The 2006 midterm is often viewed today as the ur-wave election. Indeed, it’s part of the only example in recent decades of two successive wave elections, something that just 20 years later seems almost inconceivable. What’s less remembered is that almost to the very end of the cycle it was considered a very uncertain thing whether Democrats would be able to retake control of the House of Representatives, which they hadn’t controlled since the 1994 blowout. In fact, if you looked at the numbers — polls, special elections, etc. — it had been pretty clear what was coming for months. To explain this discrepancy — how official D.C. had missed what was coming — many focused on the Foley Scandal which broke in September 2006. (Mark Foley, a lightly closeted House Republican got in trouble for what we’d now call sexting with underage male pages in the House page program and was forced to resign.)
I’ve always thought this was basically a dodge, for the reasons I explained above. But the scandal did capture a mix of rot and disintegration, a kind of synaptic breakdown in the Capital Hill Republican hegemony that presaged what was to come. And I think we’re seeing something similar with the rapidly expanding scandals involving Republicans Reps. Max Miller of Ohio and Chuck Edwards of North Carolina. In a way, neither case is intrinsically related to the drivers of Donald Trump’s mounting unpopularity. But the two cases capture the culture of impunity that has defined the last 20 months, as well as the increasing disconnect between what is happening in Washington, D.C., where Trump is all powerful, and the rest of the country, where tidal forces are visibly moving against him. They are functioning eerily as a stand-in for everything else and create this mood, this kind of palpable sign of a majority going off the rails.
Of course, a big difference is that there is a simultaneous rebellion against the national leadership of the Democratic Party. Everyone’s been talking about it for months. It has deep roots. But the basic outlines go back to March of last year when Democrats had their first shot for a showdown with Donald Trump, to force him to the table over his unfolding war against the federal government and democratic governance and decided … just not to. From that moment there’s been a howling gulf between Democratic voters and their top elected officials — a basic sense of ‘are we seeing the same thing?’ To a growing number of Democratic voters, their elected leaders, especially in Washington, D.C., have seemed just not up to the challenge of challenging Donald Trump or simply not interested in doing so.
To some degree there is a matter of almost impossible expectations. Trump’s blitzkrieg through the Constitution, the rule of law and the most essential elements of democratic self-government have been so grave it would be almost impossible for a party, for the moment locked out of power in all three branches government, to meet the expectations of those who oppose him. But that is at best only a partial and limited explanation. There’s simply been a persistent mood and signaling of business as usual that has put the present leaders of the party in Washington, D.C. at odds with the great bulk of their voters. And to a great degree the outcome of the midterm elections will depend on how these two simultaneous and related but distinct unfolding rebellions interact.
As I’ve argued, most of this rebellion within the Democratic Party is not really about ideology, if we define that as support for different policies on a conventional left-right spectrum. It’s about fight. But in numerous states it’s been the progressive left signaling a mix of fight and outrage much more clearly than more ideologically conventional Democrats. So lots of those candidates are winning because they’re operating in the fight lane, which is the only lane that most Democratic voters find acceptable today. But the national climate is more volatile and protean than most national commentary seems to allow. And that makes just how this all plays out hard to predict.