This year saw them break a
seven-year drought in winning any statewide (including Electoral College)
election and now, with sugar plums dancing in their heads, they dare dream of
more. If their behavior stays the same, reality should turn out differently.
Even
they admit it took fortuitous circumstances to have Gov.-elect John Bel Edwards
triumph, and that they could not win anything else – or emerge victorious in grand
total of just four statewide elections out of the last 30 since 2003 – underscores
the large element of chance involved. Some of it they can control, by finding
candidates like Edwards who can pretend conservatism on enough issues and also
like him who can tap into the eroding populist sentiments of the state’s political
culture.
But the crucial necessity that
gives them any chance of victory – so long as they refuse to migrate their issue
preferences from the hard left towards the center – requires
self-destruction from the Republicans. The sole lesson from the recent
governor’s race is that for them to win not only must the GOP’s strongest candidate,
in that contest Sen. David
Vitter, have something like a “serious
sin” in his background, but that this candidate also must have alienated
many Republican elites willing to disown him to the point of cutting off their noses
to spite their faces in allowing a liberal Democrat to win. Generally, you have
a better chance of finding a unicorn than to get such a favorable confluence of
events.
Properly understood, this context aptly
makes Democrats’ thoughts of capturing the Senate seat that Vitter will leave
open next year as fantasy. Not only do they have a structural disadvantage of a
Senate electorate more titled towards GOP candidates than those who vote in
governors’ contests, but also every serious Republican that runs will not have
some kind of serious sin in the background and at the very least party elites
respect, if not like, each of them.
Further, issue preferences aligned
in the favor of Republicans in state contests become absurdly so in federal
ones. On social and spending issues, Edwards could hide behind Louisiana
Democrats, because they effectively have had no state policy-making power for
eight years, in not having to deal with the extreme leftism of national Democrats,
and in state elections foreign policy matters were moot. Any Democrat running
for the Senate cannot avoid linking to and having to answer for the sins of the
national party’s extremist agenda, some of which continues to redound from the
White House.
Republicans should batten down the
hatches for an intense battle to see who survives into the runoff, as several
quality candidates either have announced or have committed to running for the
post. However, it defies reality to think that they would engage in the same
behavior as did the two major Republicans defeated in the gubernatorial general
election that relentlessly criticized on a personal level Vitter and then
refused to support him in the runoff, if not endorse Democrat Edwards (with all
of the big names already jockeying for the Senate job on the GOP side, a lone
Democrat likely would make it into an inevitable runoff). Spirited competition,
as opposed to the destructive one witnessed in the governor’s race, will leave
a quality GOP runoff survivor relatively unscathed and a subsequent easy
winner.
As Louisiana’s electorate continues
to mature from one overly enthralled with politicians’ personalities and a group-based
distributive politics to one whose increased access to information and rising intellectual
sophistication leads to more ideological thinking, Democrat elites’ persistence
in hewing hard left ideologically condemns them to minority party status for
the foreseeable future. Fluke elections don’t change the fact. Instead of
hoping that lightning strikes more than once, moderating their agenda stands a
far better chance of winning meaningful elections more often.
No comments:
Post a Comment