The Post-Mortems Begin

Nate Silver asks "How did the Democrats get here?"

We talked this morning about the Democrats’ poor electoral position — already shaky, it is probably now deteriorating further — but we haven’t talked as much about why they’re in this predicament. This is for a good reason: once you get past the premise that the state of the economy plays a large role (something that pretty much everyone would agree with) this is a very difficult question to answer.

The reasons for the Democrats’ decline are, as we say in the business, overdetermined. That is, there are no lack of hypotheses to explain it: lots of causes for this one effect. The economy? Sure. Unpopular legislation like health care? Yep. Some “bad luck” events like the Gulf Oil Spill? Mmm-hmm. The new energy breathed into conservatives by the Tea Party movement? Uh-huh.

And this hardly exhausts the theories. An inexperienced White House which has sometimes been surprisingly inept at coping with the 24/7 media cycle? The poor optics associated with Democrats having had a filibuster-proof majority in theory, but not always in practice? All of the above.

These causes can’t be so easily untangled on the basis of polling evidence; there’s really no basis on which to evaluate the competing hypotheses. This is particularly so given that different types of political events aren’t isolated from one another — health care might have been unpopular, for instance, but the reason for its unpopularity may ultimately have been the economy.

Nate's touching the actual reason, but argues that it's a number of reasons, objectively.  Of course, from the Jane Hamsher/Firebagger perspective, only one thing mattered.

Rather than focus on jobs creation in a country with climbing unemployment rates, Obama spent the better part of a year focused on passing a health care bill that looks like it will play no small part in the Democratic Party’s upcoming electoral woes.

Well, we warned you.

Jane's wrong too in a sense but she too is close.   Steve M. has a good point on this.

But I don't think it's the specifics of the bill that are hurting the Democrats. They didn't have the firepower to defend any bill, and didn't realize they needed firepower.

And I also think it's the failure on jobs that's really killing Democrats. If jobs were coming back, Democrats would hold the House and Senate this fall, health care bill or not.

And again this is close but not the answer.

That of course was the fact that the stimulus was too small to get the economy back on track.  I've been saying that for 18 months now, and all the woes that Obama and the Democrats are going through can be directly traced back to half-assing the stimulus package in order to get something...anything...passed.  The car got halfway up the hill, and now it's sliding back down towards that ditch.  If the stimulus had been larger at the outset, it may have worked.  We'll never know.

Conventional Wisdom says the problem will soon belong back to the Republicans, at any rate.