OPINION:
This may be the age of Barack Obama, but not for the Democratic Party.
Republicans are leading in next month’s governorship races in Virginia and New Jersey. Senate Democrats, including Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, are in deep trouble in at least half a dozen races in 2010, and virtually every independent campaign tracker now says the Republican Party will pick up Democratic seats in the House next year.
Some voter polls show Republican identification has shrunk, but generic congressional preference surveys show the party is now virtually tied with the Democrats on who should control Congress.
Fundraising is a critical sign of a party’s political health, and here, too, the Republican Party is winning the money race. The Republican National Committee, the party’s campaign arm, raised nearly $9 million last month, with average contributions of $36, compared to the Democratic National Committee’s $8 million.
Notably, Republicans are outraising Democrats in a number of Senate contests.
One of the Senate Democrats who is on their party’s vulnerable list is two-term Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln who is fast gaining a reputation as someone who has a hard time making up her mind on the issues now before Congress and sometimes saying the wrong things at the wrong time.
Recent polls report Ms. Lincoln is trailing her four strongest Republican rivals, including front-running state Sen. Gilbert Baker who was leading by 47 percent to 39 percent in the latest Rasmussen poll. “She has a history of being on one side, then on the other side of an issue. Couple that with the intensity of the health care debate in Arkansas, and it makes for a pretty dour political environment for her,” said Clint Reed, a chief political adviser for the Baker campaign.
Ms. Lincoln repeatedly claimed she would not vote for any health care reform bill that was not “deficit neutral” but in the end voted for the Senate Finance Committee bill, despite studies showing it would significantly boost the cost of health care premiums and thus increase its taxpayer subsidies.
Ms. Lincoln continues to claim she is against the so-called “public option” that calls for a government-financed insurance plan. Then she told reporters she was “open” to the idea of a legislative “trigger” that would establish a federal alternative to private insurance, only to back away from that a few days later. A Talk Business Quarterly poll of 600 Arkansas voters showed 74 percent favored their private health care insurance, and only 16 percent preferred a government plan.
Last week, Ms. Lincoln claimed “the average costs of premiums was going to go down 6 to 7 percent” under the Democrats’ Finance Committee bill. But a cost analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the “premiums in the new [federally subsidized] insurance exchanges would tend to be higher than the average premiums in the current-law individual market.”
Perhaps no other issue in the state has stirred its political passions as much as health care. Angry Arkansas voters packed Ms. Lincoln’s town-hall meetings in August to rail against Obamacare, throwing her off-guard and on the defensive. At one point, she called the protesters “un-American,” and was later forced to apologize.
The nearly $1 trillion cost of the Democrats’ plan and the mushrooming debt remain major issues among voters, but also deep cuts in Medicare spending among the state’s large number of retirees who fear it will reduce their medical benefits.
“Lincoln has two problems. First is the overall political environment and that Barack Obama didn’t win the state,” said senior elections analyst Jennifer Duffy at the Cook Political Report.
While the state’s top elective offices are in Democratic hands, Arkansas supported Sen. John McCain last year by a lopsided 59 percent to 39 percent.
Still, with the election more than a year away, you can’t count Ms. Lincoln out by any means. She has been given the chairmanship of the influential Agriculture Committee that is a power center in a state where “agriculture accounts for 25 percent of the state’s economy,” says Eric Schultz, chief spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. For now, however, veteran elections handicapper Stuart Rothenberg has moved Ms. Lincoln’s race from “clear advantage for incumbent party” to “narrow advantage,” a less certain outcome.
In the last few weeks, Mr. Rothenberg has been busy shifting other once-safe Democratic Senate seats into more doubtful categories. After a Mason-Dixon poll showed Nevada Sen. Harry Reid trailing all his potential Republican rivals, Mr. Rothenberg move the race into the “tossup” column. Then came Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Senate seat in Delaware. Once listed as “currently safe for Democrats,” it is now “lean takeover for the GOP.” In Colorado, Democratic Sen. Michael Bennett has been moved from “clear advantage” to “narrow advantage.”
Somehow, the age of Obama isn’t looking so good for his party.
Donald Lambro is chief political correspondent for The Washington Times.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.