The Midterms: GOP’s Target Is Obama

The election is a year away, but insiders are already in overdrive, crafting strategies that will return conservatives to a prominent legislative role. Countering Obama’s left-leaning leadership requires keeping a close eye on two things — unemployment and the budget deficit.

By John Mercurio

One year after the 2008 elections forced them out of power and into a period of self-reflection and doubt, Republicans today face a new, more promising political landscape. But halfway between their biggest rebuke in decades and a midterm election they hope will launch their rebirth, GOP prospects hinge on the fate of a man they’ve underestimated before: President Barack Obama.

Hot races are already gearing up for 35 Senate seats, all 435 House seats and 38 governorships, including those in the country’s four most populous states. To make big gains, however, Republicans will need more than top-tier candidates, strong fundraising, and good luck. They’ll need a weakened president, a demoralized Democratic base and an issues landscape that will be shaped almost entirely by the party in power.

“Every midterm election is, to a great degree, a referendum on the incumbent president, and Obama will be no different in 2010,” said Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia. “This is true even when a president is relatively popular.”

Obama is, of course, still relatively popular. However, his approval ratings have dropped 20 points since Jan. 1 to just 49 percent, according to Rasmussen Reports, and there is growing concern about his administration’s ability to manage top-priority issues such as the economy, energy, and healthcare, while leading an increasingly complex war in Afghanistan and a troop withdrawal from Iraq — all at the same time.

Republicans have suffered devastating drubbings in the past four years that have left them with their smallest minorities in more than 40 years, making it hard to chart a realistic path through which they can regain control of either chamber of Congress. But many campaign strategists now think Republicans are well positioned to make gains in both — if they can build an effective case against President Obama and his Democratic allies.

“People feel like they over-corrected in 2008, and now there’s an imbalance of power in Washington,” said Glen Bolger, a prominent GOP pollster. “They wanted change, but they didn’t want party domination.”

The GOP’s biggest challenge: They’re still less popular than Obama. Much less. And while some GOP strategists recognize the risks of heading into 2010 as the obstructionist “party of no,” they currently hold very few tools with which to do much else. Consequently, they admit, the case they’ll make to voters next year will focus squarely on Democrats.

“President Obama came into office promising to govern in a bipartisan manner and change the ‘business as usual’ in Washington D.C. During the last seventh months, however, he has governed from the far left, seemingly forgetting that America is fundamentally a center-right nation,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, chairman of the National Senatorial Campaign Committee, said recently.

Democrats are standing behind Obama — for now. “I was an early supporter of President Obama, endorsing his candidacy in 2007,” said Rep. Paul Hodes, a two-term Democratic congressman running for Senate in New Hampshire, where Obama won by 9 points. “And I’m proud to support the efforts of this president.”

But many Republicans believe Obama has been weakened sufficiently to become a campaign liability for his party’s 2010 candidates.

“President Obama and the Democrats have made the mistake of short-changing voters on campaign promises and over-interpreting their mandate,” says Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, chairman of the House GOP campaign committee. He’s hurt his party by seceding power to Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and Charlie Rangel.”

The reversal of Democratic fortunes has already been a boon to GOP candidate recruitment — in both House and Senate races. Perhaps the 2010 candidate who best represents the party’s rise and fall, and potential rise again, is a former CIA officer-turned-congressman named Rob Simmons.

Simmons, 66, was elected to Congress in 2000 at the height of the House GOP’s dominance but was thrown out of office in the GOP bloodbath of 2006. “The anti-Bush sentiment, which became the anti-Republican sentiment, was too much for me to handle, so I was sent home,” he said.

Three years later, however, Simmons is now running to oust five-term Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and early polls show the Republican enjoys a double-digit lead in a state Obama carried by 23 points.

“There’s been a dramatic shift,” Simmons maintained. “With the economic difficulties we’re confronting, and the policy approaches we’re discussing, Republican values are re-emerging as the appropriate values for this time. Free enterprise, personal responsibility, and concern about the deficit are now foremost in people’s mind.” Still, Republicans do have reason for concern — especially in the Senate, where they enjoy few real opportunities to erase the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority.

Republicans are defending 18 of the 35 Senate seats up in 2010, including at least six open seats created by GOP retirements. Both parties have recruited strong candidates to run in four of those open seats — the battleground states of Missouri, Ohio, New Hampshire, and Florida. And Democratic bids for two other GOP-held seats, in Louisiana and Kentucky, could be competitive. Even more troubling for Republicans: Of the 12 GOP senators seeking re-election, six narrowly won in 2004.

Meanwhile, none of the 17 Senate Democrats up next year has announced plans to retire, and every Democrat who won in 2004 did so with relative ease.

