President Barack Obama remains at least an even bet to win reelection. Democrats are favored to hold on to the Senate — an outcome few prognosticators envisioned at the beginning of the year. And yet, with a little more than a week to go, the party holds almost no chance of winning back the House.
“They called the fight. It’s over. We’re going to have a House next year that’s going to look an awful lot like the last House,” said Stuart Rothenberg, the independent analyst who runs the Rothenberg Political Report.
The outlines of a comeback for Democrats seemed possible. From its opening act, the 112th Congress was dominated by a raucous class of House freshmen who pushed Washington to the brink of several government shutdowns and almost prompted a first-ever default on the federal debt. It became the most unpopular Congress in the history of polling and, by some measures, the least productive.
Analysts cite several factors why the Democrats haven’t been able to take advantage. First was a redistricting process that made some Republicans virtually impervious to a challenge and re-election more difficult for about 10 Democrats. A few Democratic incumbents have stumbled in their first competitive races in years. And Republicans have leveraged their majority into a fundraising operation that has out-muscled the Democrats.
That means that regardless of who wins the White House, the Republican caucus of Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio will remain a critical player in the coming showdowns over tax and spending cuts. Such a result will have defied the chorus of prognosticators who saw so many of these inexperienced freshmen as beneficiaries of blind political luck — swept up in the 2010 wave of sentiment against Obama and presumably poised to be swept back to sea when the tide went out this November.
First among those critics was Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., labeled the “face of defeat” after overseeing the loss of 63 seats two years ago. Defying recent precedent, Pelosi gave up the speaker’s gavel but stayed on as party leader. She vowed that “the tea party Congress” was so unpopular that Democrats would ride Obama’s coattails back to the majority.
Now, with a second straight election about to leave Democrats in the minority, Pelosi, 72, has not signaled whether she will remain in office. She delayed her leadership elections until after Thanksgiving, prompting more speculation about her future than about next year’s House majority.
Rothenberg predicted modest gains for Democrats of about a handful of seats, a symbolic victory but well short of Pelosi’s “Drive to 25” for the net gain needed for the majority. Privately, Democrats do not dispute those estimates but contend the gains will set the stakes for a 2014 campaign in which they will shoot for the majority, particularly if Mitt Romney wins the presidency and is facing his first midterm election.
Republicans, however, believe they have used congressional redistricting to shore up enough of their seats to remain in power for years to come. Rather than aggressively seek more seats, Boehner’s leadership team counseled Republican-led state legislatures to fortify those Republicans already serving on Capitol Hill.
The result has been that House Republicans start off with 190 districts that have a historic performance safely in their corner, while Democrats begin with just 146 such districts, according to an analysis by the independent Cook Political Report.
That leaves just 99 districts viewed as regularly competitive, an all-time low. Democrats will likely have to carry 72 of those 99 seats to reach the bare majority of 218.
“That’s a really bad omen for Democrats, not just this year but in future years,” said David Wasserman, the House editor for the Cook report.
Though more than 80 GOP freshmen are standing for reelection, just two dozen are facing tough challenges and only 15 are in significant danger of losing. Take Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Tex., whose 2010 victory over a Hispanic Democratic incumbent defied the odds because the district was nearly 75 percent Latino. Legislators drew him into a new district running north of Corpus Christi along the Gulf of Mexico, which tilts 60 percent toward Republicans.
Rather than a one-hit wonder, Farenthold, 50, could now serve in Congress for decades to come.
Similarly, the Philadelphia suburbs have served as political ground zero for past House majority battles. In 2006, the National Republican Congressional Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent a combined $5 million battling over the 7th Congressional District to the west of Philadelphia, followed by another $1.3 million in 2010.
Now, that district snakes across five suburban counties, encompassing the most Republican-leaning sectors of each, allowing freshman GOP Rep. Patrick Meehan to cruise to re-election.
Neither party committee is devoting resources to the Philadelphia media market for the first time in more than 20 years. With a delegation that boasted a dozen Democrats two years ago, Pennsylvania will send five or six Democrats to the House next year depending on Democratic Rep. Mark Critz’s tight battle outside Pittsburgh.
Democrats have put a few high profile tea-party lawmakers on the defensive. Rep. Joe Walsh, R-Ill., whose confrontational style made him a YouTube sensation and a regular on Fox News, is running behind in his suburban Chicago district.
In Florida, Rep. Allen West, a Republican and former Army lieutenant colonel, moved north of his previous Palm Beach-based district but still faces stiff competition, even as he declines to tone down his rhetoric.
