The Premature Victory Brigade

Like most political observers, I was shocked by the news last night that Majority Leader Eric Cantor had lost the Republican primary for his Virginia 7th district house seat to David Brat, a complete unkown. It was an extremely unexpected result and immediately resulted in jockeying on Capitol Hill to replace Cantor in the Republican leadership.

There are many others far more well versed in conservative circles and right-wing politics who can explain the dynamics that led to his defeat and what the fallout will be.

What I do want to talk about is the strange way that Democrats are interpreting and overreacting to this, as they typically do to instances of Republican infighting.
Take the following tweets from former Obama aide Jim Messina and Steve Rattner, who worked in the Obama administration on the auto bailout: 

Minority Whip Steny Hoyer said this will allow Democrats to position themselves as the “governing party.” Nancy Pelosi took it a step further, saying that after Cantor’s defeat, “it’s a whole new ballgame” in the midterm elections.

Get a grip. Those statements range from premature to patently ridiculous and make me wonder if some of these folks have been watching too much MSNBC, taking to heart its proclamations of a Republican civil war that will hand the country to the heroic Democrats.

Here’s a reality check: the Republicans are virtually guaranteed to retain control of the House in November and will probably pick up a few seats. They have a three-pronged structural advantage: 1) Gerrymandering has resulted in districts drawn in such a way that favor Republicans. 2) Democratic voters tend to cluster in urban areas anyway, limiting their influence. 3) The Democratic coalition is compromised of voters who are comparatively less likely to vote in non-presidential years. That last reason is partially why Republicans may also take control of the Senate this year.

As for 2016, it’s unclear that a House primary two years prior with just 65,000 voters will play any role. The Republican Party is indeed quite conservative, and the presidential primaries will likely reflect that. But it’s worth nothing that the party has nominated establishment figures in John McCain and Mitt Romney the last two elections. While they did have to move to the right to win the primary, structural factors like the state of the economy and the incumbent president’s approval ratings were the real reasons that Barack Obama prevailed in the general election both times.

While the popularity of Democrats with growing constituencies does give them an edge, it’s premature to say they have a lock on the White House in 2016. Obama’s approval ratings aren’t exactly through the roof and the economy’s growth is slow. Two years is a long time. Overconfidence isn’t warranted.

I so it wish it were different. Any hope for political progress relies on a Democratic wave. The Republicans have ushered in cripplingly low government funding levels under the sequester, ended assistance to the unemployed, foreclosed any possibility of job-creating stimulus or measures to reduce economic inequality, blocked immigration reform, shut the government down, nearly breached the debt ceiling twice, celebrated climate change denialism, and given us phrases like “legitimate rape,” among countless other sins.

That’s a long way of saying that the actual Republican policy agenda is horrible and must be marginalized. But that won’t happen by laughing and pointing at Eric Cantor, just as it didn’t happen when the scorn was directed at John Boehner during the shutdown or when his Plan B failed during the fiscal cliff.

Political success will require Democrats to self-examine. Why isn’t popular support for their policies translating to victory at the polls? Why are some of their voters engaged only once every four years? 

Until that level of organizing, engagement, and mobilization takes place on a huge scale, we’ll be stuck with the status quo. It may produce a few laughs, but it leaves a lot to be desired.