Primary season is almost over, and it’s given us a taste of how we’ll vote come November. Here in Washington, we’ve been thinking about this upcoming midterm as a big-issues election—one in which voters will express their dismay with corruption and sleaze in Congress, their disappointment with the president’s warrantless wiretapping program and their anger about our foreign policy in the Middle East.
“[I]t’s ‘issue-framing’ time, when the parties furiously battle to position themselves on what they think will be the winning side in November,” Al Kamen wrote in the Washington Post this month.
But the truth is this election isn’t about those big national issues: It is — as Tip O’Neill said all politics is — local.
In the most recent issue of Roll Call, a column asks reporters at local papers throughout the states what they think voters are paying more attention to in this cycle: local policy/politics, or national policy/politics.
Eleven reporters responded that voters in their area felt “very strongly” about local issues, while only 6 reported that they felt very strongly about national politics.
Wait a second.
Wasn’t ethics —Abramoff, and all that — supposed to oust Republicans this fall? It hasn’t turned out that way.
Take the representatives who have been implicated in ethics scandals, but who haven’t stepped out of the race (like Tom DeLay has): Rep. John Doolittle (R-Cal), whospent many beloved hours in Jack Abramoff’s skybox in Washington, is favored to win in November. Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Cal), currently under investigation for his connections to lobbyists, can’t lose.
Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Cal), also under scrutiny for his connections to the Abramoff scandal, will win, too.
In fact, instead of being fired up about Capitol sleaze, in summer polls by Fox and NPR, voters put “ethics in Washington” or “corruption in Washington” at the very bottom of the list of factors influencing their vote in November.
But wait. What about warrantless wiretapping, and other unsavory administration programs?
The Iraq war is playing big in this midterm, but often on a personal level, affecting areas near military bases or where many have served and many have died.
As far as wiretapping goes, The Hill’s local reporters put at the bottom of lists of voters’ concerns.
But what about the primaries—don’t the defeats of Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and others like him show that ideology is playing strongly this year?
To take just one example, the primary where immigration made a big difference was in a district where immigration is local, retiring Rep. Jim Kolbe’s Tucson district.
Lieberman, Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.), and others arguably lost for specific reasons related to their records in their district or their personal eccentricities.
The primaries, like the poll numbers, show that this year’s politics are local — even to a microcosmic degree: Here in Washington, we voted for the mayoral candidate not who had the ideology we agreed with most, but the one who knocked on our own doors.
In one sense, this is disappointing.
It would be nice to transcend asking which representative has brought home the most bacon and to have a referendum on the direction of the country.
But, then again, we don’t treat elections as referenda on a set of propositions, where our congressmen are mere physical stand-ins for our beliefs.
Our relationship to our representatives—and their duty to their constituents—is a little more complex than that.
And even if local issues are at the forefront of American voters’ minds, the big questions aren’t without impact.
In northeastern Pennsylvania, incumbent Rep. Don Sherwood is struggling to hold onto his seat—even though he’s famous for hauling home dollars for the district.
Why might Sherwood lose? Because general malaise is exactly what opens voters’ eyes to their own congressman’s failings.
Eve Fairbanks is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.
