For Midterms, Republicans Hope to Party Like It's 1966
As Politico reported Monday, Republicans in the wake of Saturday's cliff-hanger health care vote in the House immediately began their campaign to target vulnerable Democrats in traditionally GOP districts. But for a Republican Party looking to retake the House of Representatives in 2010, the formula for success may not be Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution that swept out 52 Democrats in 1994. Instead, the GOP role model may be Richard Nixon, whose one man whirlwind campaign during the 1966 midterm elections help stop LBJ's Great Society dead in its tracks.
To be sure, Congressional Democrats are in for a bruising battle in 2010 under almost any circumstances. While President Obama's party still enjoys substantial leads in national party identification and preference in generic Congressional ballots over the still-unpopular GOP, as Nate Silver noted:
"The party that wins the White House almost always loses seats at the midterm elections -- since World War II, an average of 17 seats in the House after the White House changes parties."
But 2010 is not shaping up to be an average year. Last week's off-year elections showed that the dismal economy tops voters' concerns. And despite the success of the $787 billion stimulus program in restarting economic growth, the jaw-dropping 10.2% unemployment rate hangs over the heads of the Obama White House and Capitol Hill Democrats alike. (The last time the jobless rate hit double-digits was when Ronald Reagan's party lost 26 House seats in the 1982 midterms.) As the turnout numbers in Virginia and New Jersey showed last week, the combination of a fired-up Republican base and detached if not disillusioned Democratic constituencies wiped out the enthusiasm gap Democrats briefly enjoyed in 2006 and 2008.
Which brings us to the emerging dynamics for the 2010 midterm elections. In 2006, Democrats gained 30 seats in the House and added another 21 two years later. As DailyKos documented, 38 Democrats from districts won by John McCain in 2008 voted "yes" on the health care reform bill this weekend. And it is those freshmen and sophomores currently warming traditionally Republican seats that are most vulnerable next year. As Politico reported:
Other than [Tom] Perriello [(D-VA)] -- who was the target of 12 consecutive postvote GOP e-mails accusing him of breaking his promises -- a handful of members immediately stood out for casting especially tough votes.
Three of them are junior legislators from highly competitive Ohio districts: first-term Reps. Mary Jo Kilroy and Steve Driehaus, and Rep. Zack Space, a second-term Democrat from a district that backed GOP presidential candidate John McCain in 2008.
Just two years after Barack Obama captured the White House with 365 electoral votes and an 8.5 million vote plurality, many of his Democratic allies who rode the same anti-Bush wave to power in Congress are in serious danger of being sent packing. But while that may sound like Bill Clinton's 1994 disaster, 2010 may be shaping up more like 1966, albeit on a smaller scale.
That is just one of the many parallels which emerge from Rick Perlstein instant classic, Nixonland. Among other examinations of the politics of Richard Nixon, Perlstein recounts in detail how the Democratic landslide of 1964 within eight short years was eviscerated by the Nixon tidal wave of 1972. And the first step was the Republicans' overwhelming triumph in the 1966 midterms, an electoral watershed that washed 47 Democrats out of Congress.
Central to the turnaround was Richard Nixon. Six years after his razor-thin loss to John F. Kennedy, four years after his humiliating defeat in the California governor's race and two years after Lyndon Johnson won 61.1% of the vote, 44 states and 486 electoral votes, Nixon started his path to political resurrection in the run-up to the 1966 midterms. Capitalizing on the growing unease over the war in Vietnam and the building backlash against race riots and the welfare state, Nixon launched an aggressive, nationwide campaign of fundraising and campaign visits. His target: the new liberal Democratic freshmen who rode Johnson's coattails to take historically conservative seats.
Foreshadowing the culture warriors, gay bashers and Tea Baggers who now dominate Republican politics and right-wing radio, Nixon spoke to his audiences in code about Watts rioters and welfare recipients on the dole. It's easy to imagine that it was not Richard Nixon but instead Sarah Palin warning about Obama's "death panels" or FEMA concentration camps run by what Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck deemed a "racist", an "angry black man" who "hates white people":
He was campaigning in traditionally Republican districts where a Democratic congressman had won in 1964 on Lyndon Johnson's coattails, but was likely to be swept out in the conservative backlash.
For instance, Iowa's first district. A five-term Republican, Fred Schwengel, was running to recover the seat he'd lost to a young political science professor from the Bronx named John Schmidhauser. One day, Representative Schmidhauser appeared at a farm bureau meeting, prepared for a grilling on the Democrats' agricultural policies. The questions, though, were all on rumors that Chicago's Negro rioters were about to engulf Iowa in waves, traveling, for some reason, "on motorcycles." The liberal political science professor was as vulnerable as a sapling...Now that farmers were afraid that Martin Luther King would send Negro biker gangs to rape their children, the Republican restoration seemed inevitable.
The Republican sweep which ensued in 1966 yielded immediate dividends for Nixon. As the 1968 presidential election neared, GOP Congressmen across the country were indebted to Nixon. Just as important, as Perlstein documented, Nixon was able to successfully portray the Republican victory as the result of the basest racial politics, but instead a rejection of President Johnson:
The misinterpretation that this was not a backlash election suited Richard Nixon just fine. He had studied the districts that Democrats had picked up in the sweep of 1964 and found them, still, essentially Republican. There were forty-seven of them. And although the districts did not match up exactly, forty-seven was the number of seats the Republicans picked up in 1966, in an election which the press now retroactively framed, not as it actually was, a referendum on the Negro revolution, but as what Nixon said it was: a referendum on Lyndon's Vietnam leadership, with Nixon's vision as the alternative. Warren Weaver of the New York Times obliged Nixon's interpretation by writing the next week that of the sixty-six House candidates Nixon had campaigned for, forty-four had won. The victory rate of the 319 Republicans who weren't afforded a Nixon visit was 44.8 percent. RFK's record was only 39 out of 76..."The political equivalent of the batting championship for the 1966 campaign season went to former Vice President Richard Nixon."
Better yet, the article added, "national political leaders do not like to waste their time campaigning for heavy favorites; if they did, their average would be much higher."
Nixon had bamboozled the Times. Wasting his time on candidates he thought most likely to win was exactly what he had been doing.
Of course, much has changed since 1966. The electoral map has changed dramatically and the racial subtext dominating American politics (as evidenced in part by Obama's election) has been significantly altered. Nixon's Southern Strategy had not completed the transformation of the South into a Republican stronghold; the migration of conservative Democrats into the GOP was not complete until Ronald Reagan swept into the White House. Ejected in 2006 and 2008 from New England, the Republican Party is now far more southern, white and conservative than in the 1960's.
Nevertheless, Richard Nixon, a "serial collector of resentments," remains a powerful if disturbing model for Republicans traveling on the long road back to political power. For the likes of Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee and especially Sarah Palin, the path to the White House won't come from seven figure book deals, speeches in Hong Kong or more babbling about "death panels." Instead, rolling back the Obama tide starts on the rubber chicken dinner circuit in those districts Republicans have usually won (a strategy Romney appears to have embraced).
If that happens, in 2010 Republicans could be partying like it's 1966.
"The party that wins the White House almost always loses seats at the midterm elections -- since World War II, an average of 17 seats in the House after the White House changes parties."sounds funny.