An Electoral Earthquake in the Offing: Its Historical Context

by Paul A. Rahe

Scott Rasmussen now predicts that the Republicans will pick up fifty-five seats in the House. Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia still has the pick-up at forty-seven but says that, if forced to tweak the numbers right now, he would increase his estimate of Republican gains by single digits – which is to say, he agrees with Rasmussen.

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There are pollsters out there who are playing games, as a glance at the polls for the Senate race in West Virginia should make clear – and, of course, it is easy to play games. If one wants to encourage the Left and discourage potential Republican voters and donors, all that one has to do is to base one’s poll on the presumption that the percentage of self-described Democrats within the voting public in 2010 will be equal to the percentage in 2008.

Sabato and his associates and Rasmussen are not, however, among the gamesters. Both are aiming at accuracy. Sabato and company have a reputation to uphold (and, in the academic world, that is all-important), and Rasmussen is a nonpartisan pollster who attracts clients by way of demonstrated precision. Neither outfit can afford to make a fool of itself.

I nonetheless think that both are greatly underestimating the size of the Republican surge. Both have reason to be cautious. For understandable reasons, neither is going to climb out on a limb; and both are basing their estimates on recent electoral history. If something is in the offing that exceeds the range of political oscillation in recent decades (including, notably, 1994), if we in American live in something other than normal times, they will miss the size of the surge.

It is good to remember that not a single Sovietologist predicted the collapse and dismemberment of the Soviet regime. History has a way of lulling us into sleep. What has been in recent times we tend to think will be in the foreseeable future. Then, every once in a while, suddenly, out of nowhere, a political earthquake arrives – and only in the aftermath do the experts notice that there were ample warning signs.

Here are warning signs that nothing in recent experience has prepared the experts to assess adequately.

First, there is the Tea-Party Movement. It is like nothing that I have witnessed in my lifetime – a spontaneous outpouring provoked by a single remark made by Rick Santelli on CNBC on 19 February 2009. Two months later, on 16 April – the day Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift was released – I was in Washington, DC for a book launch at the Heritage Foundation. On that day, to my amazement, there were major demonstrations in our nation’s capital and lesser demonstrations all over the country. It was, I argued in a series of radio interviews that day, a phenomenon that no one understood better than Alexis de Tocqueville. On his visit to the United States in the early 1830s, as I had explained in my book, he had witnessed a movement that had grown up spontaneously in the late 1820s outside the two political parties then emerging – which had forced them to repeal the so-called Tariff of Abominations passed in 1828.

Tocqueville’s point was that the Americans had mastered an art that the French knew nothing of – “the art of association” – and he contended that this art and the sense of civic agency attendant on it insulated them to some degree against the danger that he dubbed “soft despotism”: the very danger posed by the programs proposed and partially adopted under the New Deal, the Great Society, and Obama’s ominously named New Foundation. What we were seeing, I contended, was a rejuvenation of the American spirit. And, ironically, hardly any of the Republicans in the opposition saw this as an opportunity. The regulars feared the Tea-Party Movement even more than did the Democrats. Almost no one recognized its significance.

That this was the case was doubly evident in August, 2009 – when Senators and Congressmen, persuaded that the Democratic Party was still on a roll, held town meetings all over the country and were shouted down by well-dressed attendees who were no less angry about the prospect of Obamacare than Rick Santelli had been on 19 February about the so-called “stimulus” bill. On 2 August, I posted a piece entitled The First Step Forward, suggesting that, if the opposition to Obama were to revive the rhetoric deployed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt against the Republicans in the mid-1930s, a political realignment might be in the offing. Six days later, in a post entitled The Great Awakening, I explained what I had in mind in further detail:

Now, as citizens flock to town meetings all over the country to confront their Senators and Congressmen, we can see the consequences. And the White House and the Democratic Party have responded to the spontaneous organization of opposition to their endeavors in a manner that is reminiscent of the governments in Tocqueville’s France – by insulting their fellow citizens, by charging them with conspiracy, by locking citizens out of putatively public meetings, by bringing in union toughs to intimidate the opposition, and by illegally collecting the names and contact information of those who have exercised their First Amendment rights in a manner unfriendly to the proposals advanced by the current administration – apparently with an eye to future retribution.

We should be grateful to Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Rahm Emanuel. For, in their audacity, they have done what their predecessors feared to do; and, in the process, they have made the tyrannical propensities inherent within the progressive impulse visible to anyone who cares to take notice. What Franklin Delano Roosevelt falsely charged in 1936 is visibly true today. “A small group” is intent on concentrating “into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives.”

