History Lesson: It’s not 1994 that Democrats should be looking to as a ...

History Lesson

It’s not 1994 that Democrats should be looking to as a model. It’s 1974.

The question of the week seems to be, Can Democrats nationalize the 2006 congressional election the way Republicans did in 1994? Modernized counterparts to Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” are being prepared, slogans tested, and national issues developed for an assault on the profoundly weakened beachhead of the GOP autocracy.

As is so often the case, though, Democrats are transfixed by the history and perceived successes of the right, when there are better lessons in our own history and our own successes. We’ll come back to that in a minute.

There’s a mundane reason that the 1994 model won’t work for Democrats in 2006, and it can be summed up in the numbers 53 and 18. Going into the 1994 election, Gingrich could identify 53 congressional districts whose voters had backed the first President Bush in 1992 -- even as he carried only 37 percent of the nationwide vote -- while sending a Democrat to Congress. Many of these districts had been voting reliably for Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and even Barry Goldwater while never quite shedding their allegiance to a local Democratic representative. What Gingrich did in nationalizing the election was to encourage voters to look at their Democratic representative in the light of their already established presidential preferences. Even before the “Contract with America” or the verbal stylings of pollster Frank Luntz, once Gingrich had candidates and a tide of hostility to Bill Clinton in the South and rural districts elsewhere, he had all the ingredients he needed.

Going into 2006, however, there are only 18 districts that went for John Kerry and also sent a Republican, often a moderate, to Congress. Many of those districts are ripe targets, and perhaps enough of those Republicans will fall to make moderate Republicans eligible for protection under the Endangered Species Act (assuming their party hasn’t succeeded in repealing it). But that’s a very small window of transitional districts compared with Gingrich’s opportunity.

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"make moderate Republicans eligible for protection under the Endangered Species Act (assuming their party hasn’t succeeded in repealing it)"

Touche ;)

pontificate about "what history shows."

In 1994, there was a young President still unsure of himself, facing a manufactured "scandal," Watergate.

On the other hand there has been nothing in US history like the last 5 years of Mobutu capitalism, cronyism, rank incompetence, degradation of the international reputation of the United States, manufactured rationalizations for war, out right propaganda.

Anyone who is staring at 1994 to understand our future is a very, very, very, very limited thinker.

2005 is unprecedented. 2006 promises to be much, much, much more interesting (and frankly frightening) than even the most prescient among us can imagine.

with the rest of your post, the rancid corruption today is unprecedented at least in my recollection of American History. I think the 2006 election will also be unprecedented.

Thank you for your correction.

looking back it seems like just a puddle.

I think the better comparison will be to an election like 1966's. A dominant Party full of faux unity has six years of heyday in which it runs out of the purposes and breaks down the coalition defined 30-some years earlier.

In 1965/66 the Democratic Party created by FDR reached its limits and exhaustion of its usefulness to the electorate as the dominant party.

The Republican Party created by Nixon seems likewise near its limits and near exhaustion of its usefulness to the electorate in 2005/06.