Op-Ed
The Heartbeat Continues
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Between the Lines
November 9, 2006 - 1:00amDemocrats, reasonably enough, are euphoric about last Tuesday’s election. They have comfortably taken the House and probably will have a one-seat margin in the Senate. They have also won several gubernatorial races. Many people are rushing to spin the results as showing one thing or another. We should be wary of these attempts. The Republicans have been defeated, but by no means devastated. The election results were caused primarily by ethics and Republican institutional weakness in the Northeast, more than by true ideological shift in the country.
Many Democrats, notably including Rep. Murtha (D-Penn.), have declared that the election is a repudiation of the Iraq war, and that the United States must now withdraw from Iraq, posthaste. This view is unwarranted. The results certainly show that the public is unhappy with the Iraq war, but they do not show that the public has decisively settled on withdrawal as the remedy. Most Democratic challengers, after all, quite carefully did not specify what their policy on Iraq would be, preferring to merely condemn their opponents or the president for incompetence. The Republican gain of 47 seats in 1942 was not a repudiation of the Second World War. This year’s election results are not a reason to abandon the war, but rather to fight it more effectively.
This election was emphatically not a rejection of conservatism as such. Michigan voters passed a ban on affirmative action despite opposition from both parties; many states passed bans on gay marriage. Many of the defeated Republicans were quite centrist; many of the victorious Democrats were quite conservative. Jim Webb, the presumptive new Democratic senator from Virginia, was a right-leaning Republican until he decided to run this year. As a result of the 2006 election, the Democratic party will move to the right, and this is a good thing both for the Democrats and the country.
The main cause of Republican defeat, was not ideology, but ethics. Too many Republican congressmen were seen as crooked or personally unethical, and this weighed heavily on the electorate. Exit polling suggests that corruption was a major issue, much more important to voters than had been recognized before the election. A large fraction of the Republican seats that changed hands were previously held by scandal-plagued incumbents such as DeLay, Ney and Foley. Republican corruption is unfortunate, but it is by no means surprising. Legislators who have been in power too long often make morally questionable decisions in order to stay in power, such as taking bribes or covering up scandals. Moreover, our Congress, perhaps more than any other legislature in the world, allows individual members to direct vast sums of money to pet projects with minimal oversight. As a result, parties that stay in power get corrupt, and eventually the country becomes sufficiently fed up that Congress changes hands.
This cycle of corruption is the chief cause of the “Six-year itch”, and of Republican losses this year. The President’s party typically loses seats in the sixth year of his term. So strong is this trend that it has been described as the “heartbeat of American politics”. Over the last 75 years, the opposition party has typically picked up 30-odd house seats, and 8 senators. This is right in line with Republican losses this year of 30 or so seats in the House, and 5-6 in the Senate. Losing nearly three dozen seats is a serious loss for Republicans, yet it is not a catastrophe. The party, of course, will survive. Many of the decisive races were quite close, and those seats will likely be contested again in 2008.
While the Republican party nationally is in decent health, there is serious regional weakness. New England and eastern New York elected only a single Republican to Congress, Connecticut’s Chris Shays. This is not because Republicans cannot win in the Northeast: Vermont and Connecticut returned Republican governors, and New Hampshire and Maine have two Republican senators. Massachusetts and New York have had Republican governors for the past decade. However, below the top of the ballot, the Republicans are eroding badly in the Northeast. In New York, Republicans were unable to mount serious challenges in any statewide races; Clinton, Spitzer, Cuomo and Hevesi won essentially by default.
This reversion to regional one-party rule is not a good thing. Howard Dean is absolutely right that the Democrats ought to be a 50 state party. By the same token, the Republicans ought to be one as well. Republicans in the North will not win by acting like Southern conservatives, but neither will they win by being Northern liberals. Given a choice between a liberal Republican and a liberal Democrat, there is no reason for voters to prefer the imitation to the real thing. As successful Northern Republicans such as Rudi Giuliani and Senator D’Amato have shown, the GOP can be competitive in the North, if it speaks with a northern voice. It will be the task of Republicans in the coming years to find that voice again. The public is done a disservice by not having a real choice in every election.
Nationally, voters certainly had a choice this time. Many good candidates of both parties were elected; many bad candidates, and a few good ones, were rejected. With the White House still in Republican hands and a strong Republican presence in the Senate, the Democrats are going to need real bipartisan support to pass legislation. It will be instructive to see just how willing they are to put aside ideology and get things done. The next few years are going to be interesting. Buckle your seat belts, and hold on tight.
Ari Rabkin is a graduate student in Computer Science. He can be contacted at asr32@cornell.edu. Between the Lines appears Thursdays.