Matt Yglesias

33 Responses to “Oregonian: Merkley Wins”

1. Dave Weigel Says:
   November 6th, 2008 at 9:13 am

   Also, Obama cut a final fortnight TV ad personally asking Oregon voters to send Merkley to Washington. Something to consider when Kristol or whoever spins that the 6-7 seat gain in the Senate was historically tiny and that there’s no Obama mandate (even though the Dems were at 45 seats just 25 months ago).

2. Pete Says:
   November 6th, 2008 at 9:20 am

   Can’t say that I agree. It is more important to get rid of nutbags like Dole than it is to get rid of Smith. So Hagan has a chance to be beaten in 6 years. Let’s worry about that in 4 years or so. In the meantime, we have a more reasonable vote in the Senate.

3. Gabriel Says:
   November 6th, 2008 at 9:27 am

   That’s why the insane decision to nominate Al Franken for a Senate seat is so infuriating. There’s no excuse for the Democrats to lose a Senate seat to an unpopular hack in a year that the presidential nominee carries the state by ten points. Any reasonably plausible career politician would have won that seat going away and kept it for at least a dozen years.

4. DTM Says:
   November 6th, 2008 at 9:38 am

   I dunno–give it eight more years and North Carolina may be more like Oregon than Matt appears to be suggesting (note that Gore won Oregon over Bush by about 7000 votes).

5. Dave Weigel Says:
   November 6th, 2008 at 9:59 am

   Oregon was only that close because of a strong campaign by noted racist Ralph Nader.

6. Josh Says:
   November 6th, 2008 at 10:00 am

   Matt – aside from the relative merits of Dole vs. Smith, I don’t think your log stands up to scrutiny. Oregon’s Senate seat is safe for the Democrats – therefore the seat is more valuable to them. But NC’s Senate seat was (supposedly) safe for Republicans – and therefore that seat was more valuable to THEM. Given that Senate partisanship is a zero-sum game, it stands to reason that knocking the Republicans out of a safe seat and getting a shaky Democratic seat is exactly as good as knocking them out of a shaky seat and getting a safe seat.

7. Rich Says:
   November 6th, 2008 at 10:00 am

   I agree but for a different reason. It’s useful to get rid of relatively reasonable Republicans like Smith and (so I’m told) Sununu, so it’s left as a rump party of hacks and nutters. This is kind of unfair to the reasonable Republicans, but that’s politics.

8. Jake Says:
   November 6th, 2008 at 10:11 am

   I agree but for a different reason. It’s useful to get rid of relatively reasonable Republicans like Smith and (so I’m told) Sununu, so it’s left as a rump party of hacks and nutters. This is kind of unfair to the reasonable Republicans, but that’s politics.

   Yes, yes, yes. Heighten the contradictions for reasonable Republicans. Make them try to defend the Southern rump without any intelligent conservatives to hang their hat on. This is also a reason for Obama to make overtures to the remaining moderate Repubs for cabinet positions. Once they become identified with Obama, the wingers will renounce them, and they’ll be forced to distance themselves from the Party as well.

9. DTM Says:
   November 6th, 2008 at 10:18 am

   Dave Weigel,

   Fair enough, although I think Nader probably drew some Bush votes too. But in any event, Kerry only won Oregon by 4 points, so I still think it represents a state that went from battleground to safe.

10. Amanda in the South Bay Says:
    November 6th, 2008 at 11:41 am

    Why do you assume Smith is a moderate? He always changes his tone when the going gets tough, to try and decieve Oregonians that he is Wayne Morse-incarnate, i.e. one of those traditional maveicky Oregon Republicans. And The Oregonian newspaper also endorsed him-just how many papers endorsed Obama as well as the local Republican senate candidate?

11. low-tech cyclist Says:
    November 6th, 2008 at 12:04 pm

    Matt, you’ve been saying that the key thing for Obama and the Dems right now is to deliver the goods: if they do that, then the future will take care of itself.

    I agree wholeheartedly with that. And that should be your metric in determining who’s more valuable.

    Both Hagan and Merkley will support the main planks of Obama’s program. If Dole had remained in the Senate, she would have been a sure vote against cloture on such planks. Whether Smith was an equally sure vote against cloture, or whether he would have been persuadable, is better known to those who’ve followed him more closely than I have.

