Dems brace for Election Day losses

Democratic strategists are prepared to lose all three major electoral contests on Tuesday as Republican candidates showed momentum in the final day of campaigning.

Last week, strategists said they thought Dems would win one of Tuesday’s three marquee match-ups, which include governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia and a contest for a New York House seat.

Those assertions have given way to arguments that off-year contests are never good for the party that controls the White House — an implicit admission, aided by late polls, that the party is likely to lose all three races.

Polls over the weekend showed former Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell (R) maintaining a steady lead over state Sen. Creigh Deeds (D). In New Jersey, late polls showed former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie (R) with momentum, retaking a lead he lost last week to Gov. Jon Corzine (D).

And thanks to a collapsed Republican candidate and the GOP unifying around Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman, late polls in the race to fill Army Secretary John McHugh’s old House seat show Hoffman leading attorney Bill Owens (D).

“I don’t think there’s a whole lot of lessons that we’ll take away from the 2009 elections,” said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who worked for President Barack Obama’s campaign. “We’re not putting our heads in the sand.”

Off-year governors’s race don’t always predict the next cycle’s congressional campaigns.

In 2001, when George W. Bush was in office, Democrats won GOP-held governorships in both New Jersey and Virginia. And the next year Republicans picked up eight seats in the House and two seats in the Senate.

In 1997, when Bill Clinton was in the White House, Republicans won both governorships. And the next year, Democrats picked up five seats in the House, while the Senate’s makeup remained unchanged.

Dems have their spin ready: McDonnell is a far more talented candidate who did not have a bruising primary, while Deeds ran a poor campaign. Corzine’s unpopularity proved too much to overcome. And McHugh’s seat should never have been in play in the first place; no Democrat has held it for a century.

But key elements of Obama’s ambitious agenda pending in Congress could be at risk. If centrist Democrats, who have delayed healthcare reform’s progress, get scared by the election results, party leadership may have to spend valuable time getting them back on board.

The most important thing, strategists said, is to maintain perspective.

“There’s reality and there’s psychology. The reality is that 2009 says nothing about 2010. It says a lot about 2009,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster and columnist for The Hill. “If the congressional election were in 2009, Democrats would be in pretty deep trouble. The good news: [The midterm is] not in 2009, it’s in 2010.”

Still, the party is determined to learn something from what would otherwise be an across-the-board defeat, and insiders say it has settled on three lessons. The first is that Obama’s turnout machine, which operated so effectively a year ago, needs to be replicated by House Democrats if they are to avoid big losses next year.

“Our big challenge, in 2010, is to convert some of these surge voters and first-time voters to the polls,” Anzalone said. If Democrats add just one in five voters who cast ballots in presidential years but not midterms, along with those who voted for the first time in 2008, “you become golden.”

“Our base is halfway motivated. You know, one day they’re going to be up and one day they’re going to be down,” said a senior House Democratic aide. “We’ve got to have our base ginned up and excited.”

Democrats say the way to avoid a sweep similar to the one House Republicans executed in 1994 is not to slow down healthcare reform, but to speed it up.

Failure to pass a reform bill means the specter would still be up for debate — a debate that puts Democrats in a precarious political situation — next year. That, many Democrats said, would be a bigger political liability than simply passing the bill.

“Passing healthcare means getting it off the table,” said one top aide to a Democratic freshman who will face a tough reelection fight next year. “If we don’t pass it, we’re going to get swept away. It has to pass.”

Finally, Democrats say they need to follow Corzine’s lead and become more aggressive in defining their opponents. Corzine’s terrible approval ratings meant his only path to victory was in vilifying Christie. (Christie’s own favorable ratings are a net negative, according to most polls.)

Freshman Democrats will be advised to take up Corzine’s strategy, only earlier. They will have to be aggressive about defining their opponents, the leadership aide said, calling Corzine’s technique “instructive.”

Mellman said Democrats are right to worry “because worry in this case leads to action.” But, he argued, holding the seats the party currently holds will give incumbents an advantage that Republicans cannot enjoy.

“People aren’t going to be riding the same kind of wave that they rode in 2006 and 2008, but incumbents have the ability to expand their constituencies in significant ways,” he said. “The fact that these folks are running as incumbents now puts them in a much stronger position.”