Nationalizing the Race

At the time, a lot of people thought that Elizabeth Warren's fairly prime-time speaking role at the Democratic National Convention may have been designed to nationalize her race, to reduce the number of Massachusetts voters supporting both Barack Obama and Scott Brown. It appears to have worked, with essentially every post-convention poll has shown Warren with a non-trivial lead, despite the fact that Brown's approval and favorability numbers haven't really deteriorated and Warren's favorables haven't really improved. But a pretty solid majority of Massachusetts voters want Democrats to control the Senate going forward, so they're voting for Warren. Likewise, a recent PublicPolicyPolling survey of Connecticut shows the not-very-popular Chris Murphy (D) leading the not-very-popular Linda McMahon (R), basically because as with their northern neighbors, Connecticut voters want a Democratic Senate.

As someone who remembers being gleeful when Lincoln Chafee, the last Republican one could make a plausible case for calling liberal rather than just moderate, lost his 2006 re-election campaign to Sheldon Whitehouse, and who then also voted for Chafee for Governor of Rhode Island four years later, I find this trend very encouraging. Senate and Congressional elections are conducted locally, but they concern national governance, so voters ought to behave less idiosyncratically in them than in, say, gubernatorial races. At the end of the day, the single most important fact about a candidate to the national legislature is which party they'll caucus with, and which leadership slate they'll support. So it's nice to see these blue-state Democrats becoming more willing to vote blind partisanship, whether that means resisting the charms of an oft-moderate Republican incumbent in Massachusetts or holding their nose to vote for a somewhat scandal-tarred Democrat in Connecticut.

Of course, the flip side is that we've got several important Senate contests in Republican-leaning states like North Dakota, Montana, Arizona, and--particularly after the recent deadline for Todd Akin to depart--Missouri. There's been less polling in these red-state races than in the blue-state ones of late, I think, and there's a much less solid sense of where they stand. If the race is getting nationalized all around, one might expect to see Republicans moving into the lead. Of course, if what's really going on is just a generalized Republican collapse, that might not be the case. It'll be interesting to see, as it looks to me like these races are the ones that might let Democrats expand on their current Senate majority, rather than merely holding their position.

Elizabeth Warren 2016!

I'm probably crazy to think this, for a variety of reasons (Andrew Cuomo is still the frontrunner, she'd be 67 at the time, best-case-scenario she'd only have been a Senator for four years, etc.) but reading Elizabeth Warren's quote about the philosophical argument behind progressive taxation and hearing all sorts of liberals get really excited about her is making me wonder whether a Warren campaign for President in 2016 would be entirely out of place, or entirely a lost cause. I continue to think that as soon as there is next a viable (a.k.a. electable), reasonably liberal female Democratic presidential candidate, we ought to nominate her. Those of us on the left have been looking for someone to make the case for philosophical liberalism in a strong, charismatic fashion. Anyway, it's just a thought.

If she doesn't run for President, though, I love the idea of getting her into this Senate seat. The way I see it, there are two informally-defined positions that have descended through the ages of American history. One is the Conservative Champion. John Calhoun was the first notable Conservative Champion, but his mantle has subsequently been taken up by people like Strom Thurmond. I'm a little bit uncertain about the intermediate links in that chain, but that's not the case for the other side of the isle, the Liberal Champion. I can see an argument for someone like Jefferson as the progenitor of that role, although since Jefferson was wrong about a lot of things in a kind of conservative fashion I'm a little reluctant to do so. People like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster filled this role in the antebellum era. Most recently this mantle was worn for a very long time by Ted Kennedy. Right now we don't have one, at least not on a higher scale than Dennis Kucinich. Well, not only would Elizabeth Warren be one, but she do it from the very same Senate seat as Clay, Webster, Kennedies Ted and Jack, and Charles Sumner. There have been Liberal Champions who didn't hold that Senate seat, like Bob LaFollette, but Massachusetts' Class 1 Senate seat has been the historical home of the carrier of the liberal torch. It'll be nice to have it filled by another member of that proud tradition, instead of the patheticness that is Scott Brown.