Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (67 page)

Democrats lost two other seats they should have won. In Colorado, Senator Mark Udall, a respected environmentalist, had the misfortune of watching as the party establishment successfully pushed out a Tea Party candidate and replaced him with the smoother but still very conservative Cory Gardner.
And in Iowa, Representative Bruce Braley was caught on tape telling a trial lawyers’ group that they should be horrified at the thought of Iowa Senator Charles Grassley, “a farmer,” becoming chairman of the Judiciary Committee. The two obvious problems with the statement: the race was for a seat in Iowa, and Iowa has a lot of farmers. Braley lost to Republican Joni Ernst, a state senator who made her name in the primary with an ad in which she boasted about castrating hogs. Ernst was a “fusion” Establishment–Tea Party candidate like Sasse, although in a very different way.
Her endorsers in the primary, as
Politico
put it, were “an eclectic coalition of Republicans” that included Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, and Marco Rubio. All of them campaigned for her.

At a national level, Democrats were tongue-tied. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the party’s top strategic thinker, Senator Charles Schumer
of New York, put together a package of economic issues under the rubric of
“A Fair Shot for Everyone.” They pledged to make the campaign a battle for the middle class—not unlike the campaign that had worked for Obama in 2012. Their key issues included a minimum wage increase, equal pay for women, college affordability, child care, and incentives for companies to invest in the United States. Lacking Romney as a convenient moneyed foil, they regularly assailed the Koch brothers for trying to buy the election for right-wing corporate interests.

What the Democratic Party could not figure out was a national message about Obama’s presidency and how to talk about an economic recovery that had finally begun to gather steam. With Republicans making opposition to the president their central and in some ways their only issue, these were not trivial shortcomings. Because Obama’s popularity was down and because he was especially unpopular in the key Romney states Democrats hoped to win or hold in the Senate, many in his party feared that mounting a defense of the president would backfire. In an environment in which Obama was under constant attack, the lack of a defense only made the Democrats’ situation worse. And the failure to defend Obama was depressing to his support base, whom Democrats, even in red states, needed. It was a conundrum the Democrats never resolved.

Obama himself was restrained, partly because embattled red state Democrats wanted him to be. He postponed executive actions on immigration that he had promised to undertake if the Republican House failed to act. Democrats feared that any move to legalize undocumented immigrants would create a backlash against incumbent red state Democratic senators. In the event, they lost anyway, and Obama’s failure to act enraged many Latinos and held down their turnout.

And on the economy, Democrats were torn three ways. Some Democrats, particularly in the White House, believed the party should proudly tout the economy’s rescue from near collapse, its steady comeback, and the job creation that was finally picking up steam. But Democratic pollsters warned that with so many Americans still hurting, robust praise of economic conditions would only make the party look out of touch with the large number of voters whom the recovery had still not yet reached. The further complication was the Democrats’
insistence that changes in the economy had shortchanged the middle class to the benefit of the wealthy. Obama often said these things himself. Yet this, too, was in its way a depressing message that did not necessarily reflect well on a party that had held the White House for nearly six years.

And beyond the actual campaign was the flow of disconcerting news voters were absorbing on television, online, and in their newspapers. In the months before the election, the world seemed to be flying out of control. The spate of bad news was part of the Republicans’ good luck in 2014. In the summer came the surge of Latin American children, fleeing violence in their home countries, across the United States’ southern border. The mass movement of immigrants had started the previous October but it hit the media as a major development that summer. Then came the rise of the Islamic State, a new, strange, and thoroughly terrifying group that routed the Iraqi army in northern Iraq and called into question Obama’s policies. Within two weeks in August and early September, the group put out gruesome videos of its beheadings of two American journalists, James Foley, a photographer, and Steven Sotloff.

As if these horrors were insufficient, the Ebola outbreak in Africa hit the news in September and October, punctuated by scare stories about a handful of Americans who contracted the disease. By 2015 it was clear that the Obama administration as well as local governments had handled the Ebola problem skillfully. But this was not obvious in the weeks before the election as health officials scrambled to deal with a very new problem.

These crises gave the Republicans’ their closing theme, and they linked them to their favorite issues, particularly the need to “secure” the southern border against immigrants. Typical was the closely fought Senate race in New Hampshire.
“We have a border that’s so porous that anyone can walk across it,” said Scott Brown, who had moved across another border, from Massachusetts to the Granite State, to challenge incumbent Democrat Jeanne Shaheen. “I think it’s naïve to think that people aren’t going to be walking through here who have these types of diseases and or other types of intent, criminal or terrorist.”

In an ad that was montage of frightening images, Brown declared, implausibly, that “[r]adical Islamic terrorists are threatening to cause the collapse of our country.” Democrats, he said, just didn’t get it. “President Obama and Senator Shaheen
seem confused about the nature of the threat,” he said. “Not me. I want to secure the border, keep out the people who will do us harm, and restore America’s leadership in the world.” Even the obligatory tagline sounded like a reprise of old Republican campaign messages from 2002 and 2004: “I’m Scott Brown, and I approved this message because protecting the homeland is the first step to making America strong again.”

Margaret Talev of
Bloomberg Politics
reported that in the period October 21–25 alone, ads invoking
Ebola ran 734 times.

