Both parties' record of futility in midterms
Charlie Cook is something of a godfather figure in the community of electoral prognosticators, and everyone in the business of handicapping races owes a debt to him for paving the way. He doesn't write about policy much, though, and after this week's offering, well, maybe it's better that he doesn't.
He starts out well enough in his post-election column for National Journal, correctly describing that exit polls found most American voters most concerned about the economy (although that's the case with the exit polls after almost every election), and that, although the economy looks good on paper, wage stagnation and insecurity keep people from feeling good about their personal economies. However, then he gets to the nut paragraph:
In mid-summer 2009, polls universally showed that Americans wanted the president, along with the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, to focus on the economy and job creation. Instead, in its infinite wisdom, Congress chose to focus almost exclusively and obsessively on health care reform. Although this was a worthy objective, the effort would likely have been better spent in a time when people weren't so worried about their economic well-being. This horrific choice, to focus on the Affordable Care Act rather than the economy, besides costing Democrats their House majority—not to mention platoons of Democratic governors and state legislators who would have been handy in drawing the congressional redistricting maps the next year—created scar tissue that remains to this day.
I can think of at least four things wrong with that idea, and I'll address all of them, going from the most specific to the most meta. First, there's the problem that the first thing out of the gate in the 2009-2010 session was a very large stimulus package. In retrospect, it's pretty clear it
wasn't big enough to stave off a serious recession, but at the time, it was perceived as quite large, larger than the
New Deal in current dollars but
transformative in subtler ways. The well was pretty much dry for further stimulus spending, especially considering that, with 59 Democratic senators at the time, any stimulus at all was conditioned on getting the votes of not only every Blue Doggish senator but also at least one moderate Republican.
Sure, Congress could have kept on passing more small-ball "jobs" bills in the following year as the stimulus dollars worked their way through the system, but really, given the constraints created by Blue Dogs' and/or Republicans' deficit hysteria, there wouldn't have been more infrastructure spending or direct payments to people. Anything else passed would have been tax cuts, or simply pleasant window dressing with "jobs" in the title, not likely to have any trickle-down effect for the actual Americans losing their jobs or houses. It was a better use of the Democrats' time to move on to one of the other pressing items on their to-do list.
(No doubt someone out there is sputtering "tax cuts are stimulus too!!1!" Well, yes, I suppose so, but even some Republicans know that infrastructure spending and direct payments are a much more effective way to stimulate the economy than tax cuts. Former McCain advisor Mark Zandi (granted, of the "even Mark Zandi" meme) made clear that the ratio of GDP increase to cost is best for payments like unemployment insurance and food stamps, followed by infrastructure spending, followed by tax rebates, and bringing up the distant rear, permanent tax cuts.)
There's more over the fold.
Second, there's the problem that health care isn't discrete from the economy—it's a huge part of the economy, and one that was in such a cost spiral at the time that it was contributing to dragging the broader economy down ... and given Medicare's trajectory at the time, likely to start wreaking even more havoc on the general economy without a course change. Healthcare costs were increasing at a disproportionate rate compared with the rest of the economy, especially in the individual market. That rapid rise has slowed down considerably since the passage of the Affordable Care Act (partly through providers getting more efficient, but also because of the ACA's bending of the cost curve).
The effect of the Affordable Care Act isn't just at the level of the broad economy but also people's personal economies, which is where Cook rightly puts the focus. With people spending less on unreimbursed medical costs, that's more money they can spend on consumption elsewhere, and with the specter of medical bankruptcy eliminated, not only do providers' bills get paid (instead of disappearing into the black hole of write-offs), but people's credit ratings don't get ruined, allowing them to increasingly participate in the economy. That's not to say that the ACA is an unqualified success—costs are still too high, especially in conjunction with the high-deductible policies that a lot of people have, and a public option or Medicare opt-in would have gone a long way toward driving costs down further—but it's made a real difference in tens of millions of people's lives.
There's also the question of what happens in the Darkest Timeline where the Democrats don't pass the ACA. Then you have a potential scenario of a dispirited base that stays home because their elected officials were so obsessed with small-ball economic policy that they squandered the opportunity to pass the white whale that's eluded them since Harry Truman's day, the opportunity to pass quasi-universal health care. That'd just be compounded by pundits who'd no doubt spend their time asking why healthcare costs are continuing to cripple the economy and why the Democrats didn't use their large majorities to try and do anything about that (the same pundits, of course, who in the real timeline instead asked why the Democrats pushed with the ACA, but, y'know, pundits gotta pundit).
What's especially odd is Cook's choice to call the decision to focus on health care instead of window-dressing economic legislation "horrific." Maybe it's just me, but the really horrific problem seemed to be that the millions of people who needed health insurance the most, people without employer-based coverage and with pre-existing conditions, were the ones least likely to be able to afford it, thanks to those same pre-existing conditions. Thousands of people dying each year because they lack the financial means to manage otherwise manageable chronic conditions seems to better match the usual definition of "horrific."
