This year’s US elections are still seven months away, but it is safe to say Democrats are in a state of near panic.
The clearest (recent) evidence for this came last week when the party turned on Nate Silver. Silver is a statistical whiz who originally made his reputation parsing baseball, but later moved on to politics. He vaulted to fame in 2008 by correctly predicting the results of the presidential election in 49 of America’s 50 states. In 2012, he went 50 for 50 and also correctly called all but two senate races.
This endeared Silver to Democrats because in both cases, he correctly forecast comfortable wins for their side at a moment when many Republicans were sure their party could not lose, and more than a few Democrats quietly, if unhappily, agreed.
So there was great consternation among Democrats last week when Silver issued his first forecast for the 2014 midterm elections: No realistic chance of Democrats taking back the House and a 60 per cent chance of Republicans gaining control of the Senate.
Democrats suddenly began acting as though Silver were some sort of traitor: A party loyalist who had thrown in his lot with the other side.
This is strange, since Silver has never, as far as I know, declared a political allegiance. He is a statistician who has become famous by applying math and data analysis to journalism and for his belief that most traditional pundits, because they pay relatively little attention to data, do not really know what they are talking about.
What made the episode interesting was that in saying that the House will stay Republican and the Senate may well be lost to the Democrats, Silver was saying pretty much what all of those non-data-driven pundits for whom he has such obvious contempt have been saying for months. Democrats, some of them at least, appeared to believe not only that Silver wanted to “save” them, but that he had some professional or personal interest in doing so.
There is a name for this: Clutching at straws.
The playing field for this fall’s vote has always favoured the GOP. Republican-dominated state legislatures have redrawn congressional districts in ways that make it unlikely they will lose control of the House for years to come. In the Senate, the calendar simply works against the Democrats. This year, Republicans are defending mostly safe seats while Democrats are defending marginal ones.
The wave of electoral enthusiasm that brought Obama to power in 2008 carried in its wake a handful of new Democratic senators from traditionally Republican states such as Alaska and North Carolina. Those senators must now face voters in a year when Obama is not on the ballot. In several other states, Democrats who have held senate seats for decades as their state moved to the right are now retiring, leaving their party little prospect of holding the seat once the incumbent is no longer there to defend it.
What, then, will the last two years of Obama’s presidency be like if his opponents control both houses of Congress? Probably a lot like the previous six. There will be many bills repealing Barack Obama’s health care law, none of which he will sign. There may be additional government shutdowns and the occasional crisis over the debt ceiling. There will be no hint of compromise.
Between now and November, Republicans will argue that having to deal with a GOP-led Congress will force Obama to negotiate with them. In theory, this may be true. In practice, it is nonsense.
Almost every Republican who will be elected in November will win office promising to oppose Obama in every way, shape and form. In an earlier era, some of these fire-breathers might happily have turned into deal-makers upon arrival in Washington. Our television, internet and social media-saturated age makes that effectively impossible. Few things are more deadly in American politics today than the perception that a congressman or senator says one thing at home and something different in Washington. Anyone foolish enough to do so will not get away with it for long.
That makes compromise, increasingly, a thing of the past. The fact that poll after poll indicates that Americans do not want their government to function this way means nothing. Politicians care about getting reelected and in a country where barely half of those eligible ever bother to vote it is each party’s activist base that selects the candidates and controls the process.
Which brings us back to Nate Silver, the man with whom so many Democrats suddenly seem so bitter and angry.
It is a sign of the country’s cancerous political polarisation that Democrats and Republicans both seek to claim the allegiance of political commentators and data geeks alike. Silver’s sin was trying to bring dispassionate analysis into an arena where — as silly as this may sound — increasingly few people are willing to believe such a thing exists.
Gordon Robison, a longtime Middle East journalist and US political analyst, teaches political science at the University of Vermont.
