If you’re a Democrat, you’ve
got to be feeling pretty glum today about the prospects for
November’s mid-term election.
One reason why: In a special election in Florida’s
13th Congressional District yesterday, Democrat Alex
Sink lost to Republican David Jolly.
Sink, who ran a failed campaign for governor in 2010, was a
candidate with better name recognition, and she had some real
advantages. Last November, Sink was
running ahead of Jolly by 20 points. Sink’s campaign was
better funded, and
outside group spending tilted toward the Democratic candidate
by $1 million. Barack Obama
won the district twice. And Jolly’s campaign was not exactly
masterful (at one point he
openly disagreed with an ad the national GOP was running
against Sink). Libertarian candidate Lucas Overby managed to
capture about 5 percent of the total, probably splitting off a few
votes that would have otherwise gone Republican.
Somehow, Sink still managed to lose.
What gives? The easy takeaway is that this was
all about Obamacare. That’s the line that the national GOP is
pushing, and it’s not totally wrong. But it’s a little more
complicated than that. Jolly and his allies—really, Sink’s
enemies—hit his Democratic opponent with a volley of ads accusing
Sink of supporting the
health law’s Medicare cuts and tying her to the Obamacare mess.
Yet although Democratic strategists had started to hope earlier
this year that the party’s candidates would play offense on the
law, Sink wasn’t exactly running as a full-throated Obamacare
booster. Instead, Sink was calling the rollout of the exchanges
last year “disastrous,” and saying that Obama
had “failed us” with his management of the
implementation.
Still, Sink’s half-hearted support for the law—despite
misgivings about implementation, she opposed ditching Obamacare
entirely—can’t have helped. And her party affiliation tied her to
President Obama, who is not exactly racing up the popularity charts
these days.
That brings us to another reason for Dem despair: A
Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released
yesterday puts the president’s job approval rating at 41 percent,
down two points since January. That’s the lowest it’s ever been.
Overall, the national vibe is bad for the president and negative
feelings toward Obama are up since last fall, at 44 percent,
compared to 41 percent who report positive feelings.
Republicans aren’t winning hearts either. But the poll suggests
that the public is coming around to the belief that the GOP should
be in charge of the legislature. Slightly more respondents—44
percent—said they now prefer Republican control of Congress to
control by Democrats.
Add in the fact that turnout in mid-term elections tends to
favor Republicans, and you have a pretty gloomy outlook for
Democrats come November. Bad news like we saw today exacerbates
this effect. It’s a feedback loop. Between the poor polling and
yesterday’s election, I suspect lots of Democratic hearts are
starting to, well, sink.
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