Why Democrats Are Losing in 2010

Yesterday, I began a four part series examining recent elections, and what can be learned from them that might help understand the current and future ones. Yesterday’s post was about why the Republicans lost in 2006 and 2008.

Today’s post is about today and the Democrats. The reasons for the Democrats losing are much simpler.

They totally misunderstood the results of the 2006 and 2008 elections.

That’s it.

Ok, it deserves a more in depth explanation, but that’s the real reason.

What Democrats took from their decisive victories in the 2006 and 2008 elections was this:

The people have finally come our way and embraced progressivism (liberalism). This is our chance to turn this country into the place we’ve always dreamed it could be.

In fact, the message that Democrats should have gotten is this:

This is the worst possible time to enact our sweeping changes to America, and try to move the country dramatically towards European socialism. The public elected us because of their fears of expansive and intrusive government. This is our time to tread carefully.

If they had taken that message, James Carville’s 40 more years would not be ending 38 years early. All that stuff you heard in early 2009 about the Republicans being a dead or regional party was close to true. It was slightly an exaggeration, but not by much. The Democrats have only themselves to blame for the resurgence of the Republican party. If they had governed smartly, they’d all be cruising towards re-election right now.

Instead, they gave us failed Keynesian economics, a bloated awful health care bill that they didn’t read, a bloated awful financial reform bill that they didn’t read, and promised us more and more of the same. All of this follows the expansive and intrusive government path that got the Republicans in trouble. The only difference is the Republicans were taking the scenic route down a two lane country road, and the Democrats have us on an 8 lane interstate highway with no speed limit.

In the next post in this series, I plan on looking at the Tea Party, before winding up with a look at the 2012 and 2014 elections.