Michael Livingston's Blog
Michael Livingston's Blog
Purple in Pennsylvania
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What’s changed, what hasn’t
Back from a little vacation, and now we’re just two months away from the big day.
Some things have changed, some things haven’t.
• It looks like the Democrats are in even more trouble than I imagined they’d be. Who would have thought both Tom Corbett and Pat Toomey would be flirting with double-digit leads, and that Democrats would have a real chance of losing up to half-a-dozen House seats in Pennsylvania alone? No one pretends there’s no Republican wave coming any more.
• The Democratic strategy appears to be to run away from the issues and try to scare people about the Republican candidates (as in Kentucky or Nevada) or else to resort to simple trickery (as in the increasingly pathetic shenanigans emerging from Bryan Lentz’s and Dan Onorato’s campaigns). Such tactics might work in individual cases, but they are likely to backfire in others. If anything, they threaten to anger independent voters without meaningfully increasing the enthusiasm on the Democratic side.
• While the Republicans look strong right now, there is a serious danger of overconfidence, both in the elections themselves and their aftermath. Anyone who attends Republican meetings knows that the party is much longer on resentment of President Obama than on clear and constructive ideas for what to do once in power. There is, moreover, a wide and growing gap between establishment Republicans and Tea Party insurgents, one that is less pronounced in Pennsylvania than in other states, but which will directly impact the party’s ability to function should it take control of Congress. The enthusiasm about “Speaker Boehner” should perhaps be tempered with that old adage: Be careful what you wish for, because it may come true.
September 2, 2010 at 7:19 am
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Bio: Michael Livingston is a law professor at the Rutgers University in Camdem and was a 2008 Republican candidate for Congress in Pennsylvania's 2nd District. He also blogs at http://mikelivingston.blogspot.com.
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Paul
Sep 2nd, 2010
Actually I came to expect the gains by Republicans several months ago and I think they’ll be bigger than most predictions. I don’t think the pollsters realize how badly the Democrat Party label hurts individual candidates. My son is just a few years out of college and all his friends who voted for Obama have done a complete 180 and regularly say things like they’ll never vote for a Democrat again, sentiments that I hear regularly amongst co-workers and friends my own age. There’s more at work here than I think anyone understands and it’s more than a single election cycle.
sue
Sep 2nd, 2010
Could Pa really be stupid enough to think that candidates like Toomey, Meehan and Corbett have their best interests at heart?
These are the most corporate-owned, Wall Street-friendly guys around!
von wallenstein
Sep 2nd, 2010
absolutely, sue. and i’m looking forward to fitzpatrick knocking off the cherub faced punk kid murphy
Tony Soprano
Sep 2nd, 2010
Sue —
Wasn’t the Wall Street “reform” bill that Sestak/Lentz/Onorato tout enthusiastically supported and endorsed by Goldman Sachs?
BB
Sep 2nd, 2010
We are all losers in this state with the list of candidate names on the state’s ballot come Nov. 2. None of these candidates are worth voting for, NONE. We have zero leadership, ALL bureaucrats. What a sad state of affairs in Pa. come Nov. Absolutely disgusting.
My two cents
Sep 2nd, 2010
BB has got it right – especially in the Congressional race in PA-08. Murphy is terrible and FitzFlop is not that far behind. Yes, give me a one-term Bush-era GOP Congressman who helped start the reckless government spending and sponsored such legislation as Cap and Trade and Card Check in 2004-06. FitzFlop has no new ideas – all he has are excuses for why he is flipflopping on a multitude of conservative issues. It is sad when FitzFlop’s lone redeeming quality is not being Patrick Murphy. In a time when some Republican party candidates are offering new leadership, we get the same old, same old from the corrupt and pathetic Bucks GOP.
In PA-08, there should be a a “None of the Above” option for the Congressional race … I am sure it would win.