In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.
David Brooks: Well, that was pretty much a complete drubbing.
Gail Collins: Don’t rub it in, David.
David: I guess the Republicans will pick up between eight and 10 Senate seats once the dust settles in Alaska, Virginia and Louisiana. The victories at the gubernatorial level are even more impressive. Scott Walker’s win in Wisconsin was pretty significant. The biggest surprise to me was Larry Hogan getting himself elected governor of thoroughly blue Maryland. Plus Bruce Rauner’s win as governor of Illinois was unexpected and huge. This was a national verdict.
Gail: Yeah, things were even worse than I expected. The most depressing result, for me, was Sam Brownback being re-elected governor in Kansas. If you can wreck the state’s economy and not get punished at all — I don’t know what there is to say.
David: It seems to me the Republican challenge is to understand what the party has done right without getting carried away by triumphalism. The Democratic challenge is to understand where the party went wrong without giving way to despair. Maybe we can talk about strengths and weaknesses?
Gail: Well, I guess that’s better than staying here under the bed, curled in a fetal position. You first.
David: I guess the beginning of Republican wisdom is to understand that this was more a case of the Democrats’ losing this particular election than it was a case of the Republicans winning it. The Democrats have talked a lot about wage stagnation and income inequality but they have offered nothing compelling to address these problems. President Obama lost the House four years ago because he seemed too liberal for the country after the passage of Obamacare. He lost the Senate this year because he seemed too passive, not competent, not in control. The rollout of Obamacare was the crucial moment of his second term.
Gail: I agree that the president has often seemed passive. And there’s been a lot of misspeaking for somebody who’s supposed to be a great communicator. But I don’t buy the idea that the Democrats failed to address wage stagnation and income inequality. Raise the minimum wage, create good jobs improve the nation’s roads and bridges, expand quality pre-K programs to give the next generation a boost – that’s pretty much all they talked about.
David: The big Republican accomplishment is that they have detoxified their brand. Four years ago they seemed scary and extreme to a lot of people. They no longer seem that way. The wins in purple states like North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado are clear indications that the party can at least gain a hearing among swing voters. And if the G.O.P. presents a reasonable candidate (and this year’s crop was very good), then Republicans can win anywhere. I think we’ve left the Sarah Palin phase and entered the Tom Cotton phase.
Gail: I wouldn’t call this year’s crop very good, except in the sense that they’re definitely a less extreme group than we saw in the last few seasons. Although some – like Joni Ernst, who won the Senate seat in Iowa – are still downright scary.
But the Republicans have gotten very good at teaching their candidates how to tamp down political screechiness.
David: I was especially struck by Ed Gillespie’s amazing showing in Virginia. He ran one of the more policy-oriented campaigns in the country. At a time when consultants around the nation insulted voters’ intelligence with dumb campaigns, he honored their intelligence by talking about policy and was rewarded for it, win or lose. Maybe it takes a guy who has been a professional consultant to not listen to the consultants.
Gail: Virginia shocked me. And Kay Hagan’s loss in North Carolina saddened me. The new Democratic South seems to exist mainly in theory.
David: Scott Walker’s victory in Wisconsin is also significant. The public is clearly unhappy with public sector unions, even in a traditionally progressive place like Wisconsin. Faced with a budget crisis, a mayor or governor can take on those unions and survive and even thrive. He’ll become a compelling national figure in 2016.
Gail: Yeah, when the only unions left standing are the ones composed of people who work for the taxpayers, the labor movement is in a pretty sad shape. The Republicans have done a very good job of making it almost impossible to organize in the private sector.
David: I wouldn’t give up on private sector unions. I suspect some institution will grow up to give workers more bargaining power against employers, even if it doesn’t look like the 20th-century model.
Republicans should be wary of over-interpreting their mandate. Scott Brown ran hard against immigration reform and he was a rare Republican loser last night.
