NP: John Cage, 4'33"

Another note about yesterday's primaries and special elections. Steve Benen posted a reader's takedown of the "anti-incumbency" narrative that is not without its merits. However, I feel like there is something to it, just not necessarily what everyone is talking about.

Sullivan quotes Daniel Larison, and I think both of them have at least offered up a key data point, even if they haven't teased it out.

There are two major problems with the Republican approach to these House elections. The first is that they tend to ignore or dismiss the interests of the specific district where they are competing in order to make a statement about national party agendas. The national GOP wants these elections to be mandates against Pelosi/Reid’s agenda or Obama’s agenda, and the Democratic committees and party leadership are more concerned with winning the election contests. The second problem is that they don’t seem to understand that even in districts where Obama is not particularly popular and where most voters did not support him in 2008, such as PA-12, most voters are not interested in vindicating a pre-scripted anti-Obama narrative. So long as the Democratic candidates can present them with a more appealing message of continued government funding and the promise of economic support, they are not automatically going to rally behind the candidates of the more unpopular, discredited party.

Emphasis mine. I think that, if we're going to generalize, what we're seeing is an electorate that is going out of its way to reject a certain insular thinking of the Beltway, where the national parties can foist a narrative onto a race and have it stick. People may be getting more sensitive to the difference between what politicians and the pundit class are telling them what they're thinking, and what they're thinking.

The GOP, as per the quote about trying to graft national implications onto very local races, seems particularly insensitive to this. You could say the same for Arlen Specter thinking he could just say he's a Democrat, get a pat on the back from the President, and skate into the general election. Or Mitch McConnell thinking his support in Kentucky would be a good thing. And so on.

This may not be about incumbency, it may be about the political culture, and it may be purely about dissatisfaction and anger with the political culture. I don't think this is a solutions-based movement, but the point is that the culture of DC is different from incumbency. That said, positioning yourself as "not of Washington" has been pervasive for a long time, to the point where I really, really wanted the Bullets to change their name to the Washington Outsiders instead of the Wizards.

Not entirely sure what my point is here, other than to at least try to draw a picture that doesn't treat the special election in PA as an outlier.