One of the oddest aspects of the legislative splits of the 111th Congress is that we’ve heard a ton about the political risks run by Democratic members who represent McCain-friendly districts who vote for the Obama agenda, but basically nothing about the risks facing Republicans from Obama-friendly districts who vote for the GOP leadership’s agenda’s of blocking everything. Take, for example, Representative Mike Castle of Delaware. Barack Obama got 62 percent of the vote in his at-large district. John Kerry got 53 percent. Al Gore got 55 percent. Bill Clinton got 52 percent in 1996. Castle only survives in the House because he has a reputation as a moderate. What’s more, he’s planning on running for Joe Biden’s old Senate seat. To win this seat, he clearly needs to convince people that he wouldn’t just be a rubber-stamp for a national Republican Party that can’t win anything in Delaware. And yet here he is voting against health reform. A big risk!

Beyond Castle and Joseph Cao who voted “yes” there are 33 other House Republicans representing Obama districts. And there used to be 34 until the Democrats won the open, but previously GOP-held, NY-23 seat. Some of these were narrow, but a bunch went heavily for Obama. He won 58 percent of the vote in Jim Gerlach’s PA-6, while Gerlach won just 52 percent. Obama got 56 percent in WA-8, and 61 percent in Mark Kirk’s IL-10. Meanwhile Kirk, like Castle, is vacating his seat to run statewide in a blue state. Under normal conditions you expect a popular incumbent president to win more bipartisan support for his initiatives. But that’s precisely because under normal conditions you expect legislators in this kind of situation to be afraid of defying the president. After all, Obama continues to be much more popular than the Republican leaders to whom these blue districts House GOPers are being so slavishly loyal.

But what does it mean for the midterms:

In short, there’s no question that the GOP party brand is in worse shape than any opposition party in recent memory. The question, however, is whether this difference in party valence will (a) persist through next November and (b) translate into fewer GOP House seats at the polls, especially once we account for the generic Congressional ballot, which should (in principle) take much of this difference into account (see Alan Abramowitz’s model, for instance). Those questions remain to be addressed.

I would say the problem for Democrats is that the voters can’t coordinate their actions. A person who would like to see the congressional Democrats brought down a notch or two may vote Republicans even if he doesn’t really want to see John Boehner take over as Speaker—especially if he thinks a GOP takeover scenario is unlikely. But if a whole bunch of people do that, then the GOP does take over, whether or not that’s what people intended to have happen. Conversely, it’s possible that Democrats will be able to improve on their current generic ballot position by focusing voters’ attention on the possibility of a Republican takeover.

Bafumi, Erikson, and Wlezien’s analysis doesn’t go back before 300 days before the election, but if we take the liberty of extrapolating . . . The current state of the generic polls gives the Democrats .412/(.412+.377) = 52% of the two-party vote. Going to the graph, we see, first, that 52% for the Democrats is near historic lows (comparable to 1946, 1994, and 1998) and that the expected Democratic vote–given that their party holds the White House–is around -3%, or a 53-47 popular vote win for the Republicans.

Would 53% of the popular vote be enough for the Republicans to win a House majority? A quick look, based on my analysis with John Kastellec and Jamie Chandler of seats and votes in Congress, suggests yes.

Looked at this way, Democrats had better hope the economic situation starts improving (in the sense of conditions actually improving, rather than rate of change looking better) and that improvement starts lifting their fortunes. Alternatively, an optimistic congressional Democrat could try to take solace in the extreme unpopularity of the GOP. But I actually wouldn’t count on that. The electorate’s first choice may be for the Democrats to lose seats without John Boehner becoming Speaker, but individual voters have no way to ensure that their preferences are aggregated that way.

After an August recess marked by raucous town halls, troubling polling data and widespread anecdotal evidence of a volatile electorate, the small universe of political analysts who closely follow House races is predicting moderate to heavy Democratic losses in 2010.

Some of the most prominent and respected handicappers can now envision an election in which Democrats suffer double-digit losses in the House — not enough to provide the 40 seats necessary to return the GOP to power but enough to put them within striking distance.

I think it’s important to have the proper perspective on this stuff. The political system has a tendency in the direction of parity. Consequently, any party currently enjoying a large majority should expect losses in the next election. At the moment, virtually every left-of-center congressional district is already in the hands of a Democrat (the seats held by Reps Joseph Cao and Mike Castle are the main exceptions) while many right-of-center districts aren’t currently represented by Republicans. So the GOP will probably pick up seats. What’s more, the President’s party usually loses seats in midterms.

