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"Tuesday’s elections in the United States of Arkansas, Kentucky and Pennsylvania disproved the slick media pundit conventional wisdom and its clucking Chicken Little believers wrong once again. For weeks we’ve heard it in unison from the teevee talking heads and the mynah bird beaks of mass media consumers-cum-bloggers: that 2010 is an anti-incumbent year, that Democrats are going down, will lose the US House of Representatives in November (Newt Gingrich, yesterday, predicted a November Republican gain of up to 70 seats and possibly control of the US Senate, too, including a defeat of Senator Barbara Boxer of California: Bartender, I’ll have what he’s having.)"Most of the races on the ballot yesterday were primaries and in that context political outsiders out-organized the insiders within both major parties. The only contest to test whether climate change has come to the Democrat-vs.-Republican rivalry happened in Pennsylvania’s Congressional District number 12, in a special election to replace the late US Rep. Jack Murtha, a conservative Democrat. How great was the supposed “anti-establishment” tide that the media has been crowing about? The winner was Murtha’s longtime Congressional aide named Mark Critz.
For the past twelve years Critz worked as the regional director for Murtha. He was the staffer who responded to constituents, wrote letters on their behalf, cut Federal red tape, issued flags flown over the US Capitol, attended local events and solved problems for individuals, families and small businesses in the district. In other words, he did the part of a Congressman’s work that is not ideological, the Representative's representative in the district. In Congress, he’ll likely be a “blue dog” conservative Democrat, like Murtha (and that is fairly representative of that district, which I passed through in 2008 reporting the US presidential campaign). It is a bellwether district, 95 percent white, in Pennsyltuckian Appalachia; the only CD in the country that voted both for Kerry in ’04 and McCain in ’08, a “swing district” extraordinaire.
And yesterday the Democrat got 53 percent of the vote, a comfortable margin of victory, in this supposedly “anti-incumbent” year even though Critz was the closest thing to an incumbent in the contest. His victory underscores that when it comes to US House elections – fantasies of the activists of left and right aside – “the issues” and ideology are secondary criteria for most voters. Most Americans look at their representative in Congress and think “what can he do for me?” They want to know that their US Rep. can "deliver for the locals." Critz was accurately seen as the one who could pull the strings for the district precisely because he had Congressional staff experience. The “anti-incumbent” revolution predicted from all quarters did not materialize in Western Pennsylvania.
The proper reading of yesterday's result in fact brings the opposite conclusion: Incumbents who do the grunt work of constituent services will mostly survive in November."
<Much More>
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