Debbie Wasserman Schultz Scrambling For Midterm Answers

When the polling gets tough, the desperation kicks in, and party leaders on the trailing side begin scrambling for any narrative to avoid looking the impending defeat in the face. This year, the polling is tougher for Democrats than it has been in decades, and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) isn’t giving her party much reason to believe that GOP momentum will subside before November.

With President Barack Obama’s approval ratings falling to an all-time low last week, a strong majority of Americans saying that they’d prefer a Republican Congress to a Democratic one, and Democrats struggling to defend 11 vulnerable Senate seats — a full 20 percent of their caucus — this week’s Pew poll suggesting that the GOP could make historic gains in the House could not have come at a worse time for the Democratic National Committee Chairwoman.

The Pew poll gives Republicans a four-point edge on the generic Congressional ballot, a margin that does not appear large, but is greater than the leads the GOP held at this point in 2010 or 1994, the two most recent Republican wave years. Because Democratic voters are tightly concentrated in urban areas and Republican voters are more evenly distributed between Congressional districts, a tied generic Congressional ballot almost always produces a healthy GOP majority. For example, Democrats won the generic House vote by 1 point in 2012 — and came away with 33 fewer seats than Republicans.

Wasserman Schultz knows that a four-point defeat in November could leave her party as many as 50 seats behind Republicans in the House, but more concerningly for Democrats, she has no viable plan to build her party’s brand, win over new voters or keep dissatisfied Obama voters in the fold. In fact, the DNC’s only strategy seems to be to hope that Republicans find a way to lose elections that Democrats don’t seem capable of winning.

“We have countless elections now that Democrats have won because the Republicans have nominated extremists that their voters reject,” Wasserman Schultz said during a recent appearance on Meet the Press. “And that’s the advantage we will have going into this election.”

Although the chairwoman can revel in the GOP’s nominating failures of the past, she’s sorely mistaken if she thinks the ghosts of Todd Akin and Christine O’Donnell are ‘advantages’ Democrats have going into November. Republicans have hurt their cause in recent years by nominating fatally flawed candidates in several key races, but the party is showing signs of learning from its mistakes.

Just yesterday, for example, North Carolina Republicans went to the polls to select an opponent for vulnerable Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan, whose approval ratings are barely 30 percent. They had a choice of eight candidates, several of whom bore the hallmarks of the failed candidates of the past — poor fundraising, no electoral track record, legal worries and a history of controversial statements. Instead, they chose the opponent Democrats feared most, State House Speaker Thom Tillis. We also saw this same storyline play out earlier this year in Colorado, where Ken Buck — who had lost a Senate race in 2010 after making controversial remarks about rape — dropped out of this year’s highly competitive Senate race, clearing the way for a broadly respected Congressman to win the nomination.

Counting on your opponent to shoot himself in the foot isn’t a winning strategy, even when it works, as it has for the Democrats on occasion in the past. This year, it’s Plan A, and if Wasserman Schultz has a Plan B, she’s doing a great job of hiding it. With six months to go until the election, the DNC Chairwoman already sounds resigned to defeat.