I know…I shouldn’t pick on the pathetic. But I will anyway.
Two weeks ago, after an Elway poll came out with mixed news for Sen. Maria Cantwell, I did a preliminary assessment of Cantwell’s vulnerability to a Republican challenger. I didn’t find the minor weaknesses uncovered by the Elway poll overly concerning. The poll didn’t do head-to-head match-ups for a general election, but it did find 46% would vote to keep Cantwell in office, and 36% would vote to replace her—a result almost identical that at this point in the 2006 election cycle.
My non-concern also reflected evidence from a much richer series of data from Survey USA’s regular tracking polls. They show Cantwell’s recent approval bouncing erratically from about 40% to 55%, with the most recent one at 49%.
Now Public Policy Polling has released a new poll that sheds more light on Cantwell’s lack of vulnerability. The poll finds her with 50% approval and 36 disapproval:
Cantwell is pretty universally well liked within her own party, at 80/7 with Democrats. She’s also on narrowly positive ground with independents at 44/40 and has a 17% approval rating with Republicans, which is a decent amount of crossover support (we generally found Patty Murray with a single digit approval with GOP voters over the course of last year’s campaign.)
The Republican who comes closest to Cantwell is an old favorite- Dino Rossi, who trails 53-40. Susan Hutchison and Dave Reichert do next best, both trailing by a 49-35 margin. Clint Didier trails 51-35 and Cathy McMorris Rodgers has the largest deficit at 50-31. Cantwell wins independent voters by 5-12 points in all of the match ups and picks up 8-9% of the Republican vote while only losing 2-5% of the Democratic vote.
Wow…a 17% approval with Republicans!
The head-to-head match-ups suggest that none of the Republican challengers can do any better against Cantwell than Mike McGavick’s dismal 39.9% result in 2006.
The bottom line:
Cantwell’s reasonably popular and the GOP doesn’t have anyone good to run against her.
This pretty much validates my statement from two weeks ago, “given the absence of a strong opponent on the horizon, I am simply unwilling to fret over a single Elway Poll….”
This new poll illuminates the state of the state Republicans: their candidate pool is nothing short of pathetic. There are almost no Republicans with any statewide appeal. Attorney General McKenna is about it, and he’s looking for opportunities elsewhere.
“The GOP doesn’t have anyone good to run against [Insert candidate here]”
Sounds about right for the vast majority of ’12 races.
It probably helps Cantwell that she really doesn’t get that much publicity, making her a rather small target which is difficult to hit. It will be hard to demonize her, which is really the only strategy the Republicans have had for quite some time. And most Republican candidates carry some baggage of one sort or another, which makes it very difficult to surmount the challenges of incumbency.
My prediction? The Republican Candidate will try to echo the Republican national campaign, making a vote for Cantwell a vote for Obama. And in that, they will fail spectacularly – while that strategy might work in some states, it’s NOT going to work here in Washington State. The only other arrow in their quiver is the same one all politicians use when running against an incumbent who’s been re-elected more than twice – trying to label her as an “entrenched Washington beaurocrat”.
I would think that any Republican in this state would be crazy to run against her – unless he/she figures they have nothing to lose, and will at least gain statewide name recognition in the failed attempt. McKenna isn’t going to try – he’s got his eyes on an open contest for the Governor’s mansion (assuming Gregoire doesn’t run again).
Yep..looks like we are gonna get stuck with the same set of effective winners that we have running the state into the ground now….
oh joy……..
@3: What role, exactly, do you think that Cantwell plays in running Washington state at the moment?
@4
she doesnt. I was refering to our queen and her court(the legislature and state senate).
We get crooked, innefective, and just plain wacky democrats running the state…while the republicans cant seem to dredge up anybody decent if their life depended on it.
our political parties and our politicians are TEH SUK….and same with 70% of the fools that vote them in.
as far as cantwell is concerned? eh, just another DC drone…nothing to see there, move along.
A short time ago, I suggested an amendment to the Constitution whereby the state legislatures could over-ride any act or law by the federal legislators, the executive branch or the judicial branch, as long as those state legislatures had a 75% vote for any repeal of such a federal action.
I recently discovered there is actually a group now working on getting this proposed amendment “off the ground.” Their website is:
http://www.repealamendment.org/
Having the states, as a group, possibly nullify an action or actions of the federal government would do a lot to bring into balance the distribution of power as intended by our Constitution. Our federal government has become oppressive over the past 150 years, and it’s time to reverse the trend.
