HALF-FULL REPORT 11/05/10

This is my 11th HFR since I started filling in for Jack.  It’s the first in which the political news is genuinely half full.  But even in the bad news there is good.

We saw a wave, a big wave, Tuesday.  But it wasn’t the tsunami many of us were expecting.

The news about the House of Representatives is certainly more than half full.  At this writing, Republicans have a net gain of 61 seats, with 10 races still undecided.

This is the largest gain for any party since the Democrats won 75 seats in 1948, the largest midterm gain since the Republicans gained 81 seats in 1938. In the Republican landslides of 1994 (which gave the GOP control of the House for the first time since 1952) and 1946 (which gave the GOP control of the House for the first time since 1930), Republican gains were 52 seats and 55 seats, respectively.

Still, I’m disappointed, and I suspect I’m not alone.  The generic ballot polls released by Gallup and Rasmussen the day before the election led me to believe the wave would be larger.

I’m disappointed because appealing candidates such as Sean Bielat in Massachusetts and rocket scientist Ruth McClung in Arizona came up a little short, and odious creeps such as Barney Frank, Raul Grivalja and Maurice Hinchey won.

The main reason why the tsunami didn’t appear is because the higher Republican turnout the pollsters forecast didn’t materialize.  Exit polling indicates 36 percent of the voters were Republicans; 36 percent were Democrats.  The still very large victory Republicans won in the House Tuesday was due almost entirely to independent voters, who voted Republican this time in even larger proportions than they had voted Democrat in 2006 and 2008.

Typically in wave elections, the party riding the wave wins two thirds or more of the close races.  This time, they broke roughly evenly. The GOP lost a dozen races by agonizingly small margins.

A half dozen of those races were lost because third party right wing candidates drained away enough votes to give victory to an incumbent Democrat who couldn’t get to 50 percent in the polls.  

I would cheerfully beat those candidates and all who voted for them to death with a baseball bat.

We were hoping discouraged Democrats would stay home.  If they had, perhaps Ruth McClung and others like her in blue districts would have won.  But if they had, they almost certainly would have been washed away in 2012.  The upside of the fact Democrats didn’t stay home is that the very impressive gains the GOP made Tuesday are likely to be durable.  (There are additional reasons why this is so that I’ll detail below.)

William Galston of the liberal New Republic noted: click here to view

So the 2010 electorate does not represent a disproportional mobilization of conservatives: If the 2010 electorate had perfectly reflected the voting-age population, it would actually have been a bit more conservative and less moderate than was the population that showed up at the polls.

In any event, the practical difference in the 112th Congress between 60 seats and 75 seats is negligible.  Speaker Boehner has a RINO-proof majority, more than enough votes to pursue a defund strategy.

The bad news for Republicans is that Harry Reid is still the Senate Majority Leader.  Most of us are disappointed because Republicans gained “only” six seats in the Senate, instead of the eight or nine most pundits were predicting.

And we conservatives are disappointed that Lisa Murkowski evidently has beaten Joe Miller in Alaska.  (This race won’t be settled for weeks, and because both are Republicans, does not figure in the partisan balance.) 

How could Republicans do so well in the House, but not nearly so well in the Senate?

First, as Jennifer Rubin of Commentary notes, click here to view,  GOP Senate candidates didn’t do poorly compared to the House.  Republicans gained six of the 37 seats at stake Tuesday, a pickup of 16.2 percent, with a seat still outstanding. By contrast, the House Republican pickup of 61 seats out of 435 amounts to a gain of just 14 percent.

This is all the more remarkable because, as I noted in the last HFR, the Senate seats up this time were located chiefly in blue states. 

But it could have been better.  Here’s why it wasn’t.

• Weak candidates.  The most telling statistic for me about the Nevada Senate race is that Harry Reid was re-elected despite the fact that 55 percent of voters disapproved of him.

  Yes, Dingy Harry had a lot of money to spend and a terrific GOTV operation, and there was probably more than a little vote fraud in Clark County.  But Reid could only have won because voters in Nevada thought even less of Sharron Angle.  While she was losing, Republicans picked up a seat in the House, won a landslide victory in the governor’s race, and added seats in the state legislature.  The most telling fact about Sharron Angle is that she got fewer votes in their congressional districts than each of the Republican congressional candidates, including the sacrificial lamb the GOP half-heartedly ran against popular Dem. Rep. Shelley Berkley.  Overall, GOP congressional candidates got 356,909 votes in the unofficial tally.  Sharron Angle got 320,996. 

  Ken Buck managed to lose in Colorado even as Republicans gained two House seats there, and took control of the Colorado House.

