Over at Power Line, one of my favorite blogs for which I just cut a podcast, Steven Hayward notices that the liberal columnist E. J. Dionne, in Steve’s words, “gets one right.” Dionne starts off by admitting that the 2014 Republican landslide was, from his and other Democrats’ point of view, worse than the 2010 Republican landslide. And he notes that Republicans made gains in large part because of the perception of “incompetent government.”
Then Dionne goes on muse that the Republicans might, heeding leaders like Sen. Ted Cruz, go too far to the right to suit most voters and notes that the presidential electorate is less conservative than the off-year electorate — which is usually true (though not in 2006), but which is of only marginal importance, as you can gather by crunching some exit poll numbers. Similarly, my American Enterprise Institute colleague Norman Ornstein warns, quite wrongly in my view, that Republicans can be goaded into bringing impeachment proceedings against President Obama.
The problem with this, in my view, as a strategy for Democrats is that it counts on the other side making mistakes. Ever since my days as a (Democratic) pollster and campaign consultant, I have always been suspicious of any campaign strategy one of whose essential components was: “Step Three. The other side screws up.” Because sometimes it doesn’t. And you can’t force it to do so.
The Todd Akin Award — you remember Todd Akin, the Senate candidate whom mainstream media made the emblematic Republican on the 2012 Senate cycle — this year goes to Bruce Braley, Democrat of Iowa, who allowed himself to be videotaped telling Texas trial lawyers, in front of a drinks cart, that if Republicans won the Senate the chairman of the Judiciary Committee would be “an Iowa farmer who never went to law school.” Braley got 44 percent of the vote in a state that voted 52 percent for Obama in 2012. In my career as a political consultant, I gave Democrats some bad advice. But never that bad.
