There were a few small elections yesterday and the never circumspect political-analysis industry is all over them today. Even good old Talking Points Memo and its reliably calm Josh Marshall succumbed:
Lot of tea leaves to read this morning and we’re going to be looking at all of them.
As usual, language gives away the game. “Tea leaves” is a common enough phrase, but the underlying assumption is that the configuration of your tea leaves holds some portent of future events. It doesn’t. And neither, for that matter, do last night’s results have much to do with next year’s Congressional elections. There’s one exception to that, but we’ll get to it later. First things first, let’s quickly go over why the twin Red and Blue victories from last night don’t matter all that much.
The Reds won the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia. What gets lost in the constant portrayal of politics as an epic and ever connected team sport between Red and Blue is that individual politicians can and do matter. Jon Corzine lost his bid to stay Governor of New Jersey, and since he’s got a D next to his name it’s easy to begin frothing at the mouth over how this is some kind of a rebuke to Obama (even if the numbers don’t bear that out). But declaring Corzine’s defeat as either “bad for Obama” or “not that bad for Obama” misses the fundamental point that Corzine was an unpopular governor and probably deserved to lose his job anyway. A Corzine win would be no more “good” for Obama than a Corzine loss is “bad” for Obama, either is mostly irrelevant. Does anyone think Obama is in serious jeopardy of losing New Jersey in 2012? No? Then why are we talking about this?
Virginia is a slightly different case because it may very well be competitive in 2012. Obama won it in 2008, the first Democrat to do so in a great long while. But you could take Virginia’s electoral votes away from Obama’s pile and he’d still have plenty left to get back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If this election had been for governor of, say, Ohio there’d be some sense in seeing it as having the potential to influence 2012. But even if that were true it still ignores the fact that political conditions a year ago are very different than they are now, which also means that they’ll be different one and three years hence in ways we cannot accurately predict.
Similarly, the Blue victories in last night’s House special elections aren’t all that important. The fact that there is now a very liberal Democrat representing California’s 10th Congressional district and a centrist Democrat representing New York’s 23rd Congressional district doesn’t much affect the balance of power on Capitol Hill. It makes Nancy Pelosi’s job a little bit easier, and her job is pretty hard so every little bit helps, but in the grand scheme of things it just isn’t that important.
Even in New York’s 23rd district, where the big guns of the right wing failed to secure a Red seat in a Red district, the victorious Democrat Bill Owens didn’t win the seat in perpetuity. He’s only got it until this time next year. Then he’ll have to defend his Blue ass in that Red district. Things like this are why there’s no point getting sucked into the drifts and currents of instant analysis. The next election of any real importance is still a year away and to make these analyses even more pointless the election that everyone wants to talk about (look for the name “Obama” in any story about yesterday) is still three years away.
There is a case to be made that the events of the last week in upstate New York may have some bearing on what happens next year, but only in terms of who is representing the Reds. When the modern day Red Guards drove moderate Republican Dede Scozzafava out of the race with such vitriol that she ended up endorsing the Democrat they made a far bigger political impact than the relatively meaningless subtraction of one Republican from the House. After all, if the right wingers are encouraged by their one-step-forward-two-steps-back campaign in New York, then more non-fringe Republicans may find themselves under assault from the right. The political paparazzi are already training their sights on Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio in Florida.
So far the Red Guards have only cost themselves one measly House seat. (Albeit one that had been handed down like a Republican Party heirloom for 130 consecutive years.) But if they mount Crist’s head on the mantle next to Scozzafava’s they might cost themselves a Senate seat, and those are prizes too valuable to be trifled with. Closeted homosexual or not, Crist is widely considered to be the closest thing to a lock a non-incumbent can be for Florida’s 2010 Senate race. Absent a massive Red wave, which is only probable in the fevered masturbatory fantasies of people like Michael Steele, Rubio is a far weaker general election candidate. But that logic didn’t hold them back in New York and it may not stop them in Florida.
So the one thing we can take away from this year’s elections is that we need to keep a close eye on Republican primaries next year. Most states don’t have a third party with as much local clout as the Conservative Party does in New York, so further challenges are more likely to come from within the existing Red power structure. As for other effects, and what they might portent for 2010 or (drum roll, please) 2012, well, you can read all the tea leaves you want, but you’ll be just as successful with goat entrails, crystal balls or cable news political coverage. Some of those are stickier than others, but they’re all equally meaningful.