Nate Silver has a useful chart reminding us of this:

Even popular presidents usually lose seats. So Democrats will almost certainly lose seats. But that shouldn’t be taken as evidence that some kind of fiasco is looming—the loss of seats is something that can and should be taken in stride. The loss of the House majority, by contrast, would be a huge deal. But nobody seems to think that’s in the cards at this point.

From this picture, it looks possible but unlikely that there will be a 6% swing toward the Republicans (which is what it would take for them to bring their average district vote from 44% to 50%). Historically speaking, a 6% swing is a lot. The biggest shifts in the past few decades appear to be 1946-48, 1956-58, and 1972-74 (in favor of the Democrats) and 1964-66 and 1992-194 (for the Republicans). I don’t know if any of these would quite be enough to swing the House majority. A more likely outcome, if the Republicans indeed improve in next year’s election, is for them to make some gains but still be in the minority.

It is worth noting, as you can see from the chart, that in recent years there have been several occasions in the late-1990s in which Democrats won a narrow majority of House votes but the GOP controlled the majority of House seats. The drawing of district lines thus seems to favor Republicans. Since the lines will be redone after 2010, the electoral landscape may come to be more favorable for the Democrats once the census/redistricting process is done.

Rep Joseph Cao (R-LA)

It’s part of the nature of things that the more seats you hold in the House of Representatives the more likely you are to lose ground in the next election. With Democrats holding a majority, in other words, by definition a lot of Democrats are representing more-conservative-than-average districts. Nevertheless, CQ reports that the 2010 outlook for Democrats actually looks pretty good and “The only three contests in which CQ Politics rates an advantage to the challenging party are all for seats now held by the Republicans and targeted by the Democrats.” Leading the way is Rep Joseph Cao of New Orleans who’ll face the challenge of running against someone who’s not the scandal-plagued William Jefferson.

Meanwhile, the geography of the 2010 Senate races is also highly favorable to the Democrats. And given the contrast between ironclad discipline on the GOP side and the “anything goes” attitude on the Democratic side, it looks like for a while yet we may be in a California-style dynamic where Republicans can’t win elections but Democrats can’t actually pass a governing agenda.

Interviews with a dozen Republicans running for Senate seats across the country failed to find one candidate who was willing to offer a clear position, despite the two months of public debate since President Obama picked Sotomayor for the high court.

It doesn’t actually seem like a very hard question.

Among developed countries Germany is expected to take the biggest hit. Canada is in relatively good shape. If I were an incumbent U.S. Senator running for re-election in 2010 I would be terrified by these projections.

Thus far, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) doesn’t have an announced opponent in 2010, but one possible candidate would be North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper. And even if Cooper doesn’t throw his hat in the ring, this is not the polling an incumbent likes to see:

In a recent poll of nearly one thousand voters across the state, Attorney General Cooper, a Democrat, leads Burr by four points in a hypothetical Senate race. NewsChannel3 asked Cooper if he will run for Burr’s Senate seat. “No, I have not made a decision on that. I want to serve the people of North Carolina and just need to determine the best way to do that.”

Given that Obama carried North Carolina, and that Burr doesn’t seem very popular, I find it surprising that Burr doesn’t seem to be trying harder to find a high-profile issue on which he can buck his party and partner with the president. Certainly, blanket opposition is a novel strategy under the circumstances.

Richard Burr continues to be dogged by complaints about his irresponsible rhetoric on bank deposits, and his allies, such as Richard Danos, chairman of the Henderson County Republican Party, continue to dissemble about what he said:

The Times-News reported that as part of an economic talk to the County Chamber of Commerce, Burr told of urging his wife to withdraw some cash from their ATM during the banking crisis — a story he has repeated dozens of times. Many Americans took out some extra cash as a common sense precaution during that period.

Look. People withdraw cash from ATMs all the time. That would be a ridiculous anecdote to tell. Here’s what he actually said:

“On Friday night, I called my wife and I said, ‘Brooke, I am not coming home this weekend. I will call you on Monday. Tonight, I want you to go to the ATM machine, and I want you to draw out everything it will let you take,” Burr said, according to the Hendersonville Times-News. “And I want you to tomorrow, and I want you to go Sunday.’ I was convinced on Friday night that if you put a plastic card in an ATM machine the last thing you were going to get was cash.”

This is Burr, implying to his audience, that their bank deposits are not safe. In fact, bank deposits are insured by the FDIC. This is supposed to give people confidence that they need to have these kind of fears, and thus prevent bank runs. And with few bank runs, there’s little need for the FDIC to actually step in. When Burr implies that the deposits are not safe, he’s encouraging runs on banks. That won’t lead to anyone losing their deposits—whether or not Burr understands it, the deposits are insured—but it will lead to losses for taxpayers who need to pay out insurance claims, and it will lead to bank failures and job losses.

