With Scott Brown headed to the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, most of the analyses and post-mortems in the wake of the Massachusetts special election have focused on what to do about healthcare, and whether Obama should take a hard left turn or tack to the center. Post-election analysis of this sort is usually determined in advance: those with a prior agenda will make the strongest case possible for beliefs they would have held regardless of the actual results, and the subsequent debate becomes a vapid piece of kabuki theater.
Fortunately, the DFA/MoveOn/PCC poll hot off the press allows us to use real data, rather than bloviation, to answer the question. Unfortunately, however, the temptation to debate endlessly one's prior point of view has obscured the lessons inherent in the data.
The answer to what Obama and Congressional Dems must do now on HCR appears to be to get HCR over with and focus on what really matters to voters.
The poll results themselves have been touted far and wide. To repeat, the key numbers most writers have focused on are:
DEMOCRATS LEARNING WRONG LESSON FROM MASSACHUSETTS? EVEN SCOTT BROWN VOTERS WANT THE PUBLIC OPTION, WANT DEMOCRATS TO BE BOLDER
HEALTH CARE BILL OPPONENTS THINK IT "DOESN'T GO FAR ENOUGH"
* by 3 to 2 among Obama voters who voted for Brown
* by 6 to 1 among Obama voters who stayed home
(18% of Obama supporters who voted supported Brown.)
VOTERS OVERWHELMINGLY SUPPORT THE PUBLIC OPTION
* 82% of Obama voters who voted for Brown
* 86% of Obama voters who stayed home
OBAMA VOTERS WANT DEMOCRATS TO BE BOLDER
* 57% of Brown voters say Obama "not delivering enough" on change he promised
* 49% to 37% among voters who stayed home
PLUS: Obama voters overwhelming want bold economic populism from Democrats in 2010. See more results here.
Fair enough. But what the poll suggests, not inaccurately, is that MA Democratic voters, in a state with a 3-1 Dem-to-GOP registration advantage, pulled the lever in huge numbers for a Republican candidate who promised to kill the healthcare reform bill and adamantly opposed a public option. That is nothing short of astonishing, and can lead to only one of three possible conclusions:
- Massachusetts voters are abject morons who didn't understand candidate positions on the issues; or
- Massachusetts voters are petulant fools without a lick of common sense who didn't care about candidate's positions on the issues; or
- Voting for Scott Brown had very little to do with the healthcare bill and its contents.
Given those three possibilities, it's fairly clear that option #3 is the likeliest scenario. It is particularly likely that this is the case, given the high level of disinformation and misconception about the HCR bill, mostly due to the prevarications of the right-wing Wurlitzer. In fact, the most striking numbers in the poll were these:
QUESTION: If oppose, do you think it goes too far or doesn't go far enough?
NOT ENOUGH TOO FAR NOT SURE
ALL 36% 23% 41%
MEN 34% 26% 40%
WOMEN 38% 20% 42%
DEMOCRATS 49% 18% 33%
REPUBLICANS 11% 61% 28%
INDEPENDENTS 38% 20% 42%
A full one-third of Democrats and nearly one-third of Republicans opposed to the HCR bill(s) don't even know why they oppose it. They just do. They're nervous about it and confused by it. Obviously, the articulation of the benefits of the bill has not been adequate--partly because the bill is so flawed, and partly due to the lack of an adequate Democratic message machine to push the good parts of the bill(s).
Trying to analyze what's going on with voters' relationship to the Democratic Party by judging attitudes toward HCR is likely to lead to a variety of false conclusions. The one conclusion that can be drawn with some confidence is that Dems should have come out with a simple, public Medicare expansion plan whose benefits could be easily articulated, and passed the bill long ago. The longer the bill takes to pass, and the more lobbyists get their hands on it, the weaker the Democratic Party appears, and the more nervous opposition it faces from the Left and the Right. But that ship has long since sailed.
Of all the pundits to pontificate about the meaning of the election, Robert Reich strikes the truest chord:
Don’t believe any of it. Here’s what’s really going on. In Massachusetts, in New Jersey, all over the nation, voters are petrified of losing their jobs, their homes, and what’s left of their savings. Nothing counts more than the economy. Rightly or wrongly, presidents and the party in power are blamed when the economy is lousy. Voters fired Jimmy Carter in 1980 because the economy went south. They fired George Bush the first in 1992 because the economy was awful. They fired congressional Democrats in 1994 because the economy was still awful. And they’re in the process of firing Obama and the Democrats — unless or until the economy turns around.
What happens next November depends both on the extent of joblessness and the direction the economy is moving in. The usual political rule is voters pay more attention to the latter. They’ll forgive even relatively high unemployment if they’re confident the economy is improving. But that old rule hasn’t been tested under conditions of extremely high unemployment. If next November one in five Americans is still unemployed or underemployed or working at lower pay than before the Great Recession, voters may not care that the economy is showing signs of improvement. They’ll vote the rascals out.
We are still in the worst economy since the Great Depression, with job losses continuing to mount every month, even as income inequality rises to record levels for the United States. Healthcare reform is an important part of this picture, but it's not the key issue voters are looking at. It's important to make the bill marginally better, and to discuss the differences between the Senate and House bills. But that won't make the difference to voters in November.
Voters want to know if economic help is on the way, and whether politicians are looking out for them, or looking out for special interests. It's an old and trite story in politics, but at no time is it truer than at the present. Scott Brown and his truck convinced voters that he was their candidate; Martha Coakley's campaign of stand-offish arrogance was simply a manifestation of the notion that the Democratic Party at large has turned its back on the economic interests of the average voter.
Reich argues that the only thing Democrats can do to help themselves in this environment is to increase deficit spending, which he correctly notes is risky both on a political and on a policy level. In politics, however, as in any other endeavor, perception is just as important as reality.
There may not be much that the President can do to turn the economy around on a dime, but voters may be willing to forgive him (and, by extension, the Democratic Party) if he takes a strong populist stand against Wall St. and income inequality. FDR continued to remain extremely popular even as the Great Depression raged on, because he never stopped making clear just on whose side of the class war he had planted his battle flags.
In sum, the lesson of Brown's victory appears to be: just get a healthcare bill passed, articulate its benefits clearly in a few key talking points, and move on to what really matters: financial reform and the economy.
All the rest is Crossfire-style sound and fury, signifying nothing.