“It’s about two different ideologies going forward. It’s the opportunity society against the dependency society. It’s the constitutional republic against a socialist egalitarian nanny state,” the conservative icon, one of just two black Republicans in Congress, said in an interview in St. Lucie.
Beyond the freshmen, Republican Reps. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Steve King of Iowa are fighting for their political lives. Bachmann’s Quixotic presidential campaign left her open to charges of ignoring her district. King is facing Christie Vilsack, the wife of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a still-popular former governor. She is also focusing on local issues rather than King’s national conservative platform.
“If you’re truly focused on the people of your district, if you’re making it local, you should be concerned about the 750,000 not about the ideology that my opponent is talking about,” Vilsack said in a recent interview.
Democrats believe that such high-profile victories could send a signal that hyper-partisanship is not the route to reelection, giving hope for more bipartisan work in 2013.
“Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right…stuck in the middle with who..?”
“It’s about two different ideologies going forward. It’s the opportunity
society against the dependency society. It’s the constitutional
republic against a socialist egalitarian nanny state,”
If it were true that their goal was a opportunity society we would be seeing some measurable result. Some benefit on main st that proves it. All I see is a massive shift of wealth from the people who actually work kicked up to people who have used their accumulated power to take a massive skim.
They had political power for 8 years so where is this opportunity society they speak of?
You have to hand it to their propaganda machine. They created the current “dependency” needs by putting people who want to work out of work and now they want you to believe that those people are the cause of our economic crisis when in fact they are the result. Place an ad in any paper for a almost any job and you’ll get a thousand applications. People want to work. The ones who are working are killing themselves to keep their jobs. They are already working for less pay and fewer benefits. Productivity is up. It has been going up for decades while compensation has been going down. How incredibly stupid do you have to be to buy their claim of wanting a opportunity society?
What the republican’s want is to be free to use people up and then throw them away like a dirty diaper. I know a lot of the people who are out of work. Some of them are paper makers who used to work for me and gave me 110% each and every day. The CEO who makes 600 times their pay and the shareholders put them out of work. They could have worked for free and it wouldn’t have saved their jobs.
If tax cuts for the rich created jobs or investment than where are they? The Bush tax cuts have been in effect for 10 years. The Lepage tax cuts two, where are the jobs? Where is the investment? The CBO attributes the lackluster growth in the economy and the small job creation we have seen to Obama’s stimulus. Where is the economic activity that the tax cuts were promised to produce? Obama is being attacked on the basis of the poor economic recovery. It’s actually not poor, but where is the results of the tax cuts? The cutting of regulations and a Congress that has turned a blind eye to corruption.
What we know for sure is $25 TRILLION is parked offshore contributing absolutely nothing to the US economy. We know for sure that the tax cuts increased the debt that the republican’s are suddenly concerned about. Germany’s market economy is doing great and able to bail out the EU,produce a export surplus with China, medical care for every citizen, unions, environmental regulation and they have twice the welfare costs as we do. It doesn’t take a genus to see that the only difference is they haven’t given in to the massive skim of the vultures.
I worked in the paper industry in Maine starting as a process engineer and rapidly moving up until I made it to corporate. I loved working in the mill. We were breaking every record for production, quality and safety in spite of weak capital investment. When I got to corporate it was immediately apparent that they had a different agenda. Half the company was tied up in knots trying to fend off hostile takeovers. The other half was trying to profit from them. There were huge pressures to sell out workers for a quick buck. What was once a great company has now been passed around from vulture to vulture, each one taking another chunk of value.
The vultures want you to believe that it is regulation, unions, taxes and globalization that is killing American industry, but it is in fact American vultures like Mr. Romney. The average worker has no idea how much money these guys are making simply by passing companies around and sucking the life out of them.
I have no great love for the democratic party. At one time in history their power came from the unions who were run by the mob. Now that the unions have been diminished the democrats have jumped in bed with the bankers along with the republican’s and the American worker does not stand a chance paying the enormous skim that these guys are taking. The bankers and the vultures make the mob look like a bunch amateurs. Even a brainless parasite knows enough to not kill it’s host.
President Obama has done a great job considering the mess he was left with and the enormous effort made by people who want to see him fail. Republican’s in our own Congress who have demonstrated their desire to destroy him at all costs. They didn’t destroy him. He has produced progress in spite of them. America has beat the performance of Europe and Japan for growth and employment. He has held off another war by restraining Israel.
The deaths at the embassy were tragic. Fox is still going on about it, but how can anyone compare these 4 deaths to the 3,000 that died in 911 and the 6,000 who have died in the wars that Bush and the republican’s delivered?
The republicans will retain power for as long as American’s keep falling for their propaganda and are blind to what they always deliver; war and economic hardship for working people.