The Misfires of Obama and of the Tea Party

The recent events in Ferguson, placing in the foreground the structural problems afflicting racial minorities in the United States, have largely obscured the international attention directed at the mid-term elections, which will take place this November 4. These elections, in which the 435 seats of the House of Representatives and a third of those in the Senate (33 out of 100) will be contested, are nevertheless going to take on a more and more important place in events during the next ten weeks. At this stage of the political season, two observations are especially pressing.

In the first place, let’s note that conditions seem unfavorable for the Democratic Party, which will no doubt remain in the minority in the House of Representatives, and whose slim majority in the Senate is threatened by the fact that it holds nine of the 12 seats presently on the ballot that are susceptible to a change of party (a clean loss of six seats would put it in the minority). In the same way, although local issues have more importance during mid-term elections than presidential elections, national and international conditions are not favorable to the Democratic Party.

Certainly, with modest but stable growth, and an unemployment rate remaining just above 6 percent since Spring, the economic situation is even better than at the time of Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012. Also, according to a study carried out by the Congressional Budget Office, more than 36 million people will benefit from one or another form of health insurance under the new system (“Obamacare”) by the time of the next elections in 2016, complicating the task of the forces who will plead then for its revocation.

Dissatisfaction

The Obama administration remains nevertheless in the grip of a disapproval rating of over 50 percent, and more particularly with the continual dissatisfaction of two out of three independent voters. The chaotic roll-out of Obamacare at the beginning of the year and the continual criticisms of it, as well as the recent decision by a Washington appeals court that there is an error in the writing of the law, are helping to maintain its unpopularity among half of the American public. In foreign policy, the crises in Gaza, Ukraine and Iraq/Syria have reinforced the image – easily conveyed by the conservative media and more recently by Hillary Clinton in preparing for her 2016 presidential campaign – of a presidency remaining in a reactive mode and easily taken by surprise. These elements are already forcing many Democratic candidates to distance themselves from Obama.

The race for the Senate is still more difficult for the Democrats because of the other major fact of this electoral cycle: the nearly complete failure of the Tea Party to gain victory for its candidates during the Republican primaries, which stands in contrast with the situations in 2010 and 2012. This phenomenon is still more notable insofar as the candidates who claim for themselves the populist conservatism of the Tea Party benefited this year from relatively well-organized financing from political action committees such as the Senate Conservative Fund or FreedomWorks for America.

As opposed to the House of Representatives, where the Republican majority leader Eric Cantor suffered a surprise defeat in June at the hands of a “Tea Partier,” the 2014 electoral cycle remains without fault for the Republican establishment in the Senate directed by Mitch McConnell, himself victorious over his populist opponent in Kentucky’s Republican primaries. Despite certain tighter victories (Pat Roberts in Kansas or Thad Cochran in Mississippi), no outgoing Republican senator was defeated during a primary, a first since 2008 and a surprise for many observers.

Center of Gravity

The Democratic Party thus sees itself deprived of one of the advantages from which it benefited during the last two electoral cycles, when it faced controversial and inexperienced Senate candidates linked to the Tea Party, such as Sharron Angle (Nevada), Christine O’Donnell (Delaware) or Richard Mourdock (Indiana), who had previously defeated, during the primaries, politicians associated with the Republican establishments. These Tea Party candidates had not only guaranteed victories to the Democrats, which otherwise would have been improbable, but also harmed the Republican national campaign by the controversies they caused.

If this failure of the Tea Party indeed testifies to a certain pragmatism in the Repbulican electorate, it also illustrates the continued displacement of the center of gravity of their party toward the right. This is a phenomenon that opinion polls have confirmed during the past several years on the range of issues dear to Republicans, although the importance of moral questions is tending to decline, notwithstanding the media presence of a Sarah Palin. Insofar as the group of Republican candidates have now more or less incorporated the rhetoric of the Tea Party, the “establishment vs. populists” dichotomy is perhaps less pertinent than before.

Long-term, the questions which the Republican Party is facing will remain. The hardening of its anti-state ideology and its continued fixation on the question of illegal immigration risk alienating it for a long time to come from the segments of the electorate with the steadiest growth (notably the Asian and Hispanic minorities), while its own white and older demographic base diminishes from one census to the next. Short-term, nevertheless, the electoral losses of the Tea Party in the present electoral cycle favor the Republican Party, whose electorate remains otherwise more mobilized and, as is generally the case, more likely to participate in the mid-term elections than that of the Democratic Party.

In short, the combined effects of the popular dissatisfaction with Obama’s government and the collapse of the Tea Party could well cause the Democratic Party to lose its majority in the Senate. The Republican control of the two houses of Congress, or even the maintenance of a slim Democratic majority in the Senate, would condemn the end of Obama’s presidency to a political impotence similar to that which afflicted his predecessor George W. Bush during the period from 2006 to 2008.