Libertarian @ 6, this idea is intriguing, but as a practical matter I wonder if it would stand a Supreme Court challenge.
Particularly if the deciding vote is Justice Christine Gregoire.
A Constitutional Amendment would probably work but its hard to imagine Congress voting for anything that would tend to limit their power. Even though King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta, he immediately repudiated it and plunged England into war. The powerful rarely give up power and that includes Congress. I have yet to see President Obama give back any of the powers seized by Little bush and President Cheney. I suppose that we can always hope.
The fact is, in a saner era Christine Gregoire would be a liberal-to-moderate Republican and she’d be Cantwell’s challenger, if Cantwell was even still a Democrat. I mean, compare either to Dan Evans when he was Governor and Senator and it’s hard to make a case that they shouldn’t be in the same party.
The GOP’s problem in this state is that they’re captured by (and emerge from) social conservatives and anti-government lunatics. They need to start running real moderates again. That will enable them to be competitive in urban Puget Sound, and thus statewide. The danger from their point of view is that a real liberal will get in from time to time, but wouldn’t that be better than their current situation where the best they can get is a token? I think the only reason that McKenna won as AG (and Reed at State) is that Democratic voters feel sorry for the Republicans and offer up a sympathy vote for the other party to feed their self-image as politically independent.
On the other hand, the status quo is pretty good for conservatives if not the GOP, so maybe there’s just not enough incentive to change things.
Libertine @ 7: I don’t know why you folks think this is a new idea, or have any dreams of it passing Constitional review. It was tried at least twice before, here is the result of the second attempt:
Richmond, 1865
re 5: “…while the republicans cant seem to dredge up anybody decent if their life depended on it.”
Republicans have to ‘dredge’ for candidates? What’s next — dumpster diving?
@11
RE: dumpster diving..
its obvious that the democrats have been doing that for years….
just look at some of the fruit loops in office now…
rhp6033 at 10,
Yes, it is an idea that may have failed before, but freedom is truly under attack with the most recent events. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security is a classic example of how government uses an event like 9-11 to increase its power while reducing our freedom.
The federal government has too much power! It starts wars with credit cards and gets our people maimed and killed with no plan on stopping the carnage. If we continue to allow this government to run around the world committing mayhem unchecked, then we are definitely on the road to serfdom and near the end of that road.
I urge everyone to support the Repeal Amendment before it’s too late.
That there was what I’ve been waiting to see and that is good news, indeed. Some of that’s do to lack of name familiarity and could be made up. But, that is really good new for Cantwell.
I’ve worked a lot of campaigns and you should always run paranoid and always assume that you could lose.
@6
I’ve met Cantwell a few times and would put her on a list of a handful of folks in DC that are actually pretty good. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) is about the only Republican that would make the list.
@15
Cantwell is one of the few in Congress who actually understands most of what she votes on. Shes also known to be the effective expert in the Democratic Caucus on a number of major policy areas.
@16
I think her committees: Energy And Natural Resources &
Commerce, Science & Transportation look dull and don’t get a lot of press but, underpin the modern economy and will become more and more important in the future.
# 13: While I agree that the loss of individual freedom due to the Patriot Act and corporate dominance over our lives, the solution isn’t nullification.The basic problem is that our democratic republic is based on the rule of law under majority rule, with certain limitations as codified in the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments.
Once a law is enacted, it’s not up to us (individually, or as a state) to decide which ones apply to us, and which ones don’t. In large part, that’s been the Republican philosophy for quite some time now – they are all for the rule of law when they are in power, but if they happen to lose an election they stamp their feet and threaten to take their ball and go home if they don’t get their way.
Continuation…
Again, it’s really not a new concept, all these arguments were made before, and continue to pop up in one form or another.
S. Carolina insisted that it had the right of nullification of federal laws within it’s borders until Andrew Jackson threatened to send troops to enforce the law.
S. Carolina then threatened the ultimate nullification, secession, on the grounds that the federal government wasn’t doing enough to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act in the 1850’s. Once Lincoln was elected, they seceeded (Dec. 1860), and other states of the deep south quickly followed in the winter of “secession fever” (Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisianna, Texas). At the time Robert E. Lee was a Colonel in the U.S. Cavalry in Texas, and he wrote letters home roundly criticising secession. The other Confederate states seceeded only after Ft. Sumter and Lincoln’s call for troops to enforce federal law against S. Carolina.
