EJ Dionne has a column suggesting that Biden has taken a long look at Clinton and Obama's presidencies and how they were crushed in the ensuing midterms. In both cases, the argument goes, a sluggish economy led to punishment at the polls.
I've wondered if that's true.
Clinton was presiding over the beginnings of the '90s boom, but it had largely failed to sink in with people. He failed to reform health care, because his plan was successfully labeled as a government take over of doctors. (It wasn't.) He also embraced certain cultural positions on gays in the military that pushed him into looking like a Big Government/Cultural Liberal. As a result, Democrats got hammered in the South and rural areas. Long time incumbents fell by the wayside as the white rural voters abandoned the Democratic party. If you look at the map from 1994, it is almost unrecognizable. West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, the Upper Plains and much of Texas is Blue and the Northeast and California are unexpectedly Red.
By the time Clinton leaves office in 2000, the West Coast is Blue, but there are still many Blue seats in the South. As late as 2008, Earl Pomeroy and Stephanie Sandlin are representing the Dakotas for Democrats. The 2010 bloodbath was the movement of rural white voters away from the Democrats. The 2018 election was the movement of the suburbs towards the Democrats.
Were these movements all about economics? Or more likely was the cultural sorting that is currently dividing the country? And most importantly, will Trump voters (as opposed to Republican voters) stay home without him on the ballot (as they did in 2018)?
I'm all for taking as big a bite of the apple as possible. Republicans will likely win the House in 2022. But just as likely, some of the seats in Iowa, New Mexico and California that Republicans picked up might shift back to Democrats.
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