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Politico
Battle lines for 2014
midterms are drawn
By Alex Isenstadt
10/29/13
The 2014 midterm just got a
lot more interesting.
The twin dramas of the
government shutdown and botched rollout of Obamacare have snapped a
sleepy 2014 election season out of its slumber, sharpening the battle
lines for each party and setting the stage for a consequential
midterm that few expected even two months ago.
The spring and summer
months were filled with charges and countercharges about the Internal
Revenue Service, wiretapping, Syria and immigration. Politicians
recycled old attack lines and operatives confidently predicted
control of Congress would remain status quo after next November.
No more. The parties’
competing political narratives — the dangers of a tea
party-controlled party versus the perils of President Barack Obama’s
far-reaching health care law — have been thrown into sharp relief
the past several weeks. Now each party has something tangible to
point to — that touch voters’ lives in concrete ways — to argue
that the other should be booted from office.
Republican lawmakers who
seemed safe are suddenly looking over their shoulders, and Democrats
whose election hopes were buoyed by the shutdown have been brought
back to earth by the Obamacare mess.
Democrats still intend to
run against what they call Republican extremism, as they did in 2012.
But Republicans’ willingness to shut down the government and bring
the nation to the cusp of default, they say, has shown the public
what the tea party’s agenda means in real life — government
workers paid to sit home for weeks, shuttered national parks, 401(k)
accounts at risk.
It’s a similar story with
Republicans and Obamacare.
The GOP still plans to make
Obamacare a centerpiece of its midterm strategy — tying Democratic
candidates in close Senate and House races to the sweeping law — as
it did in 2012. But the glitch-riddled unveiling of the Obamacare
website, they say, has handed them a powerful piece of evidence to
make the case that the federal government should never have thrown
itself into the health care business in the first place. And they
expect the next year to bring more stories of the law sticking people
and businesses with bigger health care bills.
“That’s going to be the
battleground,” said Wes Anderson, a Republican pollster. “Which
message is going to be the most salient to voters in the middle? Is
it that Republicans are too extreme or that we need to protect the
public on Obamacare?”
Democrats believe their
anti-tea party message will resonate throughout the country, in every
state and congressional district. With the tea party’s brand deep
in decline, they argue that post-shutdown anger extends to even the
most conservative corners of the country.
For the rest of this
article and more, go to Politico
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