Why did the Democrats lose so badly in 2010?

[muon2]

I never quite understood why the Democrats lost so badly in 2010 midterm elections. I mean, really badly. Less than two years before President Obama got into office with unbelievable enthusiasm. How did it come so far? Democrats held 257 house seats, that’s ten more than the GOP currently holds. Meaning, they could have lost more than 35 seats and still maintain a majority. Why did it happen so fast? Such big losses are, if at all, more common in the midterm elections during a second presidential term, but not the first.

I often heard that it was due to the slow economic recovery in Obama’s first two years. However, I found an analogy in history that tells a different story: In 1932, during a great recession, a Democratic president was elected with great enthusiasm, Democrats won large majorities in congress and the administration consequently passed major reforms to battle the economic downturn. The public mainly blamed previous Republican administrations for the crisis. Very similar to 2008. But as it is well known, the US economy did just slightly improve until the late 1930s. The New Deal helped a lot, but it took WW2 to take the country entirely out of the depression. But unlike in 2010, the 1934 midterms saw practically no changes in congress (Dems even made minor gains), although the economy just slightly got better. The voters didn’t lose patience with FDR so fast; they even reelected him by a record margin in 1936 and further expanded the congressional majorities.

Didn’t low voter turnout play a bigger role? And the fact that Republicans were less obstructionist against FDR than Obama?

Democrats won on similar demographics in 2006, an electorate controlled by traditional independents and working class swing voters and less by minorities (and Republicans did very well in both 2010 and 2014 with minorities Hispanics were 38% in 2010 and 35% in 2014).

The problem was that Democrats lost control of the economic argument because they focused on healthcare and failed to connect the two together. Thus creating the impression among those swing groups that the Democrats rather than creating jobs were ramming through a corrupt healthcare bill.

Also, it easy to forget now but the tea party was very popular in 2009 and 2010 because it combined a libertarian outrage at big gov't with an equally vocal opposition to the Wall Street bailouts. Since it was a rebellion against the GOP establishment, it helped to distance the Republicans from the Bush administration (the first signs of the GOP cracking at the seams began in 2007 when the base revolted against Bush over the immigration bill. Bush never had that problem before then and several primaries occured in 2008 cycle ousting incumbents over that issue. Another strand of the tea party came from the Ron Paul movement, which of course had no connection to Bush. There was no such rebellion in 1934.) Anyway the populism of the tea party and its opposition to the despised Bush era GOP, saved the Republicans from being weighed down by the unpopularity of Bush and allowed them to capitalize more fully on the vulnerablilities of the Democrats.

Republicans also had a lot of their candidates for office were small businessmen and military vets with no political history and thus no Bush era votes to defend. Rand Paul, Ron Johnson and Adam Kinzinger come to mind. Still more came from the ranks of dissenting Republicans who opposed Bush era spending/establishment like Pat Toomey.   

The Republicans also managed to successfully bring the debt and size/power of gov't to the top of the discussion, which came as a surprise to many people who expected limited gov't conservatism was dead and buried by the recession. Finally, the plethora of economic and gov't issues, pushed social issues to the back burner creating substantial snap back for the Republicans in suburbs in New York, PA and Illinois.

Nice analysis. I would add that there were a lot of parallels in the public mood in 2010 and 1994. And like 2010, 1994 also featured a stunning victory for Pubs in the first midterm of a Dem president.

Though the recession of 1991 was mild compared to 2008, there was a similar sense that the new administration with a solid majority in Congress wasn't delivering enough on the campaign promise of jobs. Real GDP growth in 1993 and was less than people were used to in the 1980's and below the strong performance later in Clinton's presidency. The growth was also felt more in the tech sector leaving traditional workers behind. Compare that to 2009 which had negative real GDP growth and disappointment with the number of jobs for "shovel ready projects".

The second obvious parallel is with health care. Bold initiatives for reform of the health care market were rolled out in 1993 and 2009. Even though the job market may have been on people's minds, the extension of government into health care became one of the main talking points for the midterm elections. In neither midterm did the specifics of the health care plan really matter, Obamacare had no impact on anyone in 2010, but it was about the larger optics of government interference in private life. If economic growth had been more robust going into the midterms, I doubt that the health care narrative would have had as much traction with the voters.

[muon2]

Well Obama did continue TARP early in his Presidency. Basically voters were pissed at both Obama and Bush W. for bailing out the banks. TARP is a tough vote for a member of Congress though.

To go off topic a bit -

I really think it's unfair that either party was blamed for the bailouts. I'm sure some more favorable changes could have been made (none of which would have mattered as long as it was even remotely seen as a bailout), but it was needed. People don't like the idea of bailing out companies who caused the problem in the first place and if they had the final say, we'd be a hell of a lot more trouble even now just because the people wanted to be vindictive. I do things all the time I don't like but at the same time, know that I have to for the greater good.

This is why we need a more engaged & educated populace. This stuff shouldn't even need to be explained to everyone, as people should do their own research before forming such strong opinions. It's the huge absence of this kind of logical behavior that frequently makes me wonder how the hell we ever got to this stage of technological evolution to begin with.

Even with an engaged populace there would have been frustration at perceived injustice at the treatment of the oligarchy of Wall Street. The level of financial education needed to understand the vertical integration that was happening in Wall Street and its impact is fairly high. I doubt many engaged citizens were noting in the 1960's when the feds began to reinterpret Glass-Steagall to permit certain partner arrangements that would lead to de facto consolidations. I know few educated voters during the go-go tech boom in 1999 cared about Gramm-Leach-Billey removing the last major barriers to financial integration constructed by Glass-Steagall. Enron was a big deal to the public in 2001, but it didn't translate into better awareness of the overall financial market. I personally only started to take real note of the larger picture when I head John McCain talk in 2005 about the potential problem looming with Fannie and Freddie. But by 2008 it was too late, and the mortgage derivatives were already bust (in 2007) by the time when the public was feeling the impact (mostly in 2009).

I'm not sure how one could have better educated the voters who weren't in finance as a career. I do agree that the push to make healthcare reform a signature in Obama's first two years distracted from other achievements that needed explanation to the public.