Gail: That seemed like a weird choice of themes for New Hampshire, but maybe Brown just forgot which state he was campaigning in. I will refrain from making any jokes about how his next move will be to buy a camper and head for California, where Barbara Boxer is up for re-election in 2016. There will always be a woman running for the Senate somewhere who he can challenge.
David: I would love to see a Brown-Boxer race. Sort of a setup for a U.P.S. advertising campaign. The deeper problem for Republicans is their party still has no growth agenda. Figuring out a set of policies commensurate with the size of the structural economic issues is the next big task.
Gail: See, that’s the frustrating thing. For the last two years the Senate has had Democratic committee chairs who went out of their way to work with Republicans on economic issues. But they were stonewalled by the Republican leadership. And then the voters blamed the Democratic incumbents for gridlock.
David: For Democrats, I guess one big lesson is: Stop talking to each other. Democratic politicians spent the early part of the year running against the Koch brothers. That argument may scare a lot of people in liberal bastions, but no one outside of these bastions knows about them or cares.
Gail: It’s totally true that politicians and the media care much more about campaign contributors than voters do I always secretly thought that if God wanted Americans to care about campaign finance reform he would have made it easier to explain. Although there was that one brief, shining moment in 2000 – John McCain. Presidential primary. New Hampshire. Amazing to think back on how that one guy in a bus just went from town meeting to town meeting talking about how to get money out of politics.
Gone but not quite forgotten.
David: Then the Democrats came back with the 2012 playbook — all the talk about contraception and “women’s” issues. That was tone deaf, given where the country is.
Gail: I don’t agree at all. Of course you can’t give the impression that reproductive rights is the only thing you’re running on. But the real problem for the Democrats was that the Republicans figured out how to defuse the issue.Ask me about abortion and I’ll tell you that birth control pills should be sold over the counter.
The Democrats aren’t going to have the luxury of running against the kind of Cro-Magnon candidates the Republicans were putting up a few years ago. Although I was tickled to see that the congressman in Florida who held the men-only gathering went down the drain. You know, the one who felt guys needed to be by themselves so they could feel free to drink, smoke and discuss serious topics.
David: Democrats also need to ask themselves what it will take for them to be a congressional party once again. That means winning in places likes Arkansas, once solid Democratic states. Over the near term it means shelving theories about an emerging Democratic majority — hoping that a tide of Democratic voters will sweep the Democrats into permanent power. That still may happen over the long term, but Democrats are just terrible at appealing to white voters, especially less-educated white voters.
Gail: No matter what the demographics of the future are going to look like, you obviously want candidates who can appeal to poor white and poor minority candidates at the same time. But it’s not easy to do. I don’t think the Republicans are meeting uneducated white voters’ needs. They’re just appealing to their fear of change.
David: The core problem for Democrats, it seems to me, is that voters are just too skeptical of government — at least as it currently exists. Obamacare may not have been a huge issue, but Republicans ran lots of ads about it, and it remains deeply unpopular. Democrats somehow need to figure out how to offer government programs when people are innately suspicious of government as something alien and ineffective.
Gail: The Republicans have done a terrific job of making their base hate government, even when they benefit greatly from government programs. And it’s ironic that President Obama, who ran as a great communicator, has been so awful at countering that message.
David: The final point is that this election marks the end of the Obama presidency’s power on the domestic front. In 2008, I would not have expected it to come to this. The verdict is still out on what Obama’s legacy will be, but it’s certainly true that he did not succeed where F.D.R., Reagan and even Clinton did — in building a plausible majority for his party.
Gail: I know that the rule of our pundit profession is that now we must turn our attention completely away from the current administration and do nothing but speculate about the presidential race in 2016. But I want to give Obama a little more time before I declare him a goner. If he leaves behind a national health care program and a significant start to the battle against climate change, he’ll have actually accomplished much more as president than Clinton did. But I guess the nation won’t learn to appreciate him unless he’s impeached.