Democrats See Signs of Hope in Election Battle for Congress
While most of the political world’s attention has been focused on the presidential primaries, Democrats who took a beating in the midterm elections say they have slowly but steadily gotten back in the game when it comes to the battle for control of Congress.
A year of fiscal fights that left the country careening from threatened government shutdown to federal default back to shutdown has hurt every member of Congress, but polls show it has hurt Republicans a bit more. Just before Christmas, House Republicans were forced to make humiliating concessions to Democrats over the extension of a payroll tax holiday and unemployment benefits, dinging the party’s tax-cutting brand.
And improving economic signs captured in jobs gains reported on Friday also have Democrats feeling more optimistic.
“This morning’s announcement that our economy added 200,000 jobs in December, bringing our unemployment rate down to 8.5 percent, is a sign of progress and provides further evidence that our economy is recovering,” Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, said Friday.
At the same time, President Obama, while still embattled, has seen his poll numbers improve slightly in the wake of the chaos on the Hill. Further, the Republican narrative that so dominated 2010 — deficit spending as the nation’s greatest ill — has been matched in recent months by the Democratic pounding of the table on income inequality.
Occupy Wall Street protests eclipsed Tea Parties around the nation this fall in defining at least some of the national mood. In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in October, 66 percent of respondents who were asked if they felt that “the money and wealth in this country should be more evenly distributed among more people” said it should be more evenly distributed, while 26 percent said the system was fair.
All of this has left Democrats feeling more hopeful that they can recapture many of the 25 House seats needed for a majority, fend off a formidable challenge by Republicans over control of the Senate and perhaps keep Mr. Obama in Washington.
“A year ago today we were depressed, we were doubtful and we were in debt,” said Representative Steve Israel of New York, who oversees the committee that works to get Democrats elected to the House.”
“Since then, because of Republican mishaps and our own aggressiveness,” he said, the party has regrouped in its fund-raising and persuaded more Democrats to run. “I am not predicting we are going to take the House back,” Mr. Israel said. “But I am willing to sign an affidavit that it will be razor close.”