This isn’t a huge deal, in the scheme of things, but it was an irresponsible thing to say. Burr and his friends should just take responsibility and move on.

“That’s going to be real hard, to be honest with you,” Cornyn said of keeping Democrats from reaching 60 seats, adding: “Everybody who runs could be the potential tipping point to get Democrats to 60. We’ve not only got to play defense; we’ve got to claw our way back in 2010. It’ll be a huge challenge.”

So far this cycle, Republicans have been faced with retirements in four swing states, emerging primaries against at least three of their members and a map that, after two cycles of big GOP losses, continues to favor Democrats.

After losing ground in 2006, you might have expected Republicans to start distancing themselves from the hugely unpopular president and his failed conservative policies. Instead, the caucus held remarkably firm behind Bush’s agenda. And then they lost a bunch of additional seats in 2008. At this point you again might have expected them to start acting conciliatory. But they haven’t been. Which might lead you to suspect that they have some kind of secret master plan to explain why this makes sense. But, clearly, they don’t—Cornyn acknowledges that his side is likely to lose more seats.

Dave Weigel takes an informative look inside Arlen Specter’s pre-primary efforts to remake himself into a more conservative figure, the better to fend off a strong challenge from former Congressman Pat Toomey. The basic gist of Specter, as I understand it, is that Pennsylvania conservative see him as fundamentally a liberal squish who dashes right whenever he’s facing a challenge from the right. Pennsylvania progressives, meanwhile, see him as fundamentally a conservative who dashes left whenever he’s facing a challenge from the left. Everyone hates him, in other words, except the voters of Pennsylvania who seem to like him just fine.

The fundamental situation looks quite good for Toomey to me. He almost beat Specter in 2004 at a time when a very popular conservative incumbent president was strongly backing the more moderate choice. Without those kinds of friends in high places to back him up, Specter should be in big trouble. The question then becomes whether or not a top-tier Democrat will emerge to run against Toomey. There’s no real evidence that an orthodox conservative can win in Pennsylvania anymore than an orthodox conservative could win in Maryland or Delaware or New Jersey. But Specter is hugely popular so PA Democrats haven’t been clamoring to get into a hard-to-win race against him. Toomey, by contrast, would be very beatable if a solid candidate emerged.

Pat Toomey nearly beat Arlen Specter in a 2004 primary. Earlier this year, he ruled out another primary challenge to Pennsylvania’s senior senator, but more recently he’s been ruling it back in. This sets up an interesting dilemma that Dave Weigel explains:

A weekend poll showed that 66 percent of Republicans, boiling over in anti-stimulus anger, would support replacing Specter. But only 42 percent of Democrats oppose Specter. A slight plurality of Democrats want to keep him, and that’s complicating Democratic efforts to find a first-tier challenger against the senator.

In 2004, Specter benefitted from the support of unions like the AFL-CIO. If Specter votes for the Employee Free Choice Act, he knows he will probably win union support that’s crucial for the general election while firing the starting gun for conservative groups who are only really useful to him in the primary.

In the 2007-2008 congress Specter, no doubt in part as a token of appreciation for that AFL-CIO support, was the lone Republican to back EFCA. If he votes for it again this congress, it’ll be tough for him to win the primary. But if he votes against it, I think he’ll find it tough to win the general election when his support from Democratic-leaning interest groups vanishes. I doubt Specter will avail himself of this option, but the obvious solution would be to stick to his guns on EFCA and follow up his support for the stimulus by switching parties and, like Jim Jeffords, reposition ideologically somewhat. In other words, stop being a vulnerable moderate Republican and become a plain-vanilla Democrat with a safe seat. It would be pretty easy for Specter, as a Democrat, to beat GOP nominee Toomey in a general election. But beating Toomey in a primary without becoming too right-wing to carry the state will be tough.

I’m not really an admirer of America’s system of loose party discipline, so I have a real respect for the House Republicans’ determination to hang together. Still, I find it puzzling. The loose discipline system is an outgrowth of objective elements of the electoral system, not the personal attributes of politicians. Strong incentives would seem to exist for not pulling this kind of stunt:

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine asked Virginia’s members of Congress to come to Richmond to discuss the state’s federal stimulus package needs, but all five of the state’s Republican Congressmen were absent. [...] They also discussed strategy for countering the Pentagon’s plans to move an aircraft carrier group from its mooring in Norfolk to Mayport, Fla. [...] Not only did U.S. Reps. Eric Cantor, Robert Goodlatte, Frank Wolf, Randy Forbes and Rob Wittman not attend, they didn’t even send aides to represent them.

