Lots of interesting ink has been spilled about the National election and it seems to be converging on the idea that Democratic Congressional candidates simply could not provide voters with a real reason to get out and vote for them. They couldn’t beat a GOP candidate in Staten Island who is under indictment, threatened to throw a reporter off of a balcony in the Capitol building and was otherwise just clueless. I’m going to provide some links to the better pieces I’ve read so far, but we’ll start with Bill Maher’s assessment (from his Facebook page):
I feel bad for the people Democrats are supposed to represent, not the Democratic candidates. They remind me of the Iraqi Army – running when they should fight.
Republicans didn’t win as big as you think they did. And Obama didn’t lose — from an observer from across the pond, a much cooler look at the election and, frankly, the best one so far. The GOP won on a map hugely favorable to them, emerging with a very small majority in a “You Broke It, You Bought It” scenario. Liberal policies won all over the place in referenda and yet the Democratic party still can’t read polls well enough to know that this is the kind of thing voters want.
The GOP takeover: Doubling down on dysfunction? Their teajhadis think they have a mandate. And for teajhadis, dysfunction is all they care about. So even if this new Congress has any interest in governing (and that’s a pretty big if, they’ve been actively sabotaging government for 6 years), they still have to get past their base.
The Democrats’ Goldwater moment — from Will Bunch, who also notes that Democratic ideas won all over the country, but mainly without Democrats attached to them. He also notes that they won’t change course in 2016, either. They’ll just put their confidence in a better map and a Presidential year to get them by.
How the Lame Democrats Blew It from Goldie Taylor at The Daily Beast. ‘Nuff said, I think. But this is interesting:
Lastly, despite the boatloads of cash pumped into otherwise winnable races, voter targeting was a ninth inning, full-count strike three that Democrats could not overcome. Campaign operatives, no doubt, studied the 2010 midterm voter rolls and decided to cast their lot with sectors of the electorate deemed most likely to turn out. After all, that’s what they teach in political science lecture halls, right? Conventional wisdom always appears reasonable until it isn’t.
In doing so, they dismissed throngs of would-be voters who once wrapped themselves around polling places in 2008 and 2012—the Obama Coalition. For instance, I personally received dozens of direct mailers, while my grown children—all of whom are in their 20s and all of whom voted in the last presidential elections—received none. No e-mails, no text messages, not a single point of contact, unless you count last-minute ads on black radio that feature aging civil rights leaders with no real connection to young voters. Did I mention that my children, like most millennials, no longer listen to the radio and rarely watch television?
For a GOTV effort that seemed to rely on getting the Obama coalition out, there was little about these campaigns that would fire up this group of people. Even locally, there was little to no real outreach to the transitional Obama coalition.
Charlie Pierce tells the President to Go Big or Go Home — there is so much right with this, just go read it.
Harry Reid’s actual contribution to the dysfunction was to keep those same Democratic senators from having to take tough votes that might hurt them on the campaign trail. It didn’t work. They all got hung with the votes they didn’t take. Alison Lundergan Grimes wouldn’t even say whether she’d ever voted for the president. (Kudos to whoever thought to plant that question.) Nobody was fooled. The president’s party proved itself utterly unwilling to stand behind the president’s policies and, therefore, the president’s very real achievements. This was not clever. It was suicidal.
What are you reading that’s a good post-mortem?