Curt A. Levey Executive Dir., Committee for Justice :
With 14 months to go until the next election, it’s too early for Democrats to be terrified. Rather, Obama’s slide in the polls should serve to remind Democrats that their big victories in 2006 and 2008 are poor predictors of their electoral prospects going forward.
While Democrats’ rapid switch from gloating about permanent minority status for Republicans to worrying about big Democratic losses in 2010 is remarkable, it says as much about the simplistic overgeneralizations that follow wave elections than it does about the impact of Obama’s falling poll numbers.
After the 1984 election, the punditry pontificated that a shift of population and thus electoral votes to the Sun Belt had given the Republicans a “lock on the Electoral College.” Eight years later, those predictions seemed silly. Following the 2004 election, the experts made similar predictions, but with a new explanation. The Democrats were doomed in presidential elections because they were competitive only in states that accounted for little more than half of the 538 electoral votes. That theory was quickly forgotten as we were all reminded of the difference between inventing theories to explain the political past and accurately modeling the future.
Ditto for Democrats’ sweep of the White House and Congress in 2008. Larry Sabato explained in April that demographic and ideological trends had put us "on our way from being a two-party system to being a party-and-a-half system.” Just five months later, I doubt Sabato would repeat that prediction.
In the waves found in nature, crests are followed by troughs, and wave elections usually follow the same pattern. There’s no reason to think that the Democratic waves of 2006 and 2008 will be any different. It’s too early to tell if 2010 will bring the Republican wave that Charlie Cook suggests is coming, but history virtually guarantees that Democrats’ ascendancy will be relatively short lived.