White House wages class warfare on Midterms
President Obama will watch returns from the residence. All but his die-hard political and legislative staff is leaving early the White House early tonight. Vice President Biden will make calls from the Naval Observatory to Democratic candidates nationwide (you know, just in case for 2016) and hope his out-on-a-limb Senate prediction holds up until midnight. Midnight Eastern.
The White House is girding for another depressing midterm election. It's also preparing a class warfare defense voters have not heard before but political scientists have been kicking around for several weeks.
It's not about economic classes. It's about Senate classes. If you check the Constitution (Article One, Section 3, you will discover there are three distinct classes of Senators. No, I don't mean high-class, low-class and no-class. Honestly, those types have always been strewn throughout the Senate. The class in question is tied to the year of the Senate election.
Class 1 was first elected in 1791, Class 2 in 1793 and Class 3 in 1795. Add six-year cycles to keep track of the distinct classes. As it happens, this year is a Class 2 election and the states involved have a much higher propensity to vote GOP than states tied to Senate Class 1 or Class 3. Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball has an excellent breakdown, and so does The Washington Post's Monkey Cage.
Here is the bottom line: In the states holding U.S. Senate elections today the average Democratic presidential performance from 2000 to 2012 is 46.6 percent. In 2012, GOP nominee Mitt Romney won 19 states while Obama won 14. Today, Democrats are defending 20 seats and Republicans 13. In eight of those states - Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia and West Virginia - Democrats hold Senate seats where the average GOP vote for presidential candidates since 2000 has been 50.1 percent or higher.
Obama made a short-hand reference to this phenomenon in an interview on the Colin McEnroe show on WNPR in Hartford, Conn. "In this election cycle, this is probably the worst possible group of states for Democrats since Dwight Eisenhower."
These and other statistics led Patrick Egan, an associate professor of politics and public policy at NYU, to label this election "the most unrepresentative" since World War II.
It's not a line of defense you will hear from Obama, not directly at least. But it has already begun to filter through the rhetorical sieve the White House is already using to strain tonight's expected election gruel.
"The Senate contests that are, understandably, so closely followed, the vast majority of them are actually taking place in states that the President did not win in the last presidential election," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Monday. "So the electorate is different this time than it is in a traditional presidential election. That will be part of the calculation that's made as we consider what sort of conclusion should be appropriately drawn from the election."
Class warfare. On Senate Class II. That will be part of the White House defense of the 2014 midterms.
One quick note about the Eisenhower-era election Obama referred to. It was 1958 and Eisenhower was beset by sagging poll numbers, a deep recession, the Soviet's launch of Sputnik and deep labor turmoil. Republicans in the Senate lost 13 seats and two more Democrats arrived from the newly admitted state of Alaska. Ten Republican incumbents were defeated in the biggest rout of senate incumbents since 1866 , and the biggest wipe out in the era of direct election of senators. That senate class (number 1, as it turns out) brought to Washington some of the best-known Democrats of the next generation: Edmund Muskie of Maine, Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, Philip Hart of Michigan, Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and Robert Byrd of West Virginia.
The senate class situation (class 3 for those keeping count) improves for Democrats in 2016, at least statistically. Republicans will have to defend 24 seats and Democrats only ten. Romney and Obama split those states in 2012. Democrats will not have to defend one state where the average GOP presidential vote exceeded 50.1 percent in the four elections since 2000. Republicans will have to defend seats in six states - Illinois, Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin--where the average Democratic turnout in presidential elections since 2000 exceeded 50.1 percent.
As Obama said a long time ago in a completely different context, elections have consequences. All of them.