Third, there's the problem that the Democrats had only a limited, two-year window to pass game-changing legislation. In reality, it was much less than two years, given the need for 60 Senate votes, and the long time it took to seat Al Franken, Ted Kennedy's illness, and then Scott Brown's special election victory. Even without those odd circumstances, it still would have been only a two-year window, because no matter what legislation the Democrats passed in that window, whether it was meaningless crap with "jobs" in the title or whether they actually passed legislation to breed real-life unicorns and give one to every American, they were going to lose seats in the 2010 midterm.
In the wake of a bad midterm, it's entirely natural to think that "Ohmigod, this midterm was completely terribly the worst repudiation ever!!1!" Unfortunately, that tendency lacks historical context—midterms are just typically terrible for the party that holds the White House, no matter what the other variables are. You can have a great economy, pass important legislation, and still lose seats ... or you can sit and twiddle your thumbs, and still lose seats.
The problem with breaking the midterm curse is one of somehow overcoming human nature itself, the tendency for people to think, "You've been in power for two years and you still haven't solved all my problems? Screw you! I'm going to do the exact opposite now!" Or put a little more precisely, it's the tendency for the supporters of the presidential party to either get complacent and/or get dissatisfied that they didn't get their promised unicorna and don't get motivated to turn out, while the supporters of the non-presidential party feel like there's an existential threat to the world as they know it, and get very motivated to turn out.
And lest you think that problem is limited to the feckless Democrats, it's not. Did the strong economy of the mid-1980s and Ronald Reagan's very high approval rating at the time (64 percent) protect the GOP from a Senate wipeout in the 1986 election? No, the Republicans lost a net of eight seats as the Democrats regained control of the Senate. How about the 1950s, a prosperous time perceived as a sort of Golden Age for the country (well, so long as you were a straight white male), and a time when Dwight Eisenhower (with 57 percent approval) was one of the least polarizing presidents ever? The 1958 midterm was one of the biggest Senate debacles ever, with the Democrats picking up 13 seats.
Is passing great legislation a magic bullet against the midterm curse? LBJ's reward for passing civil rights legislation, Medicare, and Great Society legislation was, in 1966, to lose 47 seats in the House. (Granted, the Democrats had such a surplus from the 1964 election that they still easily maintained control.) So, how about if you keep your heads down and don't do anything? Think back to the Jimmy Carter administration, where, despite a well-intentioned president and large Democratic majorities in Congress, absolutely nothing happened. That didn't stop House Democrats from losing 15 seats in 1978.
Well, surely this pattern didn't happen back in the good old days when Democrats had actual spines and strong messaging, right? Just ask FDR, who managed to lose not just seven Senate seats but 72 House seats in 1938 (though, as someone will no doubt point out, that was partly because the recovery started slipping in his second term after he took his foot off the stimulus pedal in order to assuage deficit peacocks). And surely Harry Truman, the greatest quote machine to ever occupy the White House, was immune? No, he had the worst midterm one-two punch of any president ever, losing 12 Senate seats and 55 House seats in 1946 and five Senate seats and 28 House seats in 1950.
If you want to see both parties' track record of futility in midterms condensed into one graphic, that's in the chart we created at the top of the article. We also have an alternate way of looking at it, below, showing number of lost House seats plotted against the presidents' approval ratings at the time of the election. Surprisingly, this showed that, compared with the historical trend, the Democrats in the House actually overperformed, losing a low number of seats relative to Obama's approvals. (Of course, that may have less to do with masterful DCCC strategy than with the fact that the House Dems had only recovered, in 2012, a fraction of the seats they lost in 2010. In other words, weren't overextended into dozens of districts that are Republican-leaning at the presidential level, like they were heading into 1994 or 2010; there was very little realigning that could take place.)
Midterm losses plotted against presidential approvals
In short, your overwhelming majority, no matter how much you crow in the media after the election about creating a "permanent majority," is going to disappear. Thinking otherwise makes about as much sense as watching the tide go out, figuring,"Well, this time it's gone for good!" and then being surprised when your sand castle gets destroyed later that afternoon. So use that majority while you can, to check off as many legislative boxes as you can.
Which brings me to my final, and most meta, point: The Beltway media approach to winning elections is to regard winning elections as the key step that helps you win more elections. (We're guilty of that sometimes at Daily Kos Elections, too. It's a hard mindset to break out of.) In a consultant-driven world where you're as successful as your last electoral win, and where your paycheck depends on that, it makes sense.
Ultimately, though, the point of winning elections is to pass legislation that helps the most people, at the least harm, and at a reasonable cost. Majorities come and go because of the natural ebb and flow of things, whether you act boldly or just hide under a pile of coats ... so you have to jump through the window before it inevitably closes. If you simply play defense and run out the clock, you're still going to lose, and have nothing policywise to show for your troubles.
And sometimes there's a short-term cost associated with that, where you know you'll lose more in the next midterm, or even the ones beyond that. LBJ certainly knew that when he signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, reportedly saying, "There goes the south for a generation." That didn't stop him from doing so, even though, as mentioned above, it led to carnage in the 1966 midterm. He knew that it was not only the right thing to do, but also one that could pay long-term electoral dividends too. And it did, laying the groundwork for a new Democratic electorate that, within 50 years, could elect an African American as president.