On Election Day, the voters of an edgy, unhappy country who did show up routed the Democrats. A record number didn’t vote at all, and in many respects, the year was even worse for Democrats than 2010. This time the Republicans took control of the Senate and won their largest number of House seats since 1928, the last election before the Great Depression. It was, perhaps, Hoover’s revenge. Democrats were trounced in contests for state legislative seats as well as governorships. Right-wing Republican governors who were thought to be in grave peril in Kansas and Maine survived while Democrats lost governorships in their usually loyal bastions of Massachusetts, Maryland, and Illinois. Republicans now controlled 31 governorships and 68 of the country’s 99 legislative chambers. After 2014, Democrats held full control—meaning the governorship and both houses of the legislature—in only 8 states. Republicans had full control in 24. There was a red America and a blue America on the night of November 4, 2014. The red one was much bigger.

At 35.9 percent, turnout in 2014 was the lowest since 1942, an election held during World War II, when many Americans were abroad in the service. And as in 2010, Democratic-leaning groups were the stay-at-homes.
Some 13 percent of 2014 voters were 18–29 years of age, sharply down from their 19 percent share in 2012. As voting analysts Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin noted, the 6-percentage-point fall “was identical to the drop-off in young voter representation from the 2008 to 2010 elections.” On the other hand, older voters stormed the polling places: 22 percent of 2014 voters were 65 and older, up from their 17 percent share of the electorate in 2012 and even a point above their 21 percent share in 2010. Teixeira and Halpin noted that
2012 marked “the highest share of seniors in the electorate since 1988.” And seniors were now a very Republican group.

Aggravating the Democrats’ problems was the decline in participation among ethnic and racial minorities. Nonwhites had made up 28 percent of the 2012 electorate but were 25 percent of 2014’s voters. The African-American share of the vote was down one point from the presidential election, and the Latino share dropped by two. Obama’s delays in acting on immigration extracted a price. Teixeira and Halpin also noted a drop in the female share of the electorate, from 53 percent to 51 percent. Thus did “a substantially older, whiter, and less-female electorate” hand the Democrats their drubbing.

A postelection survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, which reinterviewed 1,399 respondents who had been contacted before the election, underscored the Democrats’ turnout troubles. Latinos comprised just 8 percent of all voters in the overall sample—but 22 percent of nonvoters. Whites, on the other hand, made up a much larger share of those who voted (73 percent) than of those who didn’t (56 percent).

The nonvoter pool was also overwhelmingly young: Millennials, those of ages 18–34, made up 47 percent of the nonvoters but just 17 percent of voters. On the other hand, 54 percent of those who reported voting were over the age of 50. The electorate also skewed by class. Among nonvoters, 44 percent made less than $30,000 a year; among voters, only 26 percent had incomes that low. At the other end of the scale, those earning $100,000 or more annually accounted for 7 percent of nonvoters, but 17 percent of voters. This time the battlefield of class tilted toward the best-off.

All this had an ideological effect. Liberals accounted for 26 percent of nonvoters and 25 percent of voters. But conservatives constituted a much larger share of the voter pool relative to their numbers: while 34 percent of nonvoters called themselves conservative, 42 percent of voters did. Republicans called on Obama’s opponents to use their votes to register their unhappiness with the president. The president’s foes readily accepted the invitation.

It was less curious than it seemed that Obama was liberated by the defeat. No longer did he have to worry about Democrats trying to win in states
where he was disliked, including some where he was loathed. He had been cautious, as many of the Democrats in those battlegrounds had wished—and they had lost anyway. With the election over, he was freer to make a case for his achievements, especially after the continuing improvement of the economy began to brighten the outlook even of Americans who had, only a few months earlier, believed that the recovery would never reach them. The sense of economic progress began to move his polling numbers upward.

And there were, again, the strange rhythms of Obama’s own competitiveness. He was a fourth-quarter player whose energies often kicked in fully only when the threat of losing was upon him. It was after the disastrous summer of 2011 that he began to take the aggressive moves that his reelection would require and to make the case against the ideas of his conservative adversaries.
He offered the sports metaphor himself during his 2014 year-end news conference. “My presidency is entering the fourth quarter,” he said brightly. “Interesting things happen in the fourth quarter.” The 2014 defeat—and the calendar—reminded him that he needed to get done what he could, but also to advance ideas and arguments that would strengthen the chances that his allies could sustain his policies beyond the life of his presidency.

And so he moved quickly to act unilaterally where he had the power, and to lay down markers. He used executive action to legalize the situations of up to 5 million undocumented immigrants. There was exultation in a Latino community that had only recently excoriated Obama’s caution, and this helped bump up his polling numbers as disaffected parts of the community returned to the fold. He reached an agreement with China setting ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gases, a signal that acting on climate change would be a central focus of his final two years in office. He upended fifty-three years of American policy by opening diplomatic relations with Cuba.

And his 2015 State of the Union address made clear he had come to understand that winning the long-term argument with his partisan and ideological opponents took priority over hoping that the celestial choirs Hillary Clinton had mocked would finally start singing. He was at long last dealing with the Republican Party he had, not the one he once thought he could persuade.

He was unabashed in saying, about as clearly as a president could in an address of that sort, that his opponents had been flatly wrong.
“At every step, we
were told our goals were misguided or too ambitious,” he declared, “that we would crush jobs and explode deficits. Instead, we’ve seen the fastest economic growth in over a decade, our deficits cut by two-thirds, a stock market that has doubled, and health care inflation at its lowest rate in fifty years.”

His analysis of the nature of his political opposition, in turn, dictated the approach he took in the rest of the speech. There was no point in hedging on his wishes, constraining his hopes, and compromising in advance. At earlier points in his administration, he often seemed inclined to begin a negotiation by offering his interlocutors their asking price up front and then moving backward from there. No more.