The only question is whether the Republicans have the wit to take full advantage of the opportunity that Barack Obama has handed them.

Next to no one paid any attention to what I said at this time. To my shock and dismay, the political pundits who gathered in early September, 2009 at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association thought it plausible to analyze President Obama’s first few months in office without making any mention of the Tea-Party at all.

To their credit, however, after some hesitation and hand-wringing, the Republicans did grasp the nettle. In November, 2009 – a mere year after the landslide that had given the Democrats control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency – Bob McDonnell was elected Governor of Virginia and Chris Christie, Governor of New Jersey, and neither race was a squeaker. This was for the Republicans a wake-up call, and next to no one missed the significance of the trend in mid-January, 2010 when Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts and did so handily.

The polling data began to suggest that the Democrats were increasingly vulnerable, and, in time, there came to be other straws in the wind. Republican incumbents who seemed the least bit soft came under attack. In May, Democratic Congressman Alan B. Mollohan – who, together with his father, had occupied a congressional seat for forty-two years – was ousted in a primary in West Virginia. In late August, Joe Miller and, in mid-September, Christine O’Donnell came out of nowhere to knock off Lisa Murkowski and Mike Castle in Republican Senatorial primaries in Alaska and Delaware.

To sum up, in the last twelve months, we have had surprise after surprise – the emergence of the Tea-Party Movement, the confrontations at the town-hall meetings, the gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, the election of Scott Brown, the defeat of Mollohan in West Virginia, the purge of a number of putative RINOs in the course of the Republican selection process, and the nomination by the Republican Party of a host of Tea-Party candidates. As isolated incidents, these events might be dismissed. Taken together, they portend an electoral upheaval without recent precedent.

Finally, we have the polling data. As Jay Cost has recently observed, the quite considerable disparity in that data turns on a crucial question: “the partisan composition of the electorate remains the critical unresolved issue of this cycle. Every pollster is making a guess as to what the electorate will look like, and these guesses are at least as important as their final numbers.” In fact, one might add, these guesses determine their final numbers.

Where do we turn for guidance? I would suggest that we look at the grand-daddy of all the polls: the generic ballot data that the Gallup Organization has been collecting for almost sixty years. If one assumes a turn-out on 2 November of about forty percent of the registered voters, a percentage ever so slightly higher than the record in midterm elections since 1974, Gallup tells us that the Republicans will have an advantage over the Democrats of something along the lines of seventeen percent. If the turnout of registered voters reaches fifty-five percent, the Republicans will be ahead by about eleven percent.

What does this mean? There can be no doubt that Republicans will turn out this year in record numbers. That is revealed by every poll that bothers to ask. It is by no means clear that the Democrats will turn out. Many are disaffected. Even more are indifferent. If the Democrats do turn out in good numbers, the overall turn-out will exceed forty percent. Will turn-out reach fifty-five percent? There is no reason whatsoever to think so.

What this suggests is that the Republican advantage will exceed eleven and may well exceed fifteen percent. Even if their advantage turns out to be as low as Rasmussen’s current estimate of nine percent, this is unprecedented, and the Republic victory will be larger than Rasmussen and Sabato forecast.

Let me suggest a simple rule of thumb. Lou Cannon once observed that, in assessing Ronald Reagan’s prospects, the polls were always wrong. In every race, he received roughly five percent more than the polls forecasted. I think that something of the sort will turn out to be true this year. Take the most accurate of the polls – those of Scott Rasmussen; then, give the Republican candidate an additional five percent.

I predict that the Republicans will take between seventy and one hundred seats in the House and that they will take control of the Senate by sweeping at least five of the so-called “toss-up” races, taking Senate seats in California, Washington, Nevada, Colorado, West Virginia, and, if the dead and the as-yet unborn do not turn out in numbers too large, perhaps even Illinois. Moreover, I predict that – if the Republican leadership eschews earmarks, sticks firmly to the principles announced in the Declaration of Independence and embedded in the Constitution, and insists on a repeal of Obamacare, on there being no new taxes, and on serious budget cuts – there will be additional good news for them in 2012, especially, in the Senate. This country is in for a rough ride, but it may well emerge stronger than ever.


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Posted Oct 20th 2010 at 4:37 am in Congress, Earmarks, Featured Story, Federal Spending, Healthcare, History, Midterm Elections, News, Obama, Politics, Tea Party, taxes | 122 Comments