Still, Republicans are confident they can defeat Dodd and, quite possibly, Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln. They’re also bullish on picking up Obama’s old Senate seat in Illinois, where Democrats are still reeling from the Blagojevich scandal.

One of the top 2010 Senate contests is already under way in the bellwether state of Missouri, where Sen. Kit Bond is retiring and early polls show Democratic Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, the daughter of the late Democratic Gov. Mel Carnahan, leads Republican Rep. Roy Blunt in the race to succeed Bond.

Carnahan, 48, an attorney who still manages her family’s cattle farm in rural Rolla, is benefitting in part from voters’ lingering disdain for Washington, where Blunt has served in Congress for 13 years and his wife, Abigail Pearlman, is a well-connected lobbyist. “[This race boils down to] a question of whether you have a record of standing up for regular Missourians or a record of standing up for the lobbyists and special interests,” Carnahan said recently. “I’m not particularly surprised Republicans are following a guy who’s been in the leadership for 10 years in Washington, D.C. and got us in the mess we’re in right now.”

Carnahan’s talking points come straight from the Democrats’ playbook.

“We know that we have our work cut out for us. [But] I am relieved every time Republicans wash their hands of any responsibility toward getting our economy back on track,” Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said. “It is this strategy that explains why the country is in such an economic mess in the first place.

“Republicans are betting against the president, the Congress, and the economy. They want failure.”

Republican leaders acknowledge that their political strategy this year has focused primarily on blocking Democratic bills, not offering their own policy solutions. But, they say, they have had little choice, given the small numbers of seats they currently occupy. And, they add, that strategy just might work.

“We’ve been labeled as the ‘party of no,’” Cornyn said.

“[But] ironically, this could actually benefit us as the elections approach next year, especially as the American public continues to lose faith in the Democrat priorities and voters begin to realize the importance of electing more Senate Republicans.”

Joked Bolger, “One thing we have going for us, frankly, is that we’re out of power.”

However, some leading GOP thinkers warn that such a strategy is shortsighted and could backfire. “This year is going to be defined by Republicans and conservatives by what we oppose. But we’re going to be defined going into the 2012 presidential election by who we are and what we’re for,” ex-Bush adviser Karl Rove said during a fundraiser for Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah. “Conservatives have to have thoughtful ideas about who we are and what we’ll do.”

Ultimately, of course, Republicans have set their sights on defeating Obama in 2012. Until then, however, they’ll try to push an argument  that they rejected when they controlled all the levers of power: government functions better with checks and balances.

“During the 1990s, a Democrat president and a GOP-controlled Congress were able to work together to rein in government spending and leave a balanced budget,” Cornyn said.

“Returning two-party rule to Washington has been an effective argument in many past elections, and I expect that next year should be no different.”

For their part, Democrats are still relying on the GOP bogeyman whose low approval ratings fueled their drive to take back Congress in 2006 and the White House two years later.

“Our country is still feeling the effects of eight years of mismanagement under former President George W. Bush, so one challenge Democrats have had is reminding the American people why we’re in this mess in the first place — because of George W. Bush and congressional Republican’s irresponsibility,” Menendez said.

“The good news is voters are smart and they know this,” he added. 

In the House, the parties face an entirely different landscape, shaped by recent Democratic gains that are as huge as they are fragile.

House Democrats have picked up 54 seats since 2006, many of them in traditionally Republican regions such as the Deep South and Mountain West, and they now enjoy a 39-seat majority. However, roughly 40 of those Democrats are considered vulnerable in 2010.

Adding to their headaches next year is history. Only twice since Abraham Lincoln was elected president has the party that takes over the White House gained House seats in the next midterm election. (The two exceptions were 1934, when Democrats were so pleased with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s efforts to end the Great Depression that they widened his majority in Congress, and 2002, when Republicans were buoyed by strong post-Sept. 11 support for Bush.)

With that in mind, Democratic leaders are trying to lower expectations for additional gains next year.

“We’ve tried to bludgeon that history into our members to make sure they are very focused on this. We’ve been warning them since day one about the price of complacency,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a recent interview. “This cycle, historically speaking, will be very challenging. Our ultimate challenge is to beat history.” At this point, however, experts predict House Democrats are more likely to repeat history than to beat it. Top political analyst Charlie Cook wrote in August that “the situation this summer has slipped completely out of control for President Obama and congressional Democrats.

“Many veteran congressional election watchers, including Democratic ones, report an eerie sense of déjà vu, with a consensus forming that the chances of Democratic losses going higher than 20 seats is just as good as the chances of Democratic losses going lower than 20 seats.”

Sabato, the UVA political science professor, is even more bullish on GOP gains in the House. “It now appears that Republicans will make above-average gains in the U.S. House of at least plus-23 seats,” he tweeted recently, noting that the average shift for first midterm elections is 17 House seats.

