Okay, so as expected, Republicans are on track to take back the House by what appear to be very big margins.
There's no quibbling with it: In pure political terms, Republicans deserve major props for their performance. Whatever you think of their ideas and the strategies they were willing to employ to retake power, they have proven themselves to be a tough, very tenacious bunch who showed bottomless political stamina in fighting for what they appear to believe in and in doing what it took to fight back from the dead.
Consider how dark the landscape must have looked for Republicans in the winter of 2009, amid the euphoria greeting Obama's victory and the Dems' second straight big Congressional win in a row. Though there was a brief flirtation with the idea that the only way out of the wilderness was working with Obama, the stimulus drove them to settle on a strategy that has, quite simply, worked brilliantly.
Republicans calculated correctly that if they cast themselves as an across-the-board check against runaway Dem spending, the electorate would over time forgive their past failings and overlook their unwillingness to compromise as voters turned on Dems, particularly if Dems got drawn into a long, bruising fight over health care and the economy didn't improve.
This was not easy to foresee at the time. People were widely predicting that Republicans were condemning themselves to an eternity as a regional party. But their patience worked. The Tea Party deserves credit, too. For all its excesses and disorganization, it got its voice heard. And surely it played a key role in persuading Republicans to stiffen their spines and hold the line against Dem policies.
Here's hoping that Dems take a lesson from the GOP's refusal to compromise and refusal to tack to the "center" as they orchestrated their comeback.
A take on what this means for Dems coming soon.
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