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Did the Democratic Party 'win' on Tuesday?
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Right now, both parties are trying their best to spin the results from Tuesday night's elections. Despite losing two Governor's races (New Jersey and Virginia), Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said that the Democrats won because of the victory in two special congressional races. That is technically true, if you only look at house races and assume (probably incorrectly), that the results will not cause any Democrats to adjust their future votes. Despite losing the much-followed NY-23 race, conservatives also claimed that they did not really lose because it will help their movement. The Phillies have not yet tried to claim their loss in the World Series was really a victory, and hopefully it will stay that way.
Senator Mark Warner, (moderate) Democrat from Virginia, provided possibly the worst headline the Democratic Party could have asked for on Thursday, to POLITICO: 'We got walloped'. It is problematic mainly because it is the truth, and politics is rarely about stating such things out loud. Furthermore, the last thing the Democratic Party would want now is for moderate/conservative/vulnerable Democrats to be worried about their own electoral chances in the future.
That might cause them to vote in their own electoral self-interest (voting against or trying to water down health care reform). There will undoubtedly be calls for lawmakers to walk the plank for the greater good, but that is not generally what politicians are interested in doing. Former Senator Bob Kerrey stated his opinion about Tuesday's results plainly:
“Every Dem who is up in either 2010 or 2012 knows that last night was big — if the right wing hadn’t meddled in New York’s 23rd, that would have gone GOP, too,” said former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, adding that he fears Democrats may be heading for a repeat of some 1990s history. “The electorate appears restless and angry. If they begin to ‘vote the bums out’ as they did in 1994, Democrats know that the next election is going to be extremely difficult.”
It's hard to know exactly what motivated Senator Mark Warner to blurt out the truth as opposed to trying to spin, but it was good that he did . Politicians often look bad trying to spin the unspinable. Yes, the Democrats won NY-23, but it was after a bizarre, though entertaining, political soap opera that enabled it to happen. The Democratic Party is tumbling back to earth, as happens to any party at some point after a major victory. This is probably quicker than expected, but politics is inherently unpredictable. Perhaps the real lesson from Tuesday should be that people should be more cautious about predicting tectonic shifts in the electoral landscape, because they are often proven wrong rather quickly.
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