    But if Smith was potentially persuadable, then the OR pickup was less important to the Dems than the NC pickup in terms of delivering the goods.

12. capturedshadow Says:
    November 6th, 2008 at 12:33 pm

    I’m not so sure the Merkley seat is safe. Oregon has been tending more Democratic recently but there is a big Urban/Rural split. The Obama turnout really helped Merkley in this election but if the Republicans bring Dave Frohnmayer out of retirement, or another well known moderate, Merkley could lose.

13. Dean Says:
    November 6th, 2008 at 1:30 pm

    NY Times now reporting the concession, sourcing a Smith campaign official:
    http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/moderate-republican-falls-in-oregon-senate-race/?scp=1&sq=merkley&st=cse

14. tomemos Says:
    November 6th, 2008 at 1:44 pm

    Gabriel: I agree with you about Franken. A Senate nomination is not supposed to be a nice reward for funny attacks on Republicans. A generic Democrat would have won handily, so the nomination was a mistake, even if it made MoveOn happy.

15. Andrew Says:
    November 6th, 2008 at 2:05 pm

    Disagree. I’m thrilled that Merkley won, but prior to his race being called, out of the four outstanding races (Oregon, Alaska, Minnesota and Georgia), if we had to only win two, I’d have picked Alaska and Georgia.

    The reason? Coleman and Smith were more likely to side with Democrats on at least a few big issues (they both supported Bennet-Wyden, for example) than either Dole or Stevens were. Both Oregon and Minnesota went heavily for Obama, and although they’d vote with the party line wherever possible, like many Southern Democrats who were intimidated by Bush’s popularity, they’d break with the Republicans on a few key issues to make themselves acceptable to their electorates.

16. Dean Says:
    November 6th, 2008 at 2:55 pm

    MN has a HUGE problem finding decent Dem candidates. It’s clear that we consistently underperform in delivering a progressive agenda due to the caliber of the candidates we field. While I agree Franken’s not a great candidate (even though I think his policy positions are generally spot on), we quite seriously have no one, so we have to recruit big names. Amy Klobuchar won in large part because her family name has been huge here for decades – her dad is a very popular news columnist. I’m 40 and I’ve known the name Klobuchar as long as I can remember. If Tom Friedman or one of the Coen brothers moved back here and ran for office, they’d win. Franken’s much too divisive and acrid for the tastes of many in MN (though that may be the case with the Coen’s too – many MN-folk hated “Fargo” because they didn’t see the humor in it).

17. Erik Says:
    November 6th, 2008 at 3:46 pm

    I think here in NC, Dole had more of a reputation for “moderation” than she deserved. Her public persona was a bit to the left of soon-to-be-senior senator Burr (though her vote was usually the same), and far to the left of her predecessor Helms. Granted she didn’t have such a reputation for “independence” or “hard work,” especially after Hagan’s effective ads.

18. bridgie Says:
    November 6th, 2008 at 6:07 pm

    I’m a lifelong Oregonian and I completely disagree that Merkley’s seat is “safe”. He isn’t really well known here, despite his time as Speaker of the OR House, and he really only won because of Obama’s strength this year. Any other year, Smith would have beaten him handily. He ran a truly terrible campaign, all negativity & “kick out the bums” sentiment with no personal story of his own (which means no one really knows who he is at all, he’s just “Generic Democrat” this year), and for God’s sake, he barely even clinched the Dem nomination (over my personal hero Steve Novick) – in fact, if the DSCC hadn’t intervened to smear Novick, Merkley probably wouldn’t even have gotten the nomination. That is not a sign of a strong candidate. It just so happened Smith had some illegal immigration issues with his business in WA state, which hurt him really badly among some of his rural anti-immigrant supporters who voted for Constitution Party nominee David Brownlow.

    It will very much depend on how he does in the Senate, of course, but really, Oregon is NOT reliably Democratic in the way people seem to think it is. People from the East Coast tend not to understand the “independent” streak that runs through Western politics. People here really like to be contrarians – and they especially resent the sort of east coast bias that tells them things like “a Dem senator would never lose in Oregon”.

    I actually wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Merkley lose his seat if they ran a “good” Republican, especially if it was someone with roots in Multnomah County (well, that is, if I could think of a single Republican with roots in Multnomah County…).

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