Does Tuesday night’s GOP blowout presage anything for the presidential election that starts in earnest on Wednesday? The conventional answer is probably still no. First, as a million pundits have correctly noted, midterm voters are older, whiter and thus more Republican-leaning than voters in presidential races. Second, the key 2014 Senate races were disproportionately located in red states (although Democrats fared poorly in purple ones too). Third, the GOP trained its fire on President Obama, who won’t be on the ballot in two years.
But despite all this, there is one big takeaway from tonight’s Republican landslide that should worry Democrats a lot: The GOP is growing hungrier to win.
It’s about time. As a general rule, the longer a party goes without holding the White House, the hungrier it becomes. And the hungrier it becomes, the more able it is to discard damaging elements of party orthodoxy while still rousing its political base. Between 1932 and 1952, it took Republicans five election defeats to convince their partisans to rally behind Dwight Eisenhower, who accepted the New Deal. Between 1980 and 1992, it took Democrats three defeats to convince their base to get behind Bill Clinton, a former head of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council who supported cutting taxes and executing murderers.
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