The John Locke Foundation’s 80-minute dissection of the latest election results offered some good news and bad news for conservatives.
I’ll be able to offer just a flavor of the discussion.
Founding JLF president and current GOP strategist Marc Rotterman called the Nov. 7 results a loss for Republicans — not a loss for conservatives. Rotterman lays much of the credit at the feet of the neoconservatives who played the lead role in pushing for the Iraq War. He expects a debate about the future of the GOP:
I think this election can be summed up as a crisis in confidence in the Bush administration and the Republican Congress. And frankly, I think the debate that’s about to take place is for the heart and soul of the Republican Party. Do we want to stay the course as a party or do we want to return to the values of the party of Reagan?
John Gizzi, Washington reporter for Human Events, had predicted before the election that the GOP would maintain control over both chambers of Congress. He said “freakish, foolish, and Iraqophobish” trends hurt Republicans. Now they have a chance to regroup.
This election can bring Republicans back to what the columnist M. Stanton Evans called the gold standard of conservatism: lower taxes, less spending, and smaller government. We certainly got away from it with the prescription drug bill and with No Child Left Behind.
News & Observer political writer Rob Christensen offered a top 10 list of election lessons. Number one on his list was the observation that war tops local scandals. Republicans talking about N.C. scandals involving Democrats could not overcome dissatisfaction about the war. Christensen says the war also helped lead to an interesting phenomenon among voters: a parliamentary approach to voting.
I found that in just talking to voters at some of the early voting spots around Raleigh, people often did not know who [GOP Rep.] Russell Capps was or [Democratic challenger] Ty Harrell. They did know that they were voting Democratic, or they were voting against Bush. What we may well have just seen is America’s first parliamentary elections, where people are voting for the party as opposed to the individual candidates.
American Conservative Union chairman David Keene says voters rejected Republicans’ performance in office — not the party’s conservative principles.
To their credit, the Democrats recognized the realities of the political landscape long before the election and set about recruiting candidates who challenged GOP performance in office, rather than the conservative beliefs of the folks who put them there. As a result, they won in districts they shouldn’t have won in and are welcoming a freshman class that got themselves elected in many, many cases by promising not to do what the older, traditional Leftist leaders of the next Congress are so anxious to do.
JLF President John Hood said Democrats secured a broad — but not particularly deep — victory. In other words, Democrats won commanding majorities in the N.C. House and Senate without dominating the statewide popular vote.
Guess which party got the most votes [in House races]? The Republican Party, by some tens of thousands of votes. So if you had added an additional 9,600 votes in the appropriate districts to the majority Republican vote in the North Carolina House, the House would be 61-59 Republican. Now I’m not saying that to downplay the Democratic win; it was a clear win. And I’m not suggesting the Democrats got lucky — like 9,600 quarters were flipped and they all landed on tails. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is for many, many years the two parties in North Carolina trying to control the General Assembly have been fighting over 10,000 or so — maybe 15,000 voters, not 1.8 million or 2.1 million voters. The stakes are very significant, but the margins are relatively small.
