You can feel the conventional wisdom congealing
into a Jell-O mold of quadrennial like-think amongst media personalities: the
contentious Republican primary is forcing candidates to take positions outside
the national mainstream, hurting the party’s brand and the eventual presidential
nominee; by wild extension, the primary may even doom the party's chances in
down ballot races. It’s a tiringly predictable accusation, and one that is never
reciprocally applied to Democrats when they suffer through a contested presidential
primary. But if this is the case, Obama’s continued vulnerability and a lack of
approval for Congressional Democrats should terrify the party. If the GOP brand
is so tarnished as to be unelectable, the Democrats have done irreparable
damage to their own brand when they were entrusted with both majorities in the
two chambers of Congress and the White House.
The media narrative embraced by
partisan Democrats, that the GOP is poisoning its chances among unaffiliated general
election voters, is perfectly encapsulated in an editorial by former Michigan
Gov. Jennifer Granholm in Politico entitled
“Thanks, GOP, for
Move to far Right.” Granholm, who governed so far to the left that she was
replaced after her second term by a Republican governor (who defeated his
Democratic opponent by 18 points) and GOP majorities in the Michigan House and
Senate, knows a thing or two about alienating voters.
“Hey, keep it up boys,” Granholm chides the Republican candidates. “The
version of Republicanism you are offering is a gift to Democrats looking for
recruits. The anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti-Latino, anti-Muslim,
anti-Europe (particularly the French and the Greeks), anti-labor, anti-poor,
anti-99 percent and now anti-college graduate rhetoric enables us to eagerly
welcome your castoffs into the Democratic Party — where inclusivity is
celebrated and their contributions are welcome,” writes Granholm channeling her
inner “Troubadour.”
Edifying political analysis to be sure.
Granholm’s piece is a stunning
indictment of the GOP primary and the impression it is leaving on partisan
Democrats (a key Republican voting bloc). If Granholm’s assertion is correct
and the Republican brand has been made radioactive, Obama’s brand (and by
extension his down-ballot friends in the Democratic party) are about as
inviting as present-day Fukushima, Japan.
This devastating GOP primary which has
pushed all independent voters away from Republicans sure hasn’t moved them to
Democrats. Obama’s job approval, which was on the uptick over January, is once
again plummeting. Today’s Real
Clear Politics average job approval stands at 48 percent with disapproval
about even. Both Gallup and Rasmussen’s
daily tracking polls show Obama’s disapproval back over 50 percent (that’s a
majority for the mathematically challenged) – just as Obama reengages in
political campaigning. Certainly, there couldn’t be any correlation there.
Obama regularly encounters a job
approval ceiling that he has not been able to break through since November,
2009 (coincidentally, right as the exceedingly and stubbornly unpopular health
care reform law was entering its denouement). The pinnacle of Obama’s job approval
numbers, immediately following the triumph that was the assassination of Osama
bin Laden reached a tepid 52 percent. His deserves
reelection numbers, which rebounded slightly in a recent Washington Post / ABC News poll
(which neglected to disclose the partisan affiliation of its sample), has
languished in the low 40s and in the low 30s among independents since 2010.
The Democratic Party’s problems do not
end there. Even amidst all this divisiveness with Republicans sniping at each
other and supposedly driving independents into Obama’s arms, Democrats still
suffer a generic Congressional ballot deficit. Polls of Congressional party preference
have been relatively evenly split (with some polls giving Republicans a
single-digit advantage over Democrats and other polls showing the reverses). A
far cry from the mass exodus astute observers of national politics like
Granholm attest is occurring before our eyes. Today, the RCP
average generic ballot favors Republicans by 0.2 percent – not overwhelming to
be sure, but just enough to be discrediting for partisan progressives peddling self-affirmation.
Funny how you cannot find much in the way
of similar hand wringing from this time four years ago when Democrats were in
the midst of a brutal civil war over their primary process and as to who would
be the best representative of the party moving forward. But the endless observations
that the GOP
primary is hurting
their brand are easy to come by today.
There have been academic studies that
back up the assertion that divisive primaries can hurt candidate. Andrew Hacker’s
1965 work “‘Does a Divisive Primary Harm a Candidate’s Election Chances?”
showed that “the candidate emerging from a divisive primary stood a better than
two-to-one chance of being defeated at the general election.” But there are too
many exceptions to call this the rule any longer – particularly when chief indicators
like consumer
confidence and direction
of the country are persistently low.
Partisan cheerleading is fine. Heck,
if you read all this you are probably in the market for some cheerleading. But
let’s all agree not to allow the partisans who peddle such material to give their
hackery the unearned moniker of “analysis.” Call it what is it: “wishful
thinking.” It’s hard to blame Democrats, really. Given the number of failures
and defeats they have encountered since 2008, any victory, even a pyrrhic one
like a contested primary driven by an engaged opposition, is just too important
to pass up.
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