Peter Connelly has an interesting post up on the HuffPo about the effect of ideologues on the 2009 election year. Of course, its hard to accept his conclusion- that 2010 will be an “ideologically driven” election year- without countering that ideologues have basically dictated elections since 2000, and arguably since Reagan’s elections or the 1976 President elections, which was the first Presidential election in which the result was determined by evangelical “born again” Christian voters.
Still, Connelly makes some interesting points: that the pundits on either side were going to interpret the election results into their pre-determined narratives. The Democrats lost Virginia and New Jersey, according to Markos and FireDogLake’s Jane Hamsher, because they were not “liberal enough.” Yet according to FreedomWorks’ Dick Armey, the Republicans blamed the loss of New York’s upstate 23rd Congressional district on the faults of Constitution Party candidate Doug Hoffman who received support from the right-wing teabagger faction. This, despite the fact that the heavy influence provided by Armey and other outside interests effectively drove the Republican candidate out of the contest.
Connelly points out that incumbent Democrats kept their seats in favorable districts, such as John Garamendi’s seat near the San Francisco Bay area, questioning the anti-incumbency meme heading into the 2010 elections. Connelly also points out that anti-tax initiatives were defeated in the states of Washington and Maine, indicating that the results generated by the anti-tax teabaggers do not match the loudness of their rhetoric.
If there is an anti-incumbent trend in the 2010 elections, will the teabaggers’ cannibalization of Republican candidates nip in the bud this trend before it affects the composition of either the House or Senate? Who knows. Connelly is correct in that the 2010 elections will be decided by the ideologues on either side, and the losing side will blame everybody except themselves.
