The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
A Worthy Successor to Mayor McCheese
“Ham Elected Mayor in Colonial Beach”–headline, Free Lance-Star website (Fredericksburg, Va.), Nov. 6
Longest Books Ever Written
“Why Republicans Failed to Take Back the Senate”–headline, DailyCaller.com, Nov. 7
News of the Tautological
“Huelskamp Wins Unopposed US House Race in Kansas”–headline, Associated Press, Nov. 6
Bye-Ku for Mitt Romney
He did do better
Than 47%
But not by enough
2 (Probably 4) More Years
How did that happen? Americans just re-elected Barack Obama but also gave Republicans an only minimally diminished House majority, thereby ratifying a status quo that hardly anyone finds satisfactory. The answer is that as almost all of the big swing states–North Carolina is the lone exception, with Florida still too close to call–went Democratic in the presidential race, they sent GOP majorities to Congress.
Here’s how the new House delegation breaks down for each swing state with 9 or more electoral votes, with Republicans counted first: Colorado 4-3, Florida 17-9 (with 1 yet uncalled), Michigan 9-5, North Carolina 9-3 (1 uncalled), Ohio 12-4, Pennsylvania 13-5, Virginia 8-3, Wisconsin 5-3.
Add it up, assuming Democrats hold their leads in the uncalled races (including for Florida’s 29 electoral votes), and Obama beat Romney in these eight states 115-15, while Republican House candidates beat Democratic ones 77-37. That’s enough to account for both Obama’s margin of victory and, in all likelihood, the Republican margin in the House.
In explaining Obama’s victory, liberal pundits are giving the “emerging Democratic majority” thesis a good workout. To take a random example, the Puffington Host’s Howard Fineman:
His victorious coalition spoke for and about him: a good share of the white vote (about 45 percent in Ohio, for example); 70 percent or so of the Latino vote across the country, according to experts; 96 percent of the African-American vote; and large proportions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
The Republican Party, by contrast, has been reduced to a rump parliament of Caucasian traditionalism: white, married, church-going–to oversimplify only slightly.
Also often included in the “emerging majority” thesis are young voters and unmarried women. Of course there is considerable overlap among these categories.
One problem with the “emerging majority” idea is that it seems less compelling in 2012 than it did in 2008. Obama’s share of the vote declined by about three percentage points, from just under 53% to around 50%. (RealClearPolitics’s latest count has it at 50.4%, so it appears he will eke out a majority.)
More pertinently, whereas in 2008 the Democrats expanded their House majority, this year they barely dented the Republicans’. How does one reconcile Obama’s emerging Democratic majority with Speaker John Boehner’s enduring Republican one?
Part of the answer is that 2010 and 2012 saw some formerly Democratic or contested states realign as Republican ones. A notable example is Arkansas, where in 2010 a 3-1 Democratic U.S. House majority became a 3-1 Republican one. This year voters made it 4-0 and gave Republicans majorities in both houses of the state Legislature to boot.
Another part is redistricting. The 2010 election left Republicans in control of drawing of district lines in most of those swing states. In North Carolina, where an ugly Democratic gerrymander had left the donks with their only U.S. House majority in the South after 2010 (7-6), an ugly Republican one allowed the GOP to pick up at least three seats.
But if you look at the maps of the other swing states, most of the districts look reasonably drawn. What you see is similar to those old maps showing the 2000 presidential results by county: little islands of blue in vast seas of red. Which is to say that most swing-state House Democrats come from big cities, while most suburban and rural swing-state districts elect Republicans.
Cities, of course, tend to have very concentrated populations of blacks, Hispanics, unmarried women and other components of the “emerging Democratic majority.” Suburban and rural districts are more politically diverse, meaning they are not as Republican as the urban districts are Democratic. They’re Republican enough to elect GOP House members, but not enough, at least this year, to outnumber the Democrats statewide.
Obama’s victory obviously vindicates his strategy, about which we were skeptical in July, of making calculated appeals to the fear or self-interest of these population subgroups, from the “war on women” nonsense to the overhyped quasi-amnesty for certain illegal aliens. Similar themes helped Democrats in the Senate as well, where they incredibly gained seats for this class’s third consecutive election cycle.
“Obama clearly has a something of a whip hand now,” argues Politico’s Ben White:
Obama is likely to take his arguments to the public first and attempt to forge coalitions with Republicans beyond the House and Senate leadership. He may find willing partners. The risks to the GOP of continuing to aggressively oppose the president’s approach are now significantly higher. NBC’s David Gregory put it this way after Obama’s acceptance speech: “This is a president with some muscle.”
This strikes us as a misreading of the situation. If the Democratic approach couldn’t produce a Democratic House majority in 2012, it’s hard to see how it can in two years, especially since the weakest incumbents of both parties were weeded out this year. What Republican in either house of Congress is both ideologically flexible enough to consider cutting a deal on the president’s terms and potentially vulnerable to a challenge in 2014? With the possible exception of Maine’s Sen. Susan Collins, we can’t think of any.
This piece by Matt Yglesias of Slate would have made a good entry in our “Unenthusiastic Endorsement Watch,” if it had been published a few days ago instead of this morning. He warns Democrats of the danger of “failure–the precedent for which is easily found in the state of California, whose state Republican Party slipped beneath a veil of demographic and ideological irrelevance some time ago”:
Looking at California since Proposition 187 one sees neither a burgeoning progressive utopia nor technocratic feats of good governance. A pleasant climate and its status as the longstanding hub of America’s high tech industry gives the state enduring strengths that other areas lack. One shudders to think of California public policy mixed with the objective conditions that exist elsewhere. . . .
In California, Democrats have neither delivered great policy reforms within the existing framework nor managed to reform the institutional scheme. Something we saw both in the Golden State and in the 111th Congress is simply that it’s difficult in America to make sound policy without some level of bipartisan cooperation. Barack Obama clearly has the soul of an intelligent reformer (see Race to the Top) but when ideas come into contact with the need to grind out congressional wins you get sordid deals (see provider side-bargains in the Affordable Care Act) and ugly kludges (see Waxman-Markey) and schemes that go out of their way to avoid unduly disturbing the status quo (Dodd-Frank).
It’s imaginable that Obama, freed from the re-election need to pander to his leftist base, will either tame the House Republicans or learn to work with them the way Bill Clinton did. But there is little in his first term to suggest he has the skill to do the former or the inclination to do the latter. And the history of presidential second terms is not a terribly promising one.
On the other hand, here’s an optimistic take from reader Mark Swanson: “The most powerful man in the country is now Speaker Boehner. He can tell Obama, ‘Meet us halfway, both of us giving up some of what we want and accepting some of what we don’t want. Or face four years of gridlock.’ Boehner holds all the cards because he can live with either outcome, while Obama wants neither. Obama’s desired outcome (also his idea of compromise) is, ‘Give me everything I want, but I’ll accept a slightly slower timetable.’ But he doesn’t want his second term to be four years of nothing, so Boehner has the stronger hand.”
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