Reports that Tuesday's off-year election races in Georgia and South Carolina would prove a bellwether for all of next year's congressional races have proven premature at best, and at worst simply cockeyed. How could some of our more esteemed political analysts have so miscalculated? For any number of reasons. For instance: assuming that the record amounts of money poured into a couple of congressional districts in the South by national parties would determine their outcome. Southerners' votes, it turns out, are still not for sale.
Besides, to quote one of James Carville's keener observations when he was running the war room for Bill Clinton et ux, "It's the economy, stupid." Said economy is booming just now. And even Democrats, especially those in suburban Atlanta and Charleston, may not want their taxes raised, their dividends lowered, and their rates for health insurance increased.
But the biggest mistake of those political experts who proved not so expert was to talk as if these United States were a foreign country like Great Britain with its parliamentary system in which losing an election for seats in the legislative branch means losing power. Over there, off-year elections aren't just a sideshow but the whole show.
Even the best of politicians can make much the same mistake, as Franklin D. Roosevelt did after his landslide re-election in 1936--and decided to press home his advantage. Even to the extent of trying to pack the country's highest court. The result wasn't as satisfactory as he'd hoped. Neither was the outcome for Democrats Tuesday when they were unable to translate the country's well-founded unease with Donald J. Trump, the current president of the United States, into electoral success for their congressional candidates.
Editorial on 06/23/2017