Say what you like about Howard Dean, but you can’t argue with the results: took back the House, took back the Senate, and so far, 3 for 3 in special elections, each one in a more conservative district than the last. Tuesday night, it was Mississippi-1st, a district Bush carried with 62% in 2004, a district that had a Republican incumbent previously, where the National Republican Congressional Committee dumped over a million dollars, where they ran ads tying the nominee to Obama, to Jeremiah Wright, to everything but Osama Bin Laden.
The Democrat won by 8%.
Now, Howard Dean didn’t make Bush as popular as herpes, or hang the economy around the GOP’s neck like an albatross, or stretch the Iraq war out to five years and counting. But because he stuck to his guns on the 50-state strategy, when all that happened, the mechanisms were in place to capitalize on them. And as a result, the GOP has dipped below 200 seats in the House for the first time since…well, it would have to be before 1994 at least.
When you can’t even win by playing the “crazy colored preacher hates America!” card in Mississippi, you are in what we political scientists refer to as “deep deep shit.” Alan Abramowitz (who interviewed me on my official visit at Emory back in the Triassic Era) has put together a 3-part test based on a matrix of GDP growth, net approval rating (approve minus disapprove), and whether the incumbent party has 8 or more consecutive years in control, and right now, his model predicts a 14-point margin of Democratic victory. Now obviously, there’s plenty of time for the economy (and the perception of same) to change, or for the approval rating ratio to improve, but whoever’s running things at the RNC will go to bed tonight puckered tight enough to crap diamonds.