The best analysis of the outcome of yesterday's election comes from - of course - Nate Silver, who crunches the numbers on each of the results of the major issues and elections that politicos were following. Be sure to read the analysis, but in short, there's not much we can take away from these results.
In Maine, gay marriage lost out by a narrow margin; in Washington, gay rights look like they'll be affirmed in a strengthened domestic partnership law. Republicans won gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey - but lost a House race that was supposed to be a bellwether on the Obama presidency and Congressional Democrats.
Some folks are rushing to make sweeping conclusions from these races about national trends - Cillizza, for example, notes that independents flocked to the New Jersey and Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidates, but ignores the fact that most of them still approve of, and like, president Obama. Essentially, as Silver demonstrates, most of the results seem to be based on local politics - that's as true for NY-23 as it is NJ-GOV or the outcome for gay marriage in Maine.
But I do think there are some things to look at in these elections. For one, Democratic turnout was low - although not a factor - in Virginia, for one. Also, voters (especially independents) are no longer voting against Republicans - which you could argue they were doing in the Democratic sweeps of 2006 and 2008. Those elections were, in part, a forceful rejection of Republican policies. But now Democrats comprise the incumbent majority in federal government; any ills or unhappiness the electorate experiences will work against them. Still, there's no sign any of yesterday's results was an indication that voters are opting either for the Republican brand, or against the Democratic brand.
Whatever. Even if healthcare reform had gone swimmingly, and we had something bold and real in Congress, I don't think the results would be any different. Maybe there would have been more Democratic turnout, but it probably wouldn't have made much of a difference. But I do think abandoning Democratic principles will pose a real danger to Democratic electoral chances in 2010.
That said, I do think DC-based Democratic strategists are going to look at these races, see scattering independents, and urge their candidates to again tack rightward. This may not affect healthcare reform - though I wouldn't be surprised to see another push to drop the public option, such as it is - but it may be enough to down cap-and-trade, where many of the most conservative Democrats are from coal and oil states. (See Max Baucus' recent statements on cap-and-trade.) That's par for the course for elected politicos, who prefer to act cautiously and minimize risks than to act boldly and fight to win and re-win their seats.
In short Congressional Democrats - as usual? - will do the exact opposite of what they should do.
One way to mitigate this probable rightward shift is threaten primaries in key districts....
I haven't got much today; most of the nation's political class is focusing on key elections across the country, including public referenda on gay rights in Washington and Maine. In Maine, voters are being asked to uphold or deny a law passed in that state's legislature to legalize gay marriage; and in Washington, voters are asked to vote on a bill passed by that state's legislature that grant more legal protections to domestic partners.
As conservative religious groups across the country work to impose their brand of dogma on our legal system and deny basic rights to fellow citizens based on arbitrary, religious-based reasons, I'm reminded of this passage from Simon Schama's "The American Futre":
The implications of the First Amendment have inadvertently, or not, backed America into the great question on which the peace of the whole world, not just the United States, will turn....It's this unavoidable dialogue between faith and freedom, conviction and toleration, that has always been at the heart of American history and which is only crudely characterized as a "church-state separation debate." The unmistakable indifference of the American electorate to evangelical dogmatics in this election year, the clear sense...that evangelical politics has had its day, only comes as a surprise to those beyond America who imagined it would go on and on, eating away at democratic toleration. It's elsewhere in the world that dogma chokes on pluralism - the coexistence of conflicting versions of the best way to redemption - and uses state power to wipe it out. In the United States the Founding Fathers believed instead that religious truth would best be served by keeping the state out of the business of its propagation; that the power of religious engagement would not just survive freedom of conscience but be its noblest consequence. It was a daring bet: that faith and freedom were mutually nourishing. But it paid off and it has made America uniquely qualified to fight the only battle that matters, not General Boykin's quixotic reenactment of the true god against the false idol, but the war of toleration against conformity; the war of a faith that commands obedience against a faith that promises liberty. That, actually turns out to be the big American story.
The irony, then, in the pursuit of barring gays from state-based institutions is that religious groups are working to undermine the very structure of liberty that allowed religion to flourish in the United States.
I'm curious to see exactly how this plays out, but the noises coming from Maine's Republican Senators are encouraging. Not only does Susan Collins make positive noises about the Obama plan (which is strikingly similar to the Baucus plan), but Olympia Snowe specifically says good things about not just a public health insurance option, but that she also thinks we may need single-payer at some point.
The prospect of a Republican Senator openly supporting single-payer is the sort of thing that keeps insurance executives up at night.
The other piece of good news in all of this is that Snowe appears dedicated toward making sure the plan works. This is key. A bad single-payer system is still a bad system. A bad public health insurance option could be a piece of a bad system. The devil will be in the details on this stuff and having more Senators dedicated to hashing out the details in a way that works is crucial. Having one or two Republican Senators more dedicated to good results than ideological fixes and/or moneygrubbing from industry is also very good news. It is a lot harder for Evan Bayh to be to the right of Susan Collins than it is for him to simply walk alongside her.
