This is a purely political horseracing question, but I keep thinking about it every time I read another article talking about the 2010 elections. Much of the commentary on the 2010 election seems to take for granted that a big Republican win in Congressional elections in 2010 presages the trend for the 2012 Presidential election. And by the same token that the Obama political team must be deeply worried about trouble in 2010 for Congressional Democrats, if in fact the poll numbers turn out to be about right.
But I also thought I understood that one political horseracing lesson learned from 1994 was that a big Congressional loss to a party in power – especially if it holds Congress and the Presidency – is good news for the incumbent president. Americans tend to prefer divided government, on this view, and if Congress flips to one side in the midterms, then that is actually – beneath the many crocodile tears – good news for the President on the other side come the presidential election.
I’m not really a political horserace maven and I don’t follow all this stuff closely. But I’d be grateful if someone could explain how the White House sees the impending 2010 election and how much it cares, one way or another, and why, if Democrats were to lose the House, say, as a function of 2012. In temperate language, please, and focused on the purely horseracing aspects, not the substantive politics. This isn’t a question on the goodness or badness of Republicans or Democrats, the Obama administration, or anything else. I’m just trying to understand whether the various players – the White House, the Republicans, the Congressional Democrats, etc. – see a major Democratic loss in the midterms as bad for the reelection fortunes of the President in 2012. Put another way, the question is how closely the interests of Congressional Democrats and the President align in the 2010 election, in consideration of 2012.
I do realize that this kind of horseracing question is, in some way, inane; surely we should be focused on policy substance, etc., but I can’t seem to get it out of my mind. I’m also interested in seeing any links to what pollsters and other experts on the elections are saying, just to satisfy my own curiousity.