How A Political Wave Builds And Turns Into A Tsunami

Did Ted Cruz's McCarthy-like agenda help build a wave for the Democrats?

The 2014 midterm elections are over a year away and there's plenty that will happen between now and then. The Democrats need a net gain of 17 seats to take back the majority. That means if worthless Blue Dogs and New Dems from the Republican-wing of the Democratic Party-- say, as looks likely, Jim Matheson (UT), Mike McIntyre (NC) and Ron Barber (AZ)-- can't be saved, not even in a wave election and lose their seats, then the Democrats would have to win not 17 but 20 to make up for the 3 losses. The new polling from MoveOn and PPP indicates that is very feasible.

For the sake of this post, let's assume that the incompetence of the NRCC is roughly equal to the DCCC and that they cancel each other out and-- more of a stretch-- that Steve Israel's brilliant strategy of not running Democrats against vulnerable Republican friends of his and Debbie Wasserman Schultz's somehow goes away or that Pelosi wakes up and takes control of the situation. I know, I know… a stretch. But this is a theoretical post anyway so… stretch.

One tangent though since Israel's name just came up. An old friend of mine who ran for Congress a few years ago and was beaten by a powerful and entrenched incumbent-- since retired as part of a deal to avoid going to trial for corruption-- wrote to me today about another reason why Israel's strategy is so disastrous. "The Reps you’re saying they should take on-- Ryan, Ros-Lehtinen, McKeon, Upton, Issa-- are powerful fundraisers. What happens when you take them on is that they get very selfish in their fundraising efforts, raising money only for their own campaigns. Take my race against [xx} as an example. In 2006, he raised a million or so and gave it all away to Republicans who he thought needed some help. When I ran against him in 2008, he raised $3 million and spent it all on himself. And if you recruit a good candidate, that candidate brings new money into play, whereas the Republican incumbent will be raising dollars from already indentified GOP donors, dollars that otherwise would go to other Republican candidates." That might be beyond Steve Israel's grasp but I did want to throw it into the mix. Now, let's forget Israel and the DCCC for a minute and remember that the PPP polling this months shows more than enough seats in serious jeopardy for the Democrats to win back the House.

From today's Washington Post-ABC News poll

If you're a regular DWT reader, there's a good chance you're not normal in the same way I'm not. We're politically aware and politically committed; most Americans aren't. As I mentioned before, I'm reading Predisposed by John Hibbing, Kevin Smith and John Alford and they're trying to get to the bottom of what makes someone "liberal" and what makes someone "conservative." This does't answer the question but it helps us put the wave build-up into some kind of perspective:

The labels that organize issue disagreements likewise seem to be historically, culturally, or geographically idiosyncratic. As mentioned in the last chapter, in many countries the word “liberal” refers to individuals supporting policies best characterized as mildly libertarian: limited governmental involvement in social as well as economic issues. In the United States, though, “liberal” is associated with economic positions that are anything but libertarian. Even the concept of a “left” and “right” as a means of universally organizing political preferences seems to be bound by time and culture. The origin of the left/right political divide is mostly the product of seating arrangements of the 1789 Estates-General in Renaissance France. Presumably, if ancien regime-supporting aristos had happened to park their silken-clad bottoms to the King’s left, then Stalin and Lenin would be remembered as hard core right-wingers and Hitler as the par exemplar of the deranged left. If the toffs were seated in the galleries, maybe we would have an up-down divide rather than a left-right…

It is because issues and labels are so variable across time and space that many political scientists are skeptical about the whole idea of ideology, especially the notion that systematic sets of political beliefs can be neatly ordered along a dimension with moderates in the middle between two extremes of left and right. Traditionally speaking, the political left has been associated with support for equality and tolerance of departures from tradition, while the right is more supportive of authority, hierarchy and order. As political scientists have routinely pointed out, exceptions abound. Communists can be a pretty authoritarian bunch, though they are traditionally placed on the left, and conservatives are often fierce defenders of individual liberties even though they are viewed as residing on the right. Some people seem to simultaneously hold beliefs associated with the left and the right. Libertarians, for example, tend to be left-leaning on many social issues (gay marriage, abortion), but right-leaning on economic issues (government regulations, taxes).

Political scientists who study issue attitudes have frequently come to the conclusion that political beliefs are multi-dimensional and that where you are sitting on any particular issue at any particular time is determined wholly by social and cultural forces. In short, much research argues that people are simply not very ideological; that people’s political beliefs do not systematically add up to a stable and meaningfully interpretable point on a left-right dimension. Only a few people, this argument goes, wander the world with some underlying stable philosophy of government that charts where we sit in the grand hall of political beliefs and attitudes. Rather than stable philosophical or psychological gyroscopes, individual political beliefs and attitudes are seen as more a mash-up of purely social and environmental influences ranging from family, friends, schooling, and peers to whether you just got a pink slip, find the president attractive, served in the military, or just woke up feeling patriotic this morning.

Is the narrative that the Republicans have been taken over by a radical right, perhaps dangerous, gang of somewhat crazy and completely ignorant activists who forced them into shutting down the government and costing the taxpayers $24 billion enough to build a wave outside of ideological base votes? Probably. But… you can't beat someone-- even someone as unpopular as Buck McKeon, Fred Upton, and John Mica have made themselves-- without a candidate supported by the Democrats. And the DCCC isn't contesting those races. Blue America is. Can you help our candidates get the word out? By the way, for those paying attention, here's the ad the far right-wing Madison Project PAC is running against Mitch McConnell: