Via the LAT: Democratic Party encounters ‘Obama hangover’ in state, local elections:
Now tack on a trio of state and local political races. With an off-year election fast approaching, Obama is stepping up his commitment to Democratic candidates in hopes that an infusion of campaign charisma might pump up turnout.
What the party is finding, though, is that the electricity of 2008 is tough to recapture.
This strikes me as hardly surprising. Midterm elections, which include the whole of the House of Representatives, one third of the Senate, and any number of state races are never as energized as presidential races and off-year races such as those for governor in Virginia and New Jersey and a special congressional election in New York this year can hardly be expected to be of similar character, energy and attention as the presidential contest.
If anything, all the folks who put that energy in 2008 are all pretty tired:
Some Democratic candidates running for local office around the country call the phenomenon the "Obama hangover." It is proving tougher to recruit volunteers and get people to vote.
"It’s like the morning after the party," Michael McGann, a Democrat running for clerk of courts in the Philadelphia suburbs, said in an interview. "The party was wonderful and exciting. The day after it’s like, ‘Gee, I don’t want to do that again for a while.’ "
Granted, the press and the politicos will teat these elections as signs of portents regarding 2010 as well as some sort of thermometer for measuring Obama’s current standing. However, such dramatic pronouncements do not make it so. While there is little doubt that the over political zeitgeist of the moment is relevant in all of these races, so too are local politics in NJ, NY and VA.
The race I actually find the most interesting is the NY-23, because a three-party race has broken out because the Republican nominee is considered insufficiently conservative. This race is especially interesting because it appears to have drawn in potential GOP contenders for 2012 who are being required to choose between the Rep and the Conservative Party candidates. For example, Palin has endorsed the Conservative (via Facebook, no less) while Huckabee won’t (well, more or less). Meanwhile Gingrich has drawn fire for endorsing the GOP candidate, Scozzafava.
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October 26th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
The Conservative Party of New York is an interesting group. It’s one of the few minor parties to get a candidate elected to the Senate. No GOP candidate has one state-wide election in New York without the Conservatives’ endorsement since 1974.