{"id":2796,"date":"2010-07-13T14:54:27","date_gmt":"2010-07-13T19:54:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/?p=2796"},"modified":"2010-07-13T14:58:20","modified_gmt":"2010-07-13T19:58:20","slug":"should-dems-throw-in-the-towel-for-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/2010\/07\/13\/should-dems-throw-in-the-towel-for-2010\/","title":{"rendered":"Should Dems Throw in the Towel for 2010?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Gibbs says<\/a> the House is up for grabs in 2010.\u00a0\u00a0 My political analysis — duh!!!\u00a0 A dismally weak economy coupled with the typical coattail effect for Obama in the 2008 election that brought in a whole set of members that had no business winning their races (Democrats representing both of the Dakotas?) is a recipe for big losses.\u00a0 Jonathan Chait has a nice summation<\/a> of the effect of midterms on the party in power.\u00a0 He links to this chart from Seth Masket<\/a> that highlights the relationship (albeit weak) between economic strength and midterm losses for the president’s party.\n<\/p>\n

\"\"\/p><\/p>\n

It makes sense.\u00a0 Republicans are all ginned up = Obama’s a Nazi or a Socialist.\u00a0 Democrats are dispirited = No we cant?!?\u00a0 Turnout will drive the election and based on my empirical analysis of catching Fox News on the TV screen at my gym, Republican leaning voters will be primed.\u00a0 In my 30 minute treadmill run, I learned that “Moslims” are taking over the World Trade Center site, “Felons” stole the Minnesota Senate election for Al Franken and Iranian nuclear engineers are milling around Washington, DC.\u00a0 It all makes me want to run to the next Tea Party meeting!<\/p>\n

So what’s the right midterm strategy for the Democrats?\u00a0 I wonder why the Democrats haven’t decided to push back in terms of turnout.\u00a0 Why not recognize you’re going to get shellacked in 2010 and lay the groundwork for future elections.\u00a0 One key way to do this would be to push hard for immigration reform.\u00a0 Put it on the agenda.\u00a0 Force the Republicans to take positions that will be hard to explain to their Latino constituents.\u00a0 Instead of taking the centrist high ground, why not “go Rove” and work to build a progressive base.\u00a0 It seems that the Democrats in power are too busy pursuing centrists who are largely disengaged and are not planning to turn out for this election.\u00a0 You be better served by growing a progressive base that might help buffer against big midterm losses in future elections, even if it costs you a few seats this time around.<\/p>\n

My 2 cents \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Gibbs says the House is up for grabs in 2010.\u00a0\u00a0 My political analysis — duh!!!\u00a0 A dismally weak economy coupled with the typical coattail effect for Obama in the 2008 election that brought in a whole set of members that had no business winning their races (Democrats representing both of the Dakotas?) is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/129"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2796"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2800,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2796\/revisions\/2800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}