Ann Marie Buerkle was outspent by a 5-to-1 margin in her
campaign against incumbent Rep. Dan Maffei in New York’s 25th
district. Maffei was a phenomenal fundraiser — of his $2.7 million
total, the freshman Democrat collected more than $1.2 million from
PACs — and the district had voted for Democrats in the past three
presidential elections, delivering 56 percent for Barack Obama just
two years ago.
When Buerkle first declared her intent to run for the
seat, she said, “People looked at me like I was crazy. They said,
‘He’s got so much money. How are you going to beat
him?’”
But beat him, she did. Yesterday, after all the absentee
ballots had been counted and Buerkle still maintained a 567-vote
lead, Maffei conceded. Combined with a win for Blake Farenthold in
Texas — where Democrat Rep. Solomon Ortiz finally conceded Monday
in the 27th District — Buerkle’s victory brings to 63 the number
of House seats gained by Republicans in the mid-term election.
That’s the GOP’s biggest net gain in any election since 1938, and
gives Republicans 242 House seats — the most they’ve held since
1949. Their majority is bigger by 12 seats than the one captured by
Newt Gingrich’s GOP in 1994.
The sheer size of the electoral tsunami that swept Buerkle
and scores of other Republicans into Congress has been underplayed
by the major media, which have preferred instead to focus on the
failure of the GOP to capture a Senate majority. But the electoral
math always favored Democrats in this year’s Senate campaign, and
Republicans still scored important Senate pickups in Pennsylvania,
Ohio, Illinois, Arkansas, North Dakota and Wisconsin. (Would anyone
have bet two years ago that the GOP could defeat Russ Feingold in
2010?) The survival of Harry Reid as Senator Majority Leader — the
only good news for Democrats in the mid-terms — was predictably
the big story in the liberal press in the immediate aftermath of
Election Day. And so the enormous Republican gains in the House
have not yet been fully comprehended by most Americans.
Part of the reason for this is that so many races remained
undecided on Election Night. By the time most people went to bed on
Nov. 2, it was clear that the GOP had recaptured the House
majority, but the extent of their victory was not yet known. Even a
week after the election,
nine contests still remained undecided, and many Democrats
delayed conceding in close races. It was not until last Wednesday
that Rep. Melissa Bean
conceded to Republican Joe Walsh in the 8th District of
Illinois, and not until Friday that Rep. Bob Etheridge
conceded to Renee Ellmers in North Carolina’s 2nd District.
This slow-motion trickle of additional GOP pickups meant that the
big victory didn’t produce the kind of jaw-dropping astonishment it
should have inspired.
How big was the wave? Consider the example of Republican
operative Vince Kreul, 26, who worked for three losing
congressional candidates during the 2010 campaign season — first
for Rick Barber in Alabama’s 2nd District, then for Les Phillip in
Alabama’s 5th District, and then for Kerry Roberts in Tennessee’s
6th District. All three of those candidates lost their primaries,
but the GOP candidates who won those primaries (Martha Roby, Mo
Brooks and Diane Black, respectively) all won on Nov. 2, capturing
seats that had previously been held by Democrats. And Vince Kreul
also ended up with a winner, working for the campaign of Morgan
Griffith, the Republican who defeated 14-term incumbent Democrat
Rick Boucher in Virginia’s 9th District.
The defeat of Boucher, who had kept his rural coal-country
district in the Democrat column for 28 years — even surviving the
1994 Republican landslide — was a clear sign of just how deep the
GOP wave was. It continued a trend of partisan realignment in the
South, defeating long-serving Democrats in districts that had not
elected a Republican since Reconstruction. In Florida’s 2nd
District, Steve Southerland defeated seven-term incumbent Allen
Boyd by a margin of more than 30,000 votes. In South Carolina’s 5th
District, Republican Mick Mulvaney won by more than 20,000 votes
over 14-term incumbent John Spratt, powerful chairman of the House
Budget Committee.
The wave was also a wipeout for the “Blue Dog” Democrats,
defeating 28 of 54 members of the moderate coalition, including
Indiana’s Barron Hill, who lost the 9th District by a 10-point
margin to Republican Todd Young, and Mississippi’s Gene Taylor, a
10-term incumbent who lost the 4th District by 10,000 votes to
Steve Palazzo.
Democrats seeking to minimize the extent of their defeat
pointed out that most of their losses involved House seats in
“swing” districts that had been lost by the GOP in the 2006 and
2008 elections. Maffei, for example, was one of
22 first-term Democrats (out of 26 elected in 2008) to lose
re-election. “Republicans won by taking back the very seats we had
took from them,” D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton said in a Nov.
11 post-election panel discussion at
Georgetown University. True, but the wave also defeated a dozen
Democrats who had been in Congress for at least a decade, including
several incumbents who had been in office more than 20 years. In
Pennsylvania’s 11th District, 13-term Democrat Paul Kanjorski lost
by a 10-point margin to Lou Barletta. In Missouri’s 4th District,
17-term Democrat Ike Skelton was beaten by Vicky Hartzler. In
Minnesota’s 8th District, 18-term Democrat Jim Oberstar was edged
out by Chip Cravaack.
Despite the stunning size of the Republican victory,
pundits and pollsters were quick to declare that the election
did
not represent a “mandate” for the GOP. For example, pollsters
quickly produced
surveys claiming that a majority of Americans favored
preserving the Democratic health-care law. Yet that bill was
enacted without a single Republican vote and repealing it was the
centerpiece of winning campaigns for scores of GOP challengers like
Buerkle, who overcame enormous disadvantages to defeat
Maffei.
In the final weeks of her campaign, Buerkle said in an
interview yesterday, the incumbent Democrat was reportedly spending
nearly a quarter-million dollars a week on TV ads attacking her.
“We decided we couldn’t beat him on the money, but we could beat
him with the grassroots,” she said of her strategy. “We did 21
parades, 20 town halls, Rotary clubs, chambers of commerce.… This
campaign has really been a victory for the people, to show that the
people could make a difference.”
Those people did make a difference, and in the process
made laughingstocks of pundits who said they couldn’t do it, chief
among them E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post.
“It will be very hard for Republicans to take the House if
they don’t break the Democrats’ power in the Northeast — and they
still have to prove they can do that,”
Dionne wrote five weeks before Election Day, in a column that
featured this quote from Dan Maffei: “When we do retain the
majority… people are going to look at the map and see that the
Northeast held.” Dionne predicted: “Absent a Republican wave of
historic proportions, [Maffei’s] seat now seems out of the GOP’s
reach.”
Unfortunately for Maffei and Dionne, that “Republican wave
of historic proportions” came crashing ashore Nov. 2 with enough
power to flip six seats in New York into the GOP column. In
addition to Buerkle’s hard-fought win in the 25th District,
Republicans also captured previously Democrat-held seats in the
13th, 19th, 20th, 24th and 29th districts. New York’s six GOP
pickups was the most of any state. Republicans gained five seats in
Ohio and Pennsylvania, while adding four seats in both Florida and
Illinois. If such widespread victories are not a mandate for House
Republicans to oppose the Democrats’ liberal agenda, whatever could
be?
Buerkle seems determined to live up to her campaign
promises. At a
press conference yesterday in Syracuse, a reporter asked
whether she needed to “moderate some of [her] positions,” given her
narrow margin of victory.
“I don’t think that anyone would ask me to compromise my
principles,” Buerkle answered. “I think the consensus vote was we
need less government, lower taxes, we need to do what’s right… to
get our economy back on course.”
Turning that “consensus” into policy is the Republicans
mandate.
