s popularity is quite low, and “during economically anxious times, Americans tend to blame the party in control of the White House. In a midterm election year the President’s party also tends to lose seats, even in normal times.”

The consequence, Rozell said, is a “double-whammy of economically anxious times” and the historic trend that “the party in power in the White House inevitably loses seats anyway,” which will “amplify the effect of this election cycle, with the result that the Republicans “will win an enormous number of seats.”

Rozell, the author of God at the Grass Roots (1996) and co-author of The Christian Right in American Politics: Marching to the Millennium (2003), explained the relative absence of social conservatives and emphasis on their issues in this election year.

Diminished religious right?
“There’s a lot more attention right now on the economic issues,” he said, “where people are very anxious about their quality of life [and] whether they can pass on a better standard of living to their children than what they have, [so] the focus is going to be more on those so-called bread and butter issues than on the contentious social issues.”

Rozell noted that in the past, “contentious social issues tend to come a little bit more to the fore during periods of time when people are thinking less about the economy [and] less about national security.”

In the current situation, he said, “I just don’t think there’s a lot of patience within the public to focus on the social issues agenda when people are really thinking about the enormously high unemployment rate, high government deficits, and having to solve a number of very serious economic dislocations in the country that are making people quite understandably fearful.”

‘Genuine grassroots movement’
Rozell described the Tea Party phenomenon as “a genuine grassroots movement that came about as a result of a number of circumstances that converged at the same time,” including economic anxiety and discontent with the current administration’s policies.

“You have a lot of people who are frustrated, they’re angry, they’re fearful, and they have found a way to connect with one another and express their discontent with the policies of incumbents,” he explained, “but they don’t themselves have a core of leaders who are directing them in a particular direction. Nor do they all necessarily agree with each other as to what the right solutions are for the country.”

Rozell argued that “it’s not necessarily a bad thing for the movement that it’s so factionated right now and people are disagreeing with each other about the future of the country.”

What’s more important, he said, “is that there are people who haven’t been too terribly involved in politics in the past who’ve decided they really care about what’s going on in the country and they want to speak out.”

Speaking on the night before Christine O’Donnell defeated establishment GOP candidate Mike Castle in Delaware and Carl Paladino defeated former Congressman Rick Lazio in New York, Rozell added:

“Maybe to some of the political elites in the country right now the Tea Party activists don’t look terribly sophisticated, or they don’t seem to understand this or that issue as much as the elites think that they understand them, but the reality is these are people who care deeply about what’s going on in the country and they want to express themselves however they can.”

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