Democrats would be okay if this were like 1994 — but it isn’t

The small things are what killed Democrats in 1994. There were many retirements in vulnerable districts, and the creation of minority-majority districts in the South had weakened many white southern Democrats. Some incumbents had had their seats altered substantially, and had only run in their newly-shaped district in 1992. Most importantly, no one really believed the GOP could pick up the 40 seats they needed to take control of the House, resulting in lazy incumbents who did not bother defining their opponents until it was too late.

So this year, Democrats sought to fix the little things that they ignored in 1994, without realizing that they were just the little things. They bragged that they had kept retirements in vulnerable districts to a minimum. Their freshmen raised prodigious sums of money – most of them were over $1 million by the end of the 2nd quarter. They conducted their opposition research early and went on the air in a timely matter.

But this is a different kind of election than 1994, entirely. When my lay friends ask about this election, I explain that it is like seeing Haley’s Comet; you’ll usually only get to see it once in your lifetime. The economy is sluggish, the President has pursued an ambitious, controversial agenda, and the party is badly overexposed, with numerous first- and second- term Democrats occupying districts that had been sending Republicans to Congress for decades. It is what 1974 would have been if the Republicans had had 257 seats, what 1966 would have been if unemployment had been five points higher, what 1958 would have been if Eisenhower had pushed to roll back the New Deal.