Posted on 09/06/2010 2:20:02 PM PDT by The Pack Knight
Primary season is all but over. The 2010 candidate field is nearly set. The strongest and most vulnerable members of both parties know who they are.
But the campaign didn’t have to look like this. It’s not just the big-picture inflection points — like the White House’s decision to pursue health care reform or the congressional GOP’s lock-step vote against the stimulus — that have determined the course of the election year. It was also the personal choices or screw-ups of individual candidates.
As Labor Day launches the traditional start of the fall general election campaign, here’s POLITICO’s look back at the midterm cycle’s most influential roads not taken — the unlikely, avoidable or just plain weird contingencies that helped make this campaign what it is.
What if Doug Hoffman had been a team player?
The 2009 off-year elections were almost a total wipeout for Democrats: Republicans won the New Jersey governor’s mansion and swept Virginia’s statewide offices, winning independent voters by strong margins in the process. The one exception was a House special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, where Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman forced Republican state Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava out of the race, leaving an opening for now-Rep. Bill Owens to add a seat to the Democrats’ majority.
If Hoffman hadn’t run as a third-party candidate, Scozzafava might be comfortably ensconced in that seat by now. Or if Republicans had nominated Hoffman to begin with, he might be holding office.
In either of those scenarios, the 2009 special election would have lost the distinction of being the first race in which a tea-party-backed candidate took on the Republican establishment and won. Most important, if Hoffman’s rogue bid hadn’t allowed Democrats to call November 2009 a split decision, they might have realized sooner that a wave was on the way.
What if Mark Sanford hadn’t self-destructed?
Before the world first heard of Maria Belen Chapur, the sky looked like the limit for South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s career. He had picked a big fight with the White House over stimulus spending for South Carolina. As chairman of the Republican Governors Association, he was preparing to help lead the GOP’s 2010 campaign effort. Sanford was already high on the list of potential 2012 opponents for President Barack Obama, with his down-the-line conservative record easily compensating for his quirky personal profile.
Then quirkiness turned into scandal. And while Sanford held onto his office, he lost his post at the RGA, along with any hope of a national campaign. Instead, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour has risen in his place, at the RGA and among the ranks of credible presidential prospects.
What if there had never been a Scott Brown?
When Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy died in the summer of 2009, it set in motion a campaign that dealt more damage to Democratic hopes this year than any other single event. Then-state Sen. Scott Brown’s victory over Democratic state Attorney General Martha Coakley, in a January special election, deprived Democrats of their 60-seat majority in the Senate and launched a handful of other powerful Republican Senate bids that could cost the Democrats their majority in the chamber.
It’s not clear that another Republican — like former White House chief of staff Andy Card — could have pulled off such an upset. And would former Indiana Sen. Dan Coats have decided to run for his old seat without Brown’s victory as an inducement? How about Arkansas Rep. John Boozman, Washington Senate candidate Dino Rossi and Wisconsin candidate Ron Johnson? Would Republicans have rallied to Charles Djou’s long-shot congressional campaign in Hawaii before Brown showed that even Massachusetts was winnable? Brown’s victory sent a message to these candidates and others that everything in 2010 was up for grabs.
By snatching away the Democrats’ filibuster-proof Senate majority, Brown also ensured that Republicans would have a stronger influence over the substance of the 2010 campaign, preventing Democrats from unilaterally passing banking legislation and all but dooming energy and immigration reform.
What if Arlen Specter hadn’t switched parties?
The Pennsylvania senator’s change in party, it turns out, did not enable him to be reelected. It’s unlikely that Sen. Arlen Specter would have fared better staying in the GOP, where former Rep. Pat Toomey was on track to give Specter an even tougher fight than he did in their 2004 primary campaign.
But if Specter had stayed a Republican, both parties would probably find themselves in a very different place, heading into the fall campaign. Democrats might still have Rep. Joe Sestak as their nominee, but they might also have chosen differently, from a larger field of candidates that could have included Rep. Allyson Schwartz, state Rep. Josh Shapiro and Joe Torsella, a former deputy mayor of Philadelphia.
On the Republican side, Toomey might still be the nominee. He would have had to spend serious money on a campaign against Specter, however, and wouldn’t have been able to spend all spring positioning himself closer to the political center.
What if Barack Obama hadn’t appointed Janet Napolitano to the Cabinet?
Put another way: What if there had never been a Gov. Jan Brewer? A Democratic governor of Arizona might have blocked S.B. 1070, the state’s new immigration law and short-circuited the national debate over illegal immigration in the process.
That would have left plenty of Democrats far better off, starting with Reps. Harry Mitchell, Gabrielle Giffords and Ann Kirkpatrick, all of whom are now in competitive races in no small part because of the furor over their state’s immigration crackdown — and the Obama administration’s response. There would certainly have been a competitive fight for the Republican nomination for governor. Brewer might not even have run.
Napolitano would be in the final months of her term right now. Even if she didn’t make Democratic dreams come true by challenging Sen. John McCain, she’d still be the most powerful member of her party in Arizona instead of the top official at a challenged executive department and a favorite punching bag of the right.
What if Charlie Crist had stayed put?
Few campaign announcements have sent as many ripples through the 2010 election season as Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s decision to run for Senate. By abandoning his bid for reelection to seek what looked like a safe promotion at the time, Crist unintentionally touched off one of the bloodiest intraparty fights of the year, leading to the rise of Marco Rubio and Crist’s own departure from the GOP.