  Christine O’Donnell lost badly in Delaware a seat Rep. Mike Castle almost certainly would have won.

  The weak candidate problem applies to Joe Miller, too.  After the primary he received savage and unfair press.  But he also made a series of missteps, and some unflattering information about his past surfaced.

• Sound Democrat strategy.  A base mobilization strategy works better in statewide races than it does in congressional races.

The Democrat plan for holding down losses in the Senate was to focus on the flaws, real and imagined, of their opponents rather than on the (wholly imaginary) virtues of Democrat policies.  This is much easier to do in Senate rather than in House races, and is easier still when weak GOP candidates help them out. 

But it works pretty well against strong candidates, too.  Though he’s a smart guy who ran a strong campaign, Pat Toomey just squeaked by in Pennsylvania because Joe Sestak was able to change the focus of the race from his very left wing voting record to Toomey’s work on Wall Street more than a decade before.  Republicans need to be better prepared than they were this year for this deflection tactic.

It’s important to remember, though, that six seats is twice the average gain in a midterm election.  And with 47 Republicans, Mitch McConnell will have more than enough votes to filibuster Obama initiatives.

And let us remember that some really, really impressive conservatives were elected to the Senate Tuesday – Marco Rubio, Toomey, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, Mike Lee in Utah, Rob Portman in Ohio.  They will make their presence felt.

But the really good news about the bad news in the Senate is that Harry Reid is still the Senate Majority Leader.  I explain why in my column this week.

It’s a blessing in disguise that Republicans did not take the Senate.  Harry Truman was able to reverse the Republican landslide of 1946 with a landslide of his own in 1948 because he could run against a “do nothing” Congress.  With a Democrat Senate, this would be harder for Zero to do, even if he possessed Truman’s political skills, which he does not.

Actually, I lied when I said the political news was “genuinely half full.”  It’s a lot better than that, because of what happened in the gubernatorial races, and in races for the state legislature.  What happened there is truly astounding.

With several races still unsettled, Republicans have a net gain of at least seven governors to give them a total of at least 30, and have won control of at least 20 state legislative chambers, to give them a total of at least 53 of the 98 which have partisan affiliation (Nebraska has a unicameral legislature where legislators are nonpartisan).

Some of the gains defy credulity.  Alabama and North Carolina have their first Republican-controlled legislatures since Reconstruction.  In Minnesota, Tom Emmer may have narrowly lost the race for governor (or maybe not), but Republicans took control of both houses of the legislature since the state senate went partisan in 1974.

Nineteen of these states are “triple doubles,” in which Republicans control the governor’s mansion and both houses in the legislature.  Among them are Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Texas and Tennessee.

Overall, Republicans picked up an all time high of 680 seats.

What this means is that Republicans will dominate reapportionment.  This makes the GOP all but a lock to retain the majority won Tuesday, and to expand upon it in 2012.

This is the real Tea Party triumph, and it will reverberate for at least the next decade.  I suspect that many of those newly elected to state legislatures are Tea Partiers themselves.  Good on you, guys and girls!

Also good news on the reapportionment front is that in California, the largest, most Democratic and most gerrymandered state, the voters who had the bad judgment to elect Jerry Brown and re-elect Barbara Boxer had the good sense to take reapportionment away from Brown and the Democrat legislature and give it to a nonpartisan commission.

Though Tuesday was a good night for Republicans generally, and for the Tea Party, it wasn’t so terrific for Sarah Palin.  Here is her take on the election:

The meaning of the 2010 election was rebuke, reject, and repeal. We rebuked Washington’s power grab, rejected this unwanted “fundamental transformation of America,” and began the process to repeal the dangerous policies inflicted on us. But this theme will only complement the theme of 2012, which is renew, revive, and restore. In 2012, we need to renew our optimistic, pioneering spirit, revive our free-market system, and restore constitutional limits and our standing in the world as the abiding beacon of freedom.

Commentary editor John Podhoretz, who hasn’t been a big fan, said of this:

This political formulation is — I use the word advisedly — brilliant.

But Sarah will take flak for the defeats of Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell and Joe Miller.  Another prominent “Mama Grizzly” she supported, Nikki Haley, was elected governor of South Carolina, but by a much smaller margin than had been forecast.

One of the ugliest features of this campaign was Democrat/liberal misogyny toward conservative women.  Meg Whitman was called a whore.  Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle and Nikki Haley were called worse.

This is despicable.  But it worked pretty well.  She and we need to figure out how to deal with this in 2012.  That’s something we should discuss at the Rendezvous.

Speaking of the Rendezvous, I’ve got to cut this HFR short so I can get there.  See you there!