Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown's victory in last week's special election for the Senate should serve as an air-raid siren for the Democratic Party. Warnings began sounding last summer, and by now it seems impossible for Democrats to deny that something has gone terribly wrong for their party. In the year since President Obama's inauguration, their celebration has turned into a nightmare.
To be sure, some Democrats will try to throw their hapless Senate nominee, state Attorney General Martha Coakley, under the bus, blaming her and her campaign for the loss (blame that's partially deserved), as they did in November with their Virginia gubernatorial nominee, Creigh Deeds, after his defeat in a state that had gone for Obama. The same thing happened to New Jersey's Jon Corzine in November when he failed to win a second term as governor in another Obama state. Each of those candidates had flaws, of course, but at some point a party's blame game becomes an exercise in denial.
For Democrats, the first step toward recovery is admitting they have a problem: Over the past 12 months, they have badly damaged their brand.
As for state Sen. Brown, he and his campaign, including pollster Neil Newhouse of Public Opinion Strategies, deserve enormous credit. Brown ran a great race and did it on a shoestring for the longest time, with a fire hose of money -- more than could be spent -- coming in at the end. Observing Brown was like watching a world-class surfer catch the wave of a lifetime. The National Republican Senatorial Committee also deserves praise for spotting a growing opportunity early enough to take advantage of it. Likewise, Virginia's Bob McDonnell ran a fabulous gubernatorial campaign using Newhouse's partner, Glen Bolger. In New Jersey, Chris Christie and his operation were less than stellar but got the job done.
These successful Republican candidates were able to take advantage of the vise grip in which Obama and his party are caught. A large group of Americans are upset that the president and congressional Democrats have focused so much on health care and climate change, seemingly at the expense of the economy and jobs. Another group is furious about the expansion in the size, scope, and reach of the federal government and the explosive growth of federal spending over the last year, albeit on top of an orgy of deficit spending under President Bush and the GOP majority. These two forces are squeezing Obama and his fellow Democrats from opposite directions, doing grave damage to him and his party.
There is a perception, not entirely fair, that after Obama got elected he "checked the box" on the economy by signing a pork-stuffed and grossly insufficient stimulus package; then he quickly moved on to climate change and health care, allowing those two issues to sap the Democrats' time, energy, and political capital for much of the rest of the year. Only much later, and still insufficiently, did the White House come back to deal with jobs and the economy using an anemic renewal and expansion of the homebuyer tax credit. Inadequate first, then too little, too late. The result is that unemployment remains very high, and the housing market is still weak.
To the extent that they show up, Democratic voters can generally be counted upon to support their party's candidates this year, just as Republican voters can be expected to toe the line for GOP candidates, assuming that "tea party" supporters don't nominate some unelectable ones.
But independent voters are the largest voting bloc in Massachusetts, as they are nationally. And independents showed that they have little patience left for Democrats. Of course, Democrats' woes are not limited to the Bay State. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, conducted January 10-14, shows the two parties running even at 41 percent each in the generic congressional ballot test, a bad result for Democrats because the gauge tends to tilt about 3 points in their favor. Even more worrisome for them is that among voters with the highest interest, those most likely to turn out, Republicans hold a huge 15-point lead, 50 percent to 35 percent.
Any Democrat with a pulse ought to be extremely alarmed by now: The same wave of independent voters that swept away the GOP's majorities in the House and Senate in 2006 could do the same to Democrats, at least in the House, this November 2.