ERICK ERICKSON: The Curious Case of the Accidental Senators: Don’t Say They Can’t Win.
The Senate shift to the GOP in 1980 was so unexpected that no one had even contemplated a transition plan. Howard Baker who had, ironically, run in the Republican presidential primary to stop Ronald Reagan, became Senate Majority Leader because of Reagan’s coattails and Carter’s disastrous collapse. It was the largest swing in a Senate election since 1958 and the Senate GOP’s best showing since 1946 when voters turned against Truman. The Republicans held all ten of their existing seats up for re-election and flipped twelve of the twenty-four Democrat seats for a total gain of 22 seats.
The 1980 election moved men like Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, John Tower, and Barry Goldwater into Senate leadership positions.
“The swing in the Senate is probably even greater, in ideological terms, than the shift in the White House,” a prominent labor leader said yesterday. “A bleeping disaster,” said another.
Fast forward to now, the year 2022. The nation’s mood is as pessimistic or more pessimistic than in 1980. Inflation is at a forty-year high. American morale is in decline so much so that members of the Biden Administration have used the word malaise as Carter did. We have a labor shortage, a housing shortage, a baby formula shortage, and other shortages. “The 16 percent of voters who think the country is on the right track is easily a 13-year low in the NBC News survey.”
Corporate America seems very good at manufacturing profits, not products. Private equity groups are imposing the left’s ESG (environmental, social, governance) agenda on the Fortune 500, even if it is bad for business and helps China. The same groups are buying up American homes, forcing Americans into permanent tenant status and depriving them of home equity. They’ve taken a stand for leftwing social causes even as most Americans are not down with the agenda.
Schools are ruining the lives of students with lockdowns, excuses, and indoctrination. Parents are furious and the Department of Education is furious with the parents.
Congress won’t secure the border or take care of the basic functions of government, while also blowing up deficits and making inflation worse. The Biden Administration compounds the problems by driving up energy costs, harming American wage growth, and generally having the King Midas but turds approach. Everything Biden touches turns to poo. Oh, and COVID is starting to surge again.
I think David McCormick is a wiser choice in Pennsylvania than Kathy Barnette. Both are real Republicans and actual conservatives and not huckster frauds like Mehmet Oz. I think Herschel Walker has so much baggage that he is an enormous lift for voters to get into office, especially when any of the other Georgia Republican senate candidates would be easier to get across the finish line.
But don’t think any of them cannot win.
Especially when voters remember the good times were as recent as 2019 – that’s very a different environment than the Democratic Party’s perma-malaise, which began around 1968 and continued through the entire decade of the 1970s, until voters at last saw change in the form of Ronald Reagan. But to coin an Insta-phrase, don’t get cocky.