But Crist’s campaign transformed more than just a Senate race. He also left a vacuum in the governor’s race, which has been filled first by a brutal Republican primary and now by the competitive general election between Republican Rick Scott and Democrat Alex Sink.
If Crist had chosen differently, there’s no telling how both races would have shaped up — and which other elections would have unfolded differently. If Crist hadn’t run for Senate, would Democratic Rep. Allen Boyd have chased his party’s nomination? Would Bill McCollum have run in that election instead? Would anyone have primaried Crist from the right in a reelection campaign? The entire state of Florida — ground zero for 2010 — would look different.
What if Dean Heller or Jon Porter had challenged Harry Reid?
Before Sharron Angle became a national political figure and even before the Nevada Senate race made the idea of bartering chickens for health care a national joke, there was a chance that a Republican of real stature would step up to challenge Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
The top two prospects were Rep. Dean Heller and former Rep. Jon Porter — experienced, capable pols who would have raised plenty of money and likely avoided the trail of gaffes that plagued Angle and her primary opponents. A Mason-Dixon poll in August 2009 showed Heller leading Reid by 10 percentage points.
Reid’s still in serious peril, but the chief reason he’s not a dead man walking — and that Democrats aren’t currently figuring out how to cut him loose — is that he’s shrewdly exploited the weaknesses of his opponents. Heller or Porter wouldn’t have made that so easy for him.
What if Sarah Palin had run for reelection?
Democrats were unlikely to take the Alaska governor’s mansion with Palin in the race. They’re almost as unlikely to take over now that she’s vacated it, elevating her former lieutenant governor, Sean Parnell, to the state’s top job.
If Palin had served out her term and sought another one, her role in the 2010 campaign might be completely different. Would “mama grizzly” be a political brand, or would Palin have focused on her own race? Would there be a Nikki Haley if Palin had stayed in Alaska? How about a Joe Miller?
Democrats might also have been able to make Palin a focal point of their 2010 efforts — even more so than they have — by ginning up fundraising with promises of her defeat.
What if there had been a 2009 special election in Illinois?
When Obama vacated his Senate seat, Illinois Democrats briefly considered changing the state’s succession law to replace him through a special election, instead of an appointment. They ultimately decided against it, allowing temporary Sen. Roland Burris to serve the remainder of Obama’s term and paving the way for the current Senate race between Republican Rep. Mark Kirk and Democratic state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias.
In an alternative universe where Democrats did hold a special election, Kirk might have made it to the Senate last year — or he might have faced a different, more formidable Democratic opponent who would now be running for reelection as an incumbent. A 2009 special election would have allowed state Attorney General Lisa Madigan, Rep. Jan Schakowsky or any number of other Democrats to run without giving up reelection campaigns for their current seats.
It would also have given Democrats a shot at locking down that seat back when President Obama’s approval ratings were still defying gravity and when his star power could have gone a lot farther in his home state.
What if an A-list candidate, in either party, had challenged New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand?
In a year that has entrenched incumbents fighting for their lives, with Democratic states like California and Illinois turning into genuine battlefields, the fact that appointed Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is coasting to reelection is an astounding anomaly.
She’s still below 50 percent against a pack of utterly hopeless Republican challengers, according to Quinnipiac University polling released last week. There’s hardly any question that an ambitious Democrat would have had a good shot at making Gillibrand the fourth incumbent to lose in a primary this cycle — or that if prominent New York Republicans had stepped up, control of the Senate would be in much deeper jeopardy.
Here’s a what-if for November. What if ACORN and other leftist types engage in massive vote fraud?
Missed the most important one: “What if the MSM - Politico included - pulled its collective head out of its collective *ss, and actually reported on the corruption and incompetance of the (largely-democrat) ruling class?”
Same thing as will happen in 2012 - Obama Second Term, and Leftist majority in both houses of Congress.
-—yep—Dean Heller (my congressman) would be stomping Harry Reid so badly it wouldn’t be worth watching-—
Good point, but the districts the DemocRATS are secure in also have some competitive statewide races.
I think the biggest “What if” that they omitted is the overarching one behind this entire campaign. What if the Obama Administration had not pushed Congress to overreach and cram its agenda down the throats of a skeptical electorate? If Obama had made at least an effort to “govern from the center”, he and his party probably would not have alienated independents and would be in a much stronger position right now.
Of course, that would essentially be asking “What if Obama wasn’t Obama?” He and the Democrats bought into his own hype, and now they’re going to pay the price. What’s worse for them is that I don’t think Obama has nearly the acumen and political discipline to bounce back the way Clinton did in 1995-96.
What if the Earth had been invaded by the Klingon Empire? What-ifs are a total waste of time except when they are used in alternate history sci fi. Then they are fun.
What IF McCain had won.....Newsweak would have been so popular it would have sold for $3.00.
According to Rush “ifs” are for children. Anyway we wouldn’t even have stories like this if it was a dem year.
I take away from this article that God has infinite wisdom and patience and He continues to watch over the USA.
See Bill of Rights, Article 2
Politico....the public face of Journolist. Why does anyone pay attention to these propagandists.....is it masochism???
Just in case Obama is reelected in 2012, how would you say, “Yes, please do invade Earth,” in Klingon?
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