The Virginia GOP has been taking a beating in the past few cycles, and this kind of thing—simply refusing to try to work with the state’s governor and the president to take care of the state’s needs—isn’t going to help. As I say, I respect it. The tendency of legislators to put their responsibilities to the idiosyncratic needs of their districts over broader questions of principle is annoying to an ideologue like me. But there’s a reason legislators normally act that way.  

The AP reports:

Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius was near the top of President Barack Obama’s list of candidates to head the Health and Human Services Department, a senior administration official said Saturday.

The source, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private administration deliberations, said no decision was imminent and that other candidates remain in the mix. But the official added the former Kansas insurance commissioner was rising as Obama considers prospective candidates, in no small part on the strength of her close relationship with the president.

Sebelius would be an excellent Secretary. But as with Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, I also think she could be an excellent United States Senator. And in Kansas, even more so than in Arizona, the second-best potential candidate is probably a good deal weaker. Of course cabinet positions aren’t inconsistent with Senate runs, but the timing doesn’t look great to me in either of these situations. And one thing we’re learning is that President Obama’s ability to deliver on a progressive agenda depends at least as much on the outlook in the Senate as it does on the quality of his team.

The president’s supporters need to be able to point to a situation that’s clearly improving. The Clinton years are remembered as good economic times—we’ve never again enjoyed living standards as high as those that prevailed in 1998-2000—but the political struggles of the early Clinton years had a lot to do with the fact that economic recovery remained anemic through the first couple of years of his administration.

But perhaps more interesting is what impact this will have on Voinovich’s voting in the 111th Senate. Along with Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter, Voinovich is a guy who you’d consider one of the “most likely to defect” Senators in order to help progressive bills overcome conservative filibuster efforts. But absent a re-election campaign, he won’t be torn between a need to play to the base to raise funds and a need to tack to the middle to get votes. He can just do what he wants. But nobody’s quite sure what that’ll be.

Senator Kit Bond (R-MO) has decided to retire rather than seek re-election in 2010. This is one of those seats that’s probably safe in the hands of the incumbent, but potentially up for grabs as an open seat. Dave Weigel observes that the leading candidates will be Secretary of State Robin Carnahan on the Democratic side and Lieutenant Governor Peter Kinder, the only non-Bond GOP statewide official. There are also a passel of House Republicans who could make a play for the seat.

Of course a big factor here is going to be how things look in 2010. John McCain carried Missouri very narrowly last fall. Extrapolating from Barack Obama’s large “transition bounce” you’ve got to figure he’s pretty popular in the state right now and a Democrat would have good chances. If there are clear signs of a recovery by 2010, that’ll still be the case but if we’re in economic doldrums not so much.

There’s some interest in what becoming Homeland Security Secretary would mean for Janet Napolitano’s prospects as a Senate candidate. I would imagine that it will only mean good things. Nothing about running DHS prevents her from running for Senate in 2010 or, indeed, from running against John Kyl in 2012. Indeed, being at DHS is probably better to set up a 2012 run, and given that John McCain says he’s not retiring, that’s her better shot.

But beyond all that, note that she’s getting out as governor of Arizona while the going is still good. Being a governor of any state in 2009 is going to be ugly. It’s going to be all about cutting spending and raising taxes, while dealing with increased demand for public assistance and in all likelihood rising crime rates. Arizona was a major real estate bubble state, so it’s going to be especially unfun. It’s also a state that’s been in some respects benefiting economically from the war in Iraq, making things even worse. She’s very popular right now, though, and if she gets out and manages to bring about some improvements at DHS she’ll stay popular.

I’d been assuming that John McCain wouldn’t run for Senate again in 2010. For one thing, defeated presidential nominees tend not to want to hang around the halls of the Senate (witness John Kerry’s desperate quest for a cabinet position). For another thing, he’s really old — if he gets re-elected in 2010, he’ll be eighty by the time the term ends. On top of which, he has a really great life — eight houses, thirteen cars, all the rest. Why not enjoy it?

Lurking in the background as the obvious challenger is Arizona governor Janet Napolitano who got re-elected in 2006 and is broadly popular in the state. Of course, McCain’s popular, too. It’d be an interesting matchup to watch. Despite his long service in congress, the 2008 presidential election was the first time in his life that he faced a competitive race against a Democrat (he had a tough primary to get into the House, and of course noteworthy primary campaigns in 2000 and 2008). It didn’t go very well. 2010 would be a second bite at the apple.