In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, we saw it again when southern states argued nullification and for another shot at secession when the federal government enforced federal court desegregation decisions, and later when the various civil rights legislation were enacted.
Ultimately, the problem is that the President has a duty to enforce federal law. If a state resists, it puts federal officers in conflict with state officers. At that point the federal government nationalizes the state National Guard, as was done when George Wallace blocked the steps to the registar’s office at the Univ. of Wisconsin. Wallace backed down. But if he didn’t, you faced a real prospect of national guardsmen under federal orders in combat with state troopers. If that isn’t civil war, I don’t know what is.
Your ratification amendment presumes that the federal government would back down rather than risk a civil war. But that also presumes that the President at the time is willing to ignore his Constitutional responsibilities, and is in effect the equivilent of President Buchanan, generally regarded as the worst President in U.S. history (although G. W. Bush made a good effort for the title).
rhp6033,
I know you think you’re right, but you’re going to regret the govnernment intrusion into your life because we are headed towards a centrally controlled single government in the form of an oppressive federal government. States, counties and cities won’t matter in governance.
To prevent the federal government from becoming too powerful and too intrusive, we’ve got to rein-in its power. For 3/4 of the states to decide that an act of the federal government is null and void sounds like a good place to start if we’re ever going to stop this tragedy. How are we ever going to un-do the Department of Homeland Security and all of its un-Constitutional activites if the states (read – the people) don’t have the right to simply say, “No, federal government, you can’t do that. The Patriot Act is hereby null and void in its entirety.”
While I hope you’ll come around to the way of thinking that was the framer’s original intent, we’ll have to agree to disagree with this one.
“For 3/4 of the states to decide that an act of the federal government is null and void…”
Perhaps I’ve mis-understood your proposal. I thought you meant that 3/4 of the people of ONE state could nullify any federal law, regulation, or judicial decision with which they disagreed. That is where I objected, because we live in a Union. The debate over whether or not we lived in an indivisible Union was resolved on the battlefields of 1861-1865, which I want to make sure is never repeated again.
But if you are talking about the majority of 3/4 of the states wanting to roll back a law, regulation, or judicial decision, then we are talking about amending the Constitution, which is entirely different thing altogether.
@20
Um… What planet are you from?
Bobby Mac of the G.O.P.P. …
After the drift of the Locke-Gregoire years – he’s a shoe in…
If that teahadist healthcare lawsuit doesn’t sink him first that is.
Cantwell V. ??? Really is a head scratcher. I’m paranoid enough to think that it’s a good idea to keep an eye on McMorris Rodgers, seeing how she’s been in the game for around 16 years and hasn’t lost a race yet.
Maybe Jeff Bezo for the R’s? Fuck, I don’t know.
rhp6063,
What I was talking about was amending the Constitution whereby a majority of the state legislatures (3/4 or 2/3 – whatever works) could nullify a federal act, be it an act of the president, the House and Senate, or the Supreme Court. I believe such an amendment would help reverse the trend of increasing federal power and the lessing of states’ power. The federal government has far too much power, and it’s time to re-claim some of that power for the states. That’s why I believe we should all support the passage of the Repeal Amendment. You can Google “Repeal Amendment” for the website.
Michael,
I’m from the planet that is concerned about the concentration of power at the federal level. It’s the same planet that Thomas Jefferson is from.
@25
I wouldn’t worry about it too much, the federal government is doing everything in its power to make its self irrelevant.
Remember that banking collapse we had a while back? Had the federal government been using its power, do its job it wouldn’t have happened.
Have you seen this?
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb.....05-19.html
The federal government oversees coal mining, yet according to the report the federal government did nothing as mine after mine across the country racked up volition after volition. 29 people dead at the Big Branch Mine from easily preventable problems, that we’ve known how to fix for a century, that the federal government knew were going on and did nothing about.
Don’t like paying into SSI, check the box that says you’re a Christian Scientist and you don’t have too.
Don’t like being part of “Obama Care,” check the box that says you’re a Christian Scientist and you have to be part of it.
To borrow a line from the Rolling Stones, you’re worried about a “toothless, pitted, hag.” The federal government is a joke.
# 25: The Constitution already has an provision allowing amendments in a manner similar to the one you propose. From Article V: