The Enthusiasm Gap and the Mid-Terms

Much is being said of the "enthusiasm gap" between Democrats and Republicans at the moment, but it pays to remember that the whomping up of enthusiasm in the Republican base at this stage in Republicanism's long skid into total crazytown is purchased at the cost of a self-marginalization that cannot command majorities and hence win elections in any kind of sustainable way (barring bleak fascism comes to America get out while you can scenarios). While it is true that mid-term elections traditionally turn on lower turnouts it is an open question whether lower turnouts will sufficiently compensate the shrinkage in voter ID that Republicans are trading off for energizing their base, which at this point is nothing but a lunatic fringe mixed with the lowest of low-information voters.

Democrats are still out-fundraising Republicans, which isn't exactly the worst "enthusiasm" metric in the world, especially since a good part of that fundraising will be funding ads in which unenthused Democrats will be reminded just how stupid and crazy and evil the Republicans are who would be shepherded into power without Democratic votes to stop them.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, but it isn't a bad idea to take occasionally into account the fact that a goodly amount of the sheer enthusiasm and vaunted discipline of the wingnuts ultimately derives from the fact that, you know, they kinda sorta hate with an undiminishable passion the browning feminizing queering secular-multicultural technoscientifically-literate democratic world in which we actually live. They are pouting and stamping their feet at reality and at a world worth living in. However unified this may make them in their ugly hateful know-nothing pocket universe, it isn't exactly a winning strategy for the long-term.

If Democrats are feeling unenthusiastic this is in no small part the absolutely reasonable distaste that follows scrutiny of the prosaic sausage-making that follows the poetry of campaigning. This is always the case given the barriers to too smooth and suave an authoritarian functioning instituted by the Constitution (for better or for worse), but it is especially the case under the present rather crazy conditions of polarization between equal numbers of pragmatists (many principled, many not so principled) and outright barking mad anti-government zealots clogging up the gears of these governing machineries.

Talk of Democratic "majorities" is all well and good, but the hard facts of the matter are that the majorities are worse than razor thin, they are essentially illusory given that there are Democrats who are scarcely distinguishable from Republicans in the caucus and the Republicans are functioning monolithically in opposition, however utterly irresponsible that is given the problems we face, and hence the dynamisms through which governance is supposed to play out are skewed beyond recognition right now. And feeling angry at the Obama Administration for refusing to misbehave as much as did the Killer Clowns of the Bush Administration in the executive overreach stakes makes little sense (especially since, if anything, Obama is overreaching too much still from his perch in the ever more imperializing executive branch).

The poetry of the good old campaign season Obama team will return soon enough (carrot), and the obstructionist misbehavior of the Party of No has been captured on film and will provide an ugly spectacle (stick) to re-activate the Democratic base with. There will be nearly a year after the dispiriting healthcare reform effort to deal with any enthusiasm gap we are seeing now. I doubt many of the underdisciplined narcissists who are pouting and stamping about Third Party bids or staying home election day will still feel that way once the campaign ads start running, given just how insanely bad Republicans really are at this point. I do hope that the bloody healthcare reform sausage really will have enough good regulation left in it among the gristle and bone that all the inevitable crowing will have some kind of substance behind it. And I do hope the noises we are hearing about a jobs bill won't be drowned out by endlessly discredited neo-Hooverite noises about deficits megaphoned by nervous oligarchs clinging to their stolen loot while averting their eyes from the suffering of their fellow citizens. About Afghanistan I won't say anything, because it's too hard to talk while you are puking.

But come what may what we need right now is more Democrats and better Democrats, and however bad our situation, it still seems to me we have the rhetorical and substantial recourses at hand to bring about that result, or at any rate not lose ground.

If the mid-terms were held today, Democrats would be in trouble, we would lose some ground. That is sobering, but it would scarcely betoken even now, at its worst, any turning of the tide back to Republican anti-governmentality, any derangement of the demographic trends toward the Democrats. I don't think it would even be much of a game-changer in terms of practical governance, since I doubt Democrats would lose their Senate majority, and it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to lose the appearance of a filibuster-proof supermajority that doesn't represent reality and as such inspires unrealistic hopes and imposes unrealistic responsibilities on Senate Democrats.

The enthusiasm gap we are seeing makes perfect sense, it is perfectly reasonable given the facts on the ground, but I disagree with those who see in it anything prophetic for 2010's mid-terms. Many things will change between now and then. It isn't a bad idea to remind yourselves of the contours of the 2008 Presidential contest and how that played out. Election year dynamics differ from off-year sausage-making dynamics.

The left Netroots emerged when Democrats were in the wilderness, and this has been our first time bearing witness to the ugliness of actual governing for which we ourselves are non-negligibly responsible. There is a lot of learning going on here.