Eyes on the Senate: Tick tock, tick tock...
by David Atkins
Yes, it's early, polls are a snapshot in time, a lot can happen in a year, increased partisanship means that shutdown is less likely to have dramatic polling effects on election day, yada yada. Still, some interesting food for thought on how the biggest electoral damage to the GOP from all of this shutdown nonsense could come in the Senate rather than the House:
Next year was supposed to be a prime opportunity for Republicans to retake the Senate. And for a while, everything seemed to be breaking their way: a wave of Democratic retirements, a fluke in the electoral map that put a large number of races in states that President Obama lost, a strong farm team of conservative Senate hopefuls from the House.
Then the government shut down. Now, instead of sharpening their attacks on Democrats, Republicans on Capitol Hill are being forced to explain why they are not to blame and why Americans should trust them to govern both houses of Congress when the one they do run is in such disarray. Complicating the prospects, the grass-roots political force that has provided so much of the energy for conservative victories over the last four years — the Tea Party — is aggressively working against Republicans it considers not conservative enough.
As a result, many Republicans are openly worrying that the fallout from the fiscal battles paralyzing the capital will hit hardest not in the House, which seems safely in Republican hands thanks to carefully redrawn districts, but in the Senate. Republican infighting, they say, has given Democrats the cover they need to deflect blame and keep their majority.
“The Tea Party benefits when the energy is focused on the Democratic Party and their agenda,” said Brian Walsh, a Republican consultant and former strategist for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “What’s concerning is a select few groups trying to turn that fire inward on the Republican Party. And that is not helpful.”
In states like Georgia, Louisiana and Montana, the members of the House who are now running for the Senate are demanding that Mr. Obama make concessions on the health care law in exchange for reopening the government. That might help in a Republican primary, but it puts the candidates at risk of damaging their viability in the general election.
If things do pan out this way, it will have been the third cycle in a row in which the Tea Party will have cost Republicans their shot at taking the Senate. One wonders if the Kochs and the rest of the assorted plutocratic puppet masters still think they made a wise investment.
Remember, these folks are running out of time to get their Social Security and Medicare cuts before their voters age out of the electorate and a far more progressive electorate replaces them. They've got 15 years tops--and more likely 10 or less--before the politics get nearly impossible for them unless they attempt a shock doctrine/coup scenario. That's partly what they're doing with the shutdown, of course, but in 10 years even half measures like a government shutdown won't be enough, or even possible for them. They just won't have the numbers to sustain it: a lock on the South, a split decision in the midwest and a smattering of the least populated portions of the mountain west just aren't enough to get it done.
Every blown election cycle runs down their collective clocks. For progressives, the only dynamic working in the opposite direction is climate change. Otherwise, time is on our side with every passing year.
.