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Kevin Drum writes:
So what does the political world look like on Wednesday if the gurus at ABC News are right? They all announced their guesses Sunday morning, and the average of their projections is 352 electoral votes for Obama plus a pickup for the Democrats of 24 seats in the House and 7 or 8 seats in the Senate.If this happens, the upshot is that both parties get moved to the right. Most of the Democratic pickups will be in centrist states and districts, which will move the Democratic caucus moderately toward the center. At the same time, it will remove these centrist states and districts from the Republican side, which will make the GOP caucus not just smaller, but even more conservative than it is now. As a touchstone, the Republican Study Committee, the hardcore conservative wing of the House GOP contingent, currently represents a little over half of their total strength. After Tuesday they're likely to represent nearly two-thirds, which means that the rump of the House Republican caucus remaining after Tuesday is likely to be almost entirely in the hands of the most faithful of the movement conservative faithful.In the short-term, it's certainly correct that an expanded Democratic majority can have the paradoxical effect of moving American politics sharply to the left even as both major political parties trend slightly right. In part, that's a statistical artifact of focusing on parties rather than seats. If you replace a North Carolina Republican with a North Carolina Democrat, you've just pushed that seat far to the left, even as it's still to the right of median Democratic seat.The question is what happens over the longer-term. The two-party system is relatively, if not perfectly, responsive to changes in public opinion. If Democrats do popular things in office and achieve high approval ratings, then you will see the Republican Party respond to those incentives. Protecting a popular health reform plan, for instance, will quickly become something near to orthodoxy for both parties, much as it's very rare today for Republicans to express a desire to harm either Social Security or Medicare. You saw this in the late-90s, when George W. Bush ran as the soft Republican antidote to Newt Gingrich's cruel conservatism. And, sure enough, less than a decade after Gingrich released "The Contract With America," Republicans were voting to increase federal control over the schools and attach a $500 billion drug benefit to Medicare. So I'd suggest that the question isn't what the political world looks like on the Wednesday after the election, but on the Wednesday after the first year. The Republican Party seems a stubborn and ideological beast, but that's largely bluster. Their next incarnation will largely be a response to the political terrain as shaped by Democratic achievements -- or failures.
