The "Democrats are Doomed" narrative is so pervasive that, at this point, even casual consumers of political news are well aware of it. Consider just a smattering of the political headlines involving the midterm elections, culled from the past six months:
Trouble Is Brewing For Obama, Democrats in 2010--U.S. News and World Report, November 25
More Signs of Trouble For 2010--The New Republic, October 26
2010 Election: Trouble Brewing For House Democrats--The Huffington Post, September 13
Signs Point To Democratic Trouble in 2010--Houston Chronicle (Guest Commentary), November 27
Trends Spell Trouble For Democrats--Southern Political Report, December 3
Of course, the conventional wisdom is often wrong. The purveyors of the CW did not catch the 2006 wave election until darned near Election Eve, only grudgingly conceding as late as mid-October that the Democrats had a better than 50/50 shot at seizing control of the House (even until the bitter end, almost no one projected a Senate majority).
And, last year, no less than three major media outlets (ABC, CNN, and Time Magazine) felt compelled to invoke the term "Bradley Effect" to cast doubts on the veracity of the Obama lead in the final weeks of the campaign. As it turned out, of course, the polls were unusually prescient. On the day before the election, the seven daily tracking polls gave Barack Obama an average lead of 7.86%. He won by around 7.3%.
Therefore, it is worth asking whether the dire projections about Democratic fortunes in 2010 are justified, given the (to put it charitably) mixed record of the pundit class in the past.
There is one aspect of the CW that is almost certainly true--and Democrats and progressives ought to prepare their expectations accordingly: the Democrats will almost certainly lose some seats next year. If they don't, it will be a miraculous effort on the part of the DNC, DCCC, and the individual campaigns.
There is both history and intertia at work here. For all the talk of the "Sixth Year Itch" in American politics (the much-discussed phenomenon of the president's party getting thumped in the sixth year of his presidency), there is a smaller-but-still notable "Second Year Itch" that also exists in the recent history of midterm election cycles.
Using data compiled by the Cook Political Report, we see that in the eight first-term midterm elections that have been conducted since 1950, the party in the White House has lost seats in seven of them. The lone exception was in 2002, when the GOP gained eight seats. The average loss in those elections was 16 seats for the incumbent party, while the median was 13.5 seats.
Therefore, there is a historical basis for suggesting Democratic loss of House seats in 2010, and it is based, in some respects, on a logical foundation. Any anger over the state of the nation is going to be visited on the incumbent party.
Compounding this potential peril is the fact that the Democrats are coming off of a pair of wave elections, which combined for a net gain of greater than 50 seats over the past two election cycles. Not since the New Deal era has a political party gained seats in the House after back-to-back gains of double digits in their House membership.
Wave elections create an inertia which generates a sort of coattail effect. Candidates that, in neutral or hostile elections, would be beaten (and often beaten easily), manage to emerge victorious with a strong enough wind at their back.
Will all, or most, of the class of 2006 and 2008 be defeated? The answer is, of course, no. Many of them have proven to be excellent fits for their districts, and others will benefit from a combination of political skills and the electoral benefits that come with incumbency. But some of them are, without question, swimming upstream.
What turns a tough election into a wave election, oftentimes, is the presence of open seats. The reason that much was made of the retirements in the past two weeks of Kansas Democrat Dennis Moore and Tennessee Democrat John Tanner is that both men serve districts that, in an election absent of incumbency, might prove difficult holds for Democrats.
Open seats were the epicenter of the 1994 political earthquake, where the Gingrich-led Republican Party seized 52 seats and, with it, control of the House. Nearly half of the seats taken by the GOP that year were in open-seat elections.
At present, the Democrats have done an excellent job of minimizing open-seat vulnerabilities. In fact, and it is a fact that often goes unreported in the traditional media, the GOP has more open seats to defend at present than do the Democrats (12 to 9).
And while much is made of the triumvirate of open seats in Kansas, Tennessee, and Louisiana (where Charlie Melancon is running for the Senate), it has to be pointed out that the GOP has an even tougher trio of open seats to defend in DE-AL (Mike Castle), IL-10 (Mark Kirk) and PA-06 (Jim Gerlach). To say nothing of the fact that in Joseph Cao (LA-02), they have the incumbent most likely to be a one-termer since Michael Patrick Flanagan upset Dan Rostenkowski in IL-05 back in 1994 (great trivia for political junkies: Flanagan was discarded in the next election in a landslide by none other than....Rod Blagojevich).
The early line on the House is certainly not as pretty as it was in 2006 or 2008, but some of the projections of sheer collapse are probably a bit too pessimistic, as well.
The statistic to watch, given the fact that the Democrats control both chambers of the Congress as well as the White House, is the right track-wrong track indicator. Democrats are going to have a difficult time being successful as long as over a third of their own party members believe the nation is off on the wrong track. Watch this stat, on our weekly tracking poll and others. If it doesn't improve, particularly among the Democratic base, that could make a perilous election even more so.
The Senate and the gubernatorial elections behave a little bit differently, because in both cases there are exigent circumstances that alter the dynamics of those races.
In the Senate, there is the nature of the six-year electoral cycle. Therefore, a party's fortunes in the upcoming elections will be dictated, in no small part, by how well they did six years ago. 2004 was a wash, more or less, and the inclusion of several special elections (New York, Illinois, Delaware, Colorado) make it an even battle heading into 2010. Democrats have 19 Senate seats to defend, as do Republicans. This was supposed to be the cycle where Democrats padded their already sizeable majorities, since the Democrats will be swimming upstream in 2012 and 2014, where they defend their huge gains from '06 and '08 (the ratio of Dems seats to GOP seats in those two cycles is nearly two-to-one). Those vulnerable special elections, plus a few very vulnerable Dem incumbents, make a net wash or even the shedding of a seat or two the most likely outcome.
Could Democrats pick off some vulnerable Republicans (and there are a few open seat opportunities where Dems could emerge strongly) and add to their 60-40 majority? Yes, it is possible. But it is a great deal less likely than it looked a year ago, when the Democrats had four fewer seats to defend.
On the gubernatorial side, the x-factor is term limits, which have put the Democrats in an excellent position to limit their casualties in the 2010 electoral cycle. There are open-seat gubernatorial campaigns in a total of four states where President Obama exceeded 60% of the vote: Hawaii, Vermont, California, and Rhode Island. To be fair, Democrats also have to defend open seats in places like Kansas and Oklahoma, which could prove to be an uphill battle, to say the least.
The second complicating factor in forecasting gubernatorial elections is, as mentioned here last month, the fact that the electoral climate for governors right now is nothing short of brutal. It is telling, for example, that according to one of the deans of electoral punditry (Stuart Rothenberg), fully half of the governor's races for 2010 are either toss-ups or already leaning to the challenging party.
As with any election that is still fully eleven months away, there is still an incredible amount of fluidity in the election dynamics.
However, there are a few things that, at this point, seem likely.
There is likely to be a lot of tumult and unexpected outcomes, given some unique dynamics to this cycle (the schism in the GOP, for example). A lot of assumptions being made now (about candidates and momentum, in particular) are going to be challenged as time goes on.
Also, with each passing day, it becomes more evident that the Democrats are going to need to find some way to inspire their base. The disparities in voter intensity are stark, and something Democratic officeholders need to be acutely aware of as they head into 2010.