In a guest column on Sabato’s Web site, Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University, described a “worst-case scenario” for Democrats, who, if Obama’s approval rating sinks into the low 40s next year, could lose 41 House seats and, possibly, control of the speaker’s gavel.

On the other hand, if Obama’s approval rating rebounds into the mid-60s, the GOP would be expected to lose one seat in the Senate and gain only 15 seats in the House. Based on the current landscape, he predicts Republicans will gain one Senate seat and 23 House seats.

But while some sanguine Republicans eyeing a repeat of the 1994 “revolution” that swept them back into the speaker’s chair after 40 years, there are still big differences between that election and 2010. Of the 31 open House seats Democrats were defending 16 years ago, Republicans picked up 23 of them — about 40 percent of the GOP’s total pickups that year.

Only seven House Democrats to date have announced they’re not running for re-election — with all but three of them representing safe Democratic districts.

Despite a tumultuous year, House Democrats say the Obama record has strengthened their prospects heading into next fall. “You may be surprised to hear this, but I think the past seven months have helped,” Van Hollen said. The most important issue in 2010 will be the economy, he said, and while the country’s economic climate is still dire, the situation has improved dramatically over the past eight months.

“That’s due to a number of factors, but a big part of it was the economic stimulus plan, and Republicans made a big mistake in aligning themselves against the bill,” he said. “These guys were rooting for failure,” he added. “It’s very cynical to campaign on the ‘bad news for America is good news for Republicans,’ but that’s what they did. They’ve become the great champions of the status quo.”

But Republicans are crafting a response that seeks to target voter anxiety about growing federal budget deficits and Wall Street bailouts that many believe haven’t ended the recession or Main Street’s troubles. “People have a right to be angry,” said Blunt, the seven-term congressman from southwestern Missouri and the state’s likely GOP Senate nominee. “The government has rewarded those on Wall Street and elsewhere who helped create this crisis, while those of us who played by the rules are left to pick up the pieces and pay the bills. There’s been a clear lack of responsibility and accountability and that hasn’t changed.”

Sessions, the House GOP campaign chairman, was even more blunt than, well, Blunt: “Someone has to stop this reckless agenda in Washington before our children and grandchildren are forced to pay the price for these mistakes. Republican candidates throughout the country are offering that fresh alternative.”

Sessions said the two economic indicators that will most heavily influence the midterms are unemployment and the federal budget deficit. Asked what his most effective argument against Democrats is, he said simply, “Where are the jobs?”

Meanwhile, the gubernatorial landscape of 2010 is playing out against a backdrop of soaring state budget deficits and growing anti-incumbent sentiment that has prompted many governors to call it quits. Of the 36 gubernatorial races on tap next year, at least 22 are open-seat races. More than 20 seats are up for grabs, including the country’s four most populous states and others where incumbents opted to forgo re-election bids. Also, Democrats are struggling to defend two governors’ seats on the ballot this fall in states Obama carried last year: New Jersey and Virginia.

Currently, Democrats control 28 governors’ offices; Republicans hold 22.

Both parties are closely monitoring these races, which will have a big impact on congressional redistricting and the 2012 race for the White House. The election could, after all, introduce the country to its next president (Obama was elected to the Senate only four years before he ran for the White House); vice president (Sarah Palin was elected governor of Alaska in 2006, two years before she was nominated to run for vice president); or another prominent voice on the national stage.

The gubernatorial races already feature some familiar names and prominent headlines. In California, for example, Democrats will choose between two well-known candidates (former Gov. Jerry Brown and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom) in the race to succeed their celebrity governor, Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. Nearly two years after New York Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned after having sex with a prostitute, his successor, David Paterson, also a Democrat, is struggling to fend off a primary challenge from one of the most famous names in American politics: state Democratic Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. For their part, Republicans are urging former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani to run for governor. Illinois Democrats are in disarray following Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s impeachment, but they appear to be unifying behind his successor, Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn. And in Texas, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison is resigning to challenge incumbent Gov. Rick Perry in what promises to be a knock-down, drag-out blockbuster fight for the GOP nomination.

One year after Democrats rode a wave of anti-Republican sentiment into power, one thing is clear: Voters now hold Obama and his party accountable for the direction of the country. From their perch in the wilderness, that reality isn’t lost on Republicans.

“The time for their finger-pointing and excuse-making is over,” said Cornyn, the Senate GOP campaign chairman. “They can and will be held responsible for whatever happens in Washington these next 12 months.”

Cornyn is right about at least one thing: The next year of Obama’s presidency is a crucial period for his party. If all goes well, Democrats could build a durable power base. If it does not, they could be cast aside by a minority party whose return to power could spell big trouble for Obama as he gears up for his own re-election battle in 2012.

As originally published in Newsmax magazine.