After Arlen Specter's defeat in Pennsylvania last night, we'll hear a lot about anti-incumbent sentiment, and, as Tim says, the rise of the Tea Party. Some of that is true. Voters are definitely frustrated, and even angry, with Washington.
But those aren't the only determining factors. Even the New York Times suggests that some of Specter's loss was due to low turnout in friendly districts because of bad weather. Voters can be fickleness and flaky, and it's hard to attribute the races last night entirely to passionate national sentiment against the status quo. Plus, Specter was pretty vulnerable just because of his Republican-to-Democrat switch.
Pennsylvania's other big race also shows that it's not just about anti-incumbency. Mark Critz won the special election to replace his late former boss, John Murtha. A Democrat in that district was always thought to be an anomaly, and everyone thought the Republicans would pick it up. As Daniel Larison writes, the Republican party tried to nationalize the race, when maybe they shouldn't have.
There are two major problems with the Republican approach to these congressional races. The first is that they tend to ignore or dismiss the interests of the specific district where they are competing in order to make a statement about national party agendas. The national GOP wants these elections to be mandates against Pelosi, Reid, and Obama.
The GOP's second problem is that Republicans don’t seem to understand that even in districts where Obama is not particularly popular and where most voters did not support him in 2008, such as PA-12, most voters are not interested in vindicating a pre-scripted anti-Obama narrative. So long as the Democratic candidates can present them with a more appealing message of continued government funding and the promise of economic support, they are not automatically going to rally behind the candidates of the more unpopular, discredited party.
We'll see how this plays out elsewhere, but it's good to remember how local politics usually is.
-- Monica Potts
