Will 2014 in effect be the Seinfeld election?
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The Washington Post reports that unlike in previous mid-terms elections, this election is turning out to be an election about nothing, and also an election about everything. Yes believe it, and don’t believe it:
Ask voters in North Carolina’s Research Triangle what November’s midterm elections are about and one will tell you drones. A second will say closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Yet another, the middle-class squeeze.
At a Sunday school classroom in Ypsilanti, Mich., voters are concerned about deteriorating roads, teen sex parties, truancy in schools and violent crime. Six hundred miles west at a Republican campaign office in Urbandale, Iowa, people fear that America is on an irreversible decline — like Germany after World War I, as one man predicted.
Across Colorado, voters are thinking about a whole other set of concerns — veterans’ care, driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, the soaring cost of housing, the erosion of Christian conservative values, Russia’s rise, and fracking.
This is an election about nothing — and everything. Unlike in previous midterm election years, no dominant national theme has emerged for the 2014 campaign, according to public opinion surveys as well as interviews last week with scores of voters in five key states and with dozens of politicians and party strategists.
Which means: yes, Democrats should brace themselves because traditionally a party that holds the White House for a second term has a terrible mid-term election two years before the President leaves office. And polls — despite the tiresome rejection of them by some partisans who’ll point to methodology when they don’t like a poll and tout it to the four corners of North America if they like it — show Democrats in a perilous position. But wait! You really can’t predict…
Even without a single salient issue, a heavy cloud of economic anxiety and general unease is hanging over the fiercely partisan debate. Listening to voters, you hear a downbeat tone to everything political — the nation’s economy, infrastructure and schools; the crises flaring around the world; the evolving culture wars at home; immigration laws; President Obama and other elected leaders in Washington.
Many Americans would like to scream “A pox on both your houses,” but don’t, perhaps out of fear that Homeland Security would arrest them for making a terrorist threat.
This isn’t small potatoes: this mid-term is shaping up as different, the Post reports:
Over the past 20 years, every midterm election has had a driving theme. In 1994, Newt Gingrich led Republicans to power in a backlash against President Clinton’s domestic agenda. In 1998, it was a rebuke to Republicans for their drive to impeach Clinton. Terrorism motivated voters in 2002, while anger over the Iraq war propelled Democratic gains in 2006. And 2010 turned into an indictment of Obama’s economic stewardship and, for many, his health-care plan.
As long as it has been polling, Gallup has asked voters to state their “most important problem.” For the first midterm cycle since 1998, no single issue registers with more than 20 percent of voters. Immigration was the top concern for 17 percent of those Gallup surveyed in July, while 16 percent said government dissatisfaction and 15 percent the economy.
The result could be an especially unpredictable final 12 weeks of the campaign. With voter turnout expected to be low and several big races virtually tied, campaigns everywhere are searching for pressure points — by taking advantage of news events or colorful and, at times, highly parochial issues — to motivate their base voters to go to the polls.
For both parties it’s going to be about getting out their base.
And the basest of politics results when parties hit the partisan panic buttons to get out their base.
The lack of a dominant issue also means that campaigns could be more susceptible than in other years to events this fall. Republicans believe, for instance, that if Obama signs an executive order granting legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants, as White House officials have indicated he might, it will create a huge backlash against Democrats.
On the other hand, it might motivate Latino voters go get out to vote in huge numbers as they heard angry Republican backlash and the inevitable hype for impeachment that would start in talk radio and spread to Fox News, then to the internet echo chamber (blogs).
And after a summer dominated by problems around the globe — a downed plane in Ukraine, war in the Middle East and the return of U.S. bombs in Iraq — continued trouble abroad could further dampen support for the president and his party.
There is hope in the uncertainty for both parties. Democrats believe they have an opening to use wedge issues, such as same-sex marriage, access to birth control and abortion, to rally opposition against Republicans. Republicans, meanwhile, see the potential to expand their opportunities and turn what they expect to be a good year into a great one.
“It’s like a close basketball game and then something happens, there is a breakaway, and it goes from a three- to four-point game to a 10-point win,” Republican strategist Ed Rollins said.
And it is a game.
To everyone but Americans who need actual solutions and governance.
Our campaigns are increasing predictable “yada, yada, yada…”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.