Midwesterners Stand Firm on Gubernatorial, Congressional Races
Any of you that have watched even five minutes of a network news broadcast recently, let alone those of you that have enough patience to read all the way through one of my diatribes, know that many Democrats in Congressional battles nationwide are facing major league beatings. Whether it’s voter anger or resentment towards President Obama or just general voter apathy with the current majority party, it may be a bad time to be an incumbent, but it could be a worse time to be an incumbent Democrat.
According to two recent articles from Politico and the Wall Street Journal, it’s apparently worse yet to be a Democrat, incumbent or otherwise, in the Midwest.
On Sunday, Maggie Haberman wrote on the Politico’s website that “From Ohio to Iowa, there’s a yawning stretch of heartland states whose citizens voted for Obama and congressional Democrats in 2008, but who have lost patience waiting for an as-yet undelivered economic revival that was first promised in 2006, and then two years later.”
Pundits on both sides of the aisle seem to agree that the party of the donkey is in for a rough go of things in November in gubernatorial, House, and Senate races, even in what may seem like largely blue states like Ohio and Illinois. As Glen Bolger, a GOP pollster with Public Opinion Strategies (amusingly abbreviated as POS...OK, I thought it was funny), was quoted in Haberman’s article, “The Midwest is going to be a killing field for Democrats.”
OK, Glen. That was probably a wee bit of a crude comparison, but the point is certainly taken.
The problem for the Democratic Party, particularly in gubernatorial races in the Midwest, is that even their candidates that are running the best campaigns still seem to trail by considerable margins in recent polls. Take, for example, Ohio, where the incumbent Gov. Ted Strickland “isn’t even cracking 35 percent approval” according to recent Public Policy Polling surveys. This can’t be good for Strickland, who is already running seven percent behind his GOP challenger, former Rep. John Kasich, who was Chairman of the House Budget Committee after the “Republican Revolution” in 1996.
When you also factor into the mix the fallout from the recent corruption trial of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, low approval ratings for his successor, Pat Quinn, and Democrats running for governor in Iowa and the Senate in Indiana running as much as 20 percent behind their GOP opponents, it’s the proverbial recipe for disaster for the donkey.
And then there’s North Dakota.
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