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.
