If your email gets a “Morning Jolt” or you consult “The Campaign Spot” regularly at National Review Online, you know that Jim Geraghty keeps a close watch on electoral developments across the country. Geraghty is a contributing editor at National Review. During a recent visit to North Carolina, he addressed the John Locke Foundation’s Shaftesbury Society. Geraghty also discussed key 2014 election trends with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: Your day-to-day job — day in, day out — is to follow what’s going on with politics across the country. So what’s going on right now?
Geraghty: I’ll just say, I get to write about politics for a living, which is 90 percent of the time joyous and wonderful and maybe about 10 percent maddening and making me tear my hair out.
So as we speak right now, … midterms are approaching, and the outlook I’d say for Republicans is pretty good — not super-duper terrific, slam dunk, buy the fireworks for the victory party, quite yet. Most of the polling most of the year has been pretty darned consistent — whatever your measuring stick is, whether it’s the governors’ races or the Senate races, the House races.
For obvious reasons, people are most focused on the Senate because Republicans definitely have a chance. And some might even say that they’re favored to take control of the Senate starting with the 2014 midterms.
This would have a Republican House and a Republican Senate for the final two years of Barack Obama’s presidency. And while some might say, “Eh, what does it matter? Obama is doing everything through executive orders — everything,” it can really complicate his life for all kinds of nominations, including Supreme Court nominations, sending a lot of legislation to his desk that he may not want to sign or that he may actually be forced to sign out of public opinion — Keystone pipeline-type things.
So it’s worth the fight if you’re a conservative, to start electing more conservative lawmakers in the Senate right now, even if they’re not perfect or down the line.
Right now, we obviously have a very exciting race here in North Carolina, and [Republican challenger Thom] Tillis taking on [Democratic incumbent Sen. Kay] Hagan. … One of the reasons it has people excited about Republican odds for a takeover, there are three states that are deeply red, where Democratic incumbents announced they’re retiring, and the Republican is heavily, heavily favored to win: West Virginia, South Dakota, and Montana. And really there hasn’t been a poll that shakes anybody’s faith in any of the results of those three.
Then you get to three more that are in the South that are all kind of interesting. Democratic incumbents like Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, here in North Carolina you have Kay Hagan, and then the other race in Arkansas. And in each one of those, there’s a circumstance in which you have a fairly good reason to think that the Republican challengers have run for office before — Tom Cotton in Arkansas, Tillis here — kind of know what they’re doing, they’re not prone to saying crazy things or something like that. And the polling has been pretty close.
Now shortly before we spoke, The New York Times [released a] massive poll — 100,000 respondents, but it’s online. There are a lot of folks that say, “Pleh — you know, online polls, they’re all, you know, crazy, wacky, you can’t trust the sampling.”
The New York Times, CBS, and this group called YouGov went into this very detailed explanation of the sampling and how they tried to account for people who aren’t online. So take their numbers with as many grains of salt as you see fit. Most of the results were not that — there were very few where’d you say, “Democrat winning in Oklahoma?” You know, kind of wacky results like that.
And everything was more or less in the ballpark of kind of where you’d expect, and if things turned out exactly as this New York Times poll indicated, Republicans would win eight seats. I can hear conservatives out there right now breaking out the party hats and dancing and all that stuff, but of those eight, four of them, the Republican had a lead by one or two points, including Tillis. So don’t get too confident when you have a lead of one or two points. Obviously, we’re still in the summertime, there’s a lot of road ahead.
Probably for all your listeners and everyone out here, if you’re in North Carolina, you’re going to see nothing but political ads starting in September, all the way through there, and it’s going to be nonstop attack ads and the grainy black-and-white photos, and “Thom Tillis is the kind of guy you just can’t. …”
I have a sense that most people tune that out fairly early on. I actually think you’re seeing a law of diminishing returns for attack ads and stuff. But look, the stakes are pretty darn high for a nonpresidential year, and, for Republicans, a really significant victory and certainly, I think, a pushback against what they saw as a really stunning defeat in 2012 is within their grasp.
I know a lot of folks that say they’ve seen Republicans grab defeat from the jaws of victory many times before. So if it turns out that everything goes terribly wrong for Republicans, please make sure I included these caveats on this broadcast.
Kokai: You’ve seen these campaign seasons in the past. You know where things have stood in the past, around the late summertime, before the fall campaign really gets going. What are you going to be watching very closely in the months ahead?
Geraghty: Sure. I definitely think that for your average grass-roots Republican voter, 2012 was this heartbreaking defeat. And this real frustration that we felt like we had — regardless of what you thought of Mitt Romney, that President Obama had not succeeded in his first four years.
We had made an argument that [the] big-government approach had not succeeded, that his policies had not succeeded, it was not a safer world. “America, here’s our argument.” That was rejected, and they went with the other guy.
Now a lot of conservatives and folks on the right really felt slapped in the face by that. And I think there was for probably a good chunk of 2013, a funk, a depression, a certain lack of enthusiasm in some circles. I think it’s largely shaken out of it, and now we’re kind of looking at the general, you know, what’s the mood of the country as a whole.
I think that this has been a really miserable summer for the Obama administration, and I think, you can safely say, not a great summer for the country as a whole. The southern border, you have all these kids from Central America coming across. Russia is on the move again, shooting down airliners. The Middle East is aflame. ISIS has taken over. The news abroad is bad. The economy, they’ll say, “Oh, the stock market is doing well,” and then the [gross domestic product] goes down a little bit.
Obamacare is going into effect, and there are plenty of folks who are frustrated as heck about that, with good reason. And so … the right-track, wrong-track numbers of when they ask the electorate, people are really bleh right now. That’s the technical term they use in political science. People are down. People are frustrated.
And so, you might say, “Aha. That’s good news for the Republicans.” Not really. As people are really down on everybody in politics, I think the government shutdown back last fall had a lot of people kind of say, “Ah. They’re all a bunch of bickering children up there. I don’t trust any of them. I don’t like any of them.” And they may snap out of it.
I think it’s safe to say that the mood in the Democratic — of base voters is very down. Democrats have a tougher time getting their voters out in a midterm election. Basically, if it was a presidential election, and you’re voting for this big personality — this larger-than-life figure as Barack Obama, the munificent sun god who stepped down into the presidency … people get excited for that.
Strangely enough, Kay Hagan is not quite inspiring that same level of bonanza excitement — not a whirling dervish of raw political charisma there, and people are kind of like, “Eh?” They may vote; they may not.
A certain portion of the Republican base remains fired up. I think a certain portion of the Republican base remains quite irked at the leadership in Congress. You saw the defeat of [U.S. House Majority Leader] Eric Cantor earlier this year. Really, no love lost for [House Speaker] John Boehner or [Senate Republican Leader] Mitch McConnell or any of these guys.
On the other hand, I think they’re still angrier at Obama and the policies he’s done: Obamacare, immigration — take your pick. They’re angry enough that they’re going to show up on that.
I think the real question is the folks in the middle, which I think is a smaller and smaller fraction of the electorate at each cycle, and I think that — right now, the odds are either that they will stay home because they don’t like anybody, or they may say, “You know what? I’m really mad as hell, and I’m going to vote for the Republicans to send a message to Obama that I don’t like what he is doing.”
The number of people who say does Barack Obama share your values has plummeted from like 70-some [percent] when he got re-elected to about 40-some right now. So that’s a key indicator that people are really not happy with the state of the country right now.