Article From Politico.Com
Voters Tuesday tore apart the complex map of America President Barack Obama proudly displayed after his 2008 victory, driving Democrats from office in rural areas, the suburbs and virtually the entire South — and unseating a generation of powerful Democratic centrists.
Republicans took the House of Representatives in a convincing rejection of Obama’s policies and reordered the political map that delivered the presidency to him. They would have taken the Senate but for their own internal divisions and weak candidates in key states. Their partisan victory was indiscriminate: Democrats who ran away from Obama and the House leadership, like New York's Mike McMahon and Georgia's Jim Marshall, lost; so did the Democrats, like Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold and New York’s Scott Murphy, who embraced Obama and defended his health care plan. The party’s young stars, led by Virginia’s Tom Perriello, lost their seats; so did old bulls like Ike Skelton and John Spratt.
The Republican victory drove Democrats back past 2008 and even beyond the anti-Bush wave of 2006, returning to the polarizing red and blue map that defined President Bush’s hard-fought re-election campaign against Senator John Kerry. The new GOP majority is expected to hobble the president’s legislative agenda and bleed his administration with subpoenas and investigations. And the 2010 results will haunt his reelection campaign, as Republican governors appear likely to retake control of the crucial battlegrounds of Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania.
Obama now faces a stark, and immediate, choice between a novel effort to rebuild the 2008 coalition and an acceptance of the divisive political scene that he sought to move beyond. His Democratic allies Wednesday were torn between an impulse to seek common ground with the vital new Republican Party and a deep belief that GOP legislators have little interest in compromise. There were signs that the new Republicans were also pulled in both directions, with one new senator, Florida’s Marco Rubio, striking a tone of humility and conciliation, while another, Indiana’s Dan Coats, promising “firm opposition” to the “Obama regime.”
The Democrats’ defeat Tuesday night was broad, but shaped along three specific lines:
RE-REALIGNED
Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia – the unlikeliest of states that Obama won – all reverted to Republican form and ousted House Democratic incumbents. And the GOP won control of the state House in both Indiana and North Carolina while easily winning U.S. Senate races.
Most of the traditional battleground states that the president so easily carried two years ago – places like Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania– elected Republican governors and senators while also sweeping out House Democrats.
RURAL CARNAGE
In a bloodbath of a night for Democrats, the most gruesome returns came in from rural America. They lost the overwhelming number of gubernatorial and Senate races in the South, Midwest and interior West. Even more striking, House Democrats lost seats in every one of the 11 states of the old Confederacy.
Across the countryside, pillars of the House such as South Carolina’s Spratt, the Budget Committee chairman, Minnesota’s Jim Oberstar, the Transportation committee chairman, and Missouri’s Skelton, the Armed Services Committee chairman, went down along with long-serving political survivors such as Allen Boyd (Fla.), Gene Taylor (Miss.), Earl Pomeroy (N.D.) and Chet Edwards (Tex.). So did more junior members such as Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (S.D.), Harry Teague (N.M.), and Ohioans Charlie Wilson and Zack Space. The decades-long march toward the GOP among rural and small town voters – interrupted and even reversed in 2006 and 2008 – has resumed.
THE BURBS
Perhaps even more ominous, Democrats suffered extensive losses in the suburbs. Districts clustered around cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, Orlando, Cincinnati, Columbus, Las Vegas and Phoenix swung back to the GOP after going Democratic over the past two election cycles. And Republican candidates for governor and senator built their wins in many of these same counties. No region was immune to Republican gains. They won back New Hampshire’s two House seats and both chambers of its state legislature, two Wisconsin House seats and its Assembly and Senate and at least one House seat in Washington state.
“We took some knocks everywhere today,” said former Democratic National Committee Chairman Don Fowler.
REDISTRICTING
Beyond the GOP's demographic resurgence, the most devastating part of Tuesday's results for Democrats may have been the impact it will have on redistricting. Republicans not only won the governorships in such large states such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin - but they also took complete control of the state legislature in each of those Rust Belt behemoths.
No comments:
Post a Comment