Election 2014: Maybe the Kids Are Alright After All

Today on NRO

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Refusing to acknowledge failure didn’t make it go away. Democrats’ Waterloo.

ELIANA JOHNSON: How Larry Hogan did the impossible in Maryland. Anatomy of an Upset.

YUVAL LEVIN: It’s time to set an agenda, not pretend to “govern.” A Republican Congress.

PATRICK BRENNAN: Did the midterm electorate like liberal policies? Dems Aren’t Really Winning on the Minimum Wage.

KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON: A real-resources agenda for the GOP majority. With Energy, More Is More.

JOHN BERLAU: Why is a life insurer now too-big-to-fail? Obama’s Peanut-Brained Attack on Metlife.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

November 6, 2014

Election 2014: Maybe the Kids Are Alright After All

In 2012, voters from 18 to 29 made up 20 percent of the electorate in Colorado. That year, Colorado voters legalized marijuana through a popular initiative.

In 2014, voters from 18 to 29 made up 14 percent of the electorate in Colorado.

Hm. Once you legalize marijuana, the youth vote drops. Perhaps I have been completely off base in my wariness about legalizing weed. Heck, give it away for free on college campuses in early November!

Another point about the Millennials — Republicans do badly among the older half, somewhat better among the younger half. Apparently it makes a big difference whether you politically came of age during the era of “Hope and Change” from 2007 to 2009, say, or the rest of the Obama presidency. This analysis of the exit-poll data tells the familiar story:

Overall, young voters were more likely to show up at the polls and more likely to cast their ballots for Republicans than they were in 2010.

With the exception of Arkansas, where the GOP nominated a likeable 37 year-old candidate, the youngest voters within our demographic (18-24) were more likely to vote Republican than the older ones (25-29). This confirms a trend we observed in 2012 and 2013: first-time voters who supported Barack Obama in 2008 have been somewhat loyal to his party, while their younger siblings and those who came of voting age during the Obama presidency have largely turned away from Democrats in the face of crippling student loan debt and the highest sustained youth unemployment levels since World War II.

Stop Kidding Yourselves, Media. The Midterms Are Not Good News for Hillary Clinton.

Remember how the media often covers major events through the lens of, “but what does this mean for Obama?” Out of all the possible angles or ways to frame a story, national press habitually views major events, legislative fights, foreign-policy crises, and national controversies as if they’re as plot twists in an episode of The West Wing and particularly good or bad turns of fortune for the president — as opposed to how these events impact the nation as a whole.

Get ready for two years of, “But what does this mean for Hillary?”

The Washington Post: “Why the Senate GOP takeover might actually help Hillary Clinton”

Yahoo: “How Hillary Clinton Won the 2014 Midterms”

Part of that Yahoo piece:

In the last six elections, 18 states (plus Washington, D.C.) have voted for the Democratic candidate every single time.

This means that Clinton, assuming she’s the nominee, will start out with 242 electoral votes in 2016; she’ll need only 28 of the remaining 183 tossups to win the election.

Yes, but that was every bit as true before the midterm elections as it is today. That doesn’t make her the winner, as the headline asserts.

Let’s get something clear: Watching your party get stomped like a narc at a biker rally* in a midterm election is not something that helps a party’s presidential front-runner. In theory, the Republicans belly-flopping in the 1998 midterms helped convince a lot of GOP thinkers that the next nominee had to have no tie to Washington or Congress, which helped set the stage for George W. Bush. But it’s not like a good midterm election for the GOP that year would have ruined Bush’s odds of winning the nomination or the presidency.

America is not happy with Washington, and particularly furious with the Obama administration and Democratic-party governance as a whole. Republicans are now governors of 31 states. There really isn’t a way to interpret that as a vast, national yearning for “President Hillary Clinton.”

Looking back at the past four cycles — 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2014 — we see a coalition of African Americans, Hispanics, young voters, gays, and single women that come out in droves in the years Obama is atop the ticket . . . and doesn’t come out in any other circumstance so far. Will those groups come out in huge numbers for Hillary Clinton? It’s an open question. Maybe the single women and gays do, but not the African Americans and Hispanics. The Millennials seem pretty iffy.

Does that coalition come out just in presidential years? Or just in presidential years with a rock-star, pop-culture celebrity candidate like Obama? Or just for Obama himself? If you know the answer to that question, you know who will win in 2016.

Whether she likes it or not, Hillary’s odds of election are tied greatly to how the country feels about the current president. If he’s thriving — with a Republican Congress — maybe she’ll be able to run as the natural successor. But, more likely, if there’s gridlock, she’ll have to either explicitly run against his vetoes, creating more tension within the parties, or agree with them and become a vote to continue the status quo of gridlock.

GOP adviser Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, said the notion that an all-Republican Congress is good for Clinton will not bear out.

“I don’t buy it,” he said, because Congress will pass legislation that Obama will then veto, and that will not leave Clinton much running room. “What’s she going to say? ‘I would have vetoed it, too, so I’m going to be the third term of Barack Obama’?”

It’s possible — in fact, pretty likely — that two years from now, voters are disappointed, frustrated, or angry with the results of a government run by President Obama, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, and House speaker John Boehner. How that translates to a national appetite for Hillary Clinton isn’t quite clear. She’s old, a Washington fixture since 1993, a thoroughly uncreative policy thinker, closely tied to both the D.C. establishment and Wall Street, and a key player in an administration foreign policy in a world on fire.

In other words, there’s an excellent chance that 2016 is yet another year where the American electorate wants change — and it’s going to be exceptionally difficult for her to position herself as the candidate of change.

She did benefit from 2014 in one way, however.

Maryland electing Larry Hogan their next governor — by five points! — ruins the presidential ambitions of Martin O’Malley. But you know what had already ruined the presidential ambitions of Martin O’Malley? Martin O’Malley.

*Thank you, Dennis Miller.

Face It, Washington Media. We Have a Petulant Narcissist in the Oval Office.

Ace, with some truth-bombs:

Whenever [the media] need to complain about [Obama’s] failure, they will only do so on two grounds.

The first ground, which we saw in that Politico piece the other day, the big one about Obama's "detachment" and "depression," is that Obama, nobly, despises the "Theatrical" aspects of his job.

That is, he won't play the Actor, oozing false sentiment.

This is as complimentary a "criticism" as one could hope to bestow -- he's too honest to be a great leader!!!

The second ground — which the New York Times spends the entire rest of the article fleshing out — is that Obama doesn't care to "schmooze" with his allies in Congress.

Again, this "criticism" is pretty much a compliment. Again, the criticism directed at Obama is that he is too honest and can't abide the bull****.

The actual truth is that Obama simply doesn't do his job, because he is lazy, and he refuses to do the non-glamorous, non-"fun" parts of his job such as compromising, horse-trading, or working out the details, because he is a committed die-hard ideologue who also suffers from an intense Messianic complex in which he can only be the conquering hero.

And also, he seems to be lethargic because he is psychologically a depressive, whose mood is only elevated by hero worship -- something he hasn't gotten in a while, because he's a miserable failure.

These are the real truths of the matter, but of course the New York Times and Politico can only bring themselves to criticize Obama for disdaining phony theatrics or phony "schmoozing" with the horrible phonies that make up the Democratic congressional caucus.

ADDENDA: It’s going to be a fun cruise. I will be bringing a few copies of the book with me, but if you want me to sign or inscribe one for you, it might not be a bad idea to bring your own copy.

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