A bad omen in Illinois

John Fund:

Karen Hanretty, the spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, had a terse response to the startling loss of former Speaker Dennis Hastert's seat in a special election in Illinois on Saturday.

"The one thing 2008 has shown is that one election in one state does not prove a trend," she noted. Fair enough. Indeed in June, 2006, Republicans retained a California seat in a high-profile special election, but that had no predictive value given that Democrats stomped their way to control of Congress a few months later.

But special elections in highly visible seats do have a psychological effect on parties. Not only can they boost or depress morale, but they can affect how political contributions flow in the months leading up to the general election.

That should worry Republicans because history does show that some special elections have captured a growing mood against the party that controls the White House. In early 1974, Republicans lost the Michigan seat vacated by Gerald Ford when he was appointed vice president by Richard Nixon, a clear sign that Watergate was weighing heavily on GOP political fortunes. Twenty years later, Democrats anxiously realized that the Clinton administration was a liability to them in the middle of the debate over Hillary Clinton's health care plan after they lost a Kentucky special election. Republican Ron Lewis was able to win an historically Democratic district in part by running an ad showing Democratic candidate Joe Prather morphing into an image of Bill Clinton. The next fall, Democrats were swept out of Congress.

It's unclear what the significance of the GOP's loss in Mr. Hastert's seat is, but the news is not good. Mr. Hastert had won election ten times from the district on the outer fringes of the Chicago metro area, which also includes the birthplace of Ronald Reagan. It is a normally Republican seat, giving George W. Bush 55% of the vote in 2004.

But Democratic physicist Bill Foster, a political neophyte, was able to win 53% of the vote to seize the seat from Republican dairy owner Jim Oberweis. The two candidates will face each other again in the fall, but Mr. Foster's incumbency will make him the favorite in the rematch.

...

In 1961 John Tower won the seat Lyndon Johnson gave up to become Vice President. Is was not an omen for coming elections, but Tower remained in office until 1985 and was the first of many Republicans in Texas to hold statewide offices that are now all held by Republicans.

In 1994 a Republican also knocked off the then leader of the Democrat House. But the 2004 race that saw Tom Dachle, the Democrat leader of the Senate, lose was not an omen for the 2006 election.

The Republicans would have been better off if Hastert had stayed in office.

Bill Kristol talks about the Hastert seat in his story about McCain's daunting task. I should remind folks that Tower's election did not lead to a Republican victory in 1964, but a landslide for Democrat Lyndon Johnson. It is time for us to keep this all in perspective.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains

James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Read more