GOP Lands on Its Feat
President Obama has bailed out a lot of things in six years – but [Tuesday] night, the Democratic Party wasn’t one of them. By night’s end, his policy failures accounted for one of the largest Republican waves to hit Capitol Hill since World War II, as the GOP won back control of Congress. With a 12-seat cushion in the House and seven-plus gains in the Senate, conservatives sent more Democrats packing than the city has moving vans. The message from an angry electorate was clear: the experiment in lawlessness has gone on long enough. And while Republicans were the beneficiaries of the country’s outrage, Tuesday’s victories were not so much an endorsement of the GOP as they were a repudiation of Senator Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.).
President Obama has bailed out a lot of things in six years – but [Tuesday] night, the Democratic Party wasn’t one of them.
By night’s end, his policy failures accounted for one of the largest Republican waves to hit Capitol Hill since World War II, as the GOP won back control of Congress. With a 12-seat cushion in the House and seven-plus gains in the Senate, conservatives sent more Democrats packing than the city has moving vans.
The message from an angry electorate was clear: the experiment in lawlessness has gone on long enough. And while Republicans were the beneficiaries of the country’s outrage, Tuesday’s victories were not so much an endorsement of the GOP as they were a repudiation of Senator Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.).
Angry voters used Republicans to remind the White House that the President and his party can bypass Congress. They can even ignore the Constitution. But as long as democracy exists, they cannot silence the people. With a 52-45 edge in the Senate and a comfortable double-digit majority in the House, a new political dynamic is already taking shape. This morning, voters woke up to even more surprises, as Democrats continued to fall like dominos in liberal strongholds like Illinois, Maryland, and Massachusetts.
In race after race, we witnessed the raw power, not of the Republican Establishment, but of voters who understood the last line of defense for America is at the ballot box. What the bruising will mean for President Obama’s last two years is anyone’s guess. “I don’t expect the President to wake up tomorrow morning and view the world any differently,” Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said. “He knows I won’t either.”
Two months away from gaveling in new leadership, let’s hope the GOP realizes that Americans didn’t send Republicans to Washington to babysit America’s decline, we sent them to hold this President accountable and begin restoring America’s constitutional foundation. By the way, don’t be surprised if Establishment Republicans and the talking heads in the media say these victories belong to moderates. They couldn’t be more wrong. [Tuesday] night’s success is rooted in a common passion to restore the Constitution, the family, life, and faith to a place of honor in American law. And the GOP overlooks this fact at their peril. Americans are looking for men and women of conviction. And as last night’s results show, they will accept no substitutes.
For more on the election and the GOP’s historic victory, tune in to FRC’s special election webcast.
FRC Action PACs a Punch
Our thanks go out to everyone who supported the FRC Action PAC! With races still being called, [Tuesday] night’s winners showed that your money was well spent. At least 17 of our endorsed House and nine of our Senate candidates crossed the finish line ahead. And several seats – including Senate seats in Alaska, and Virginia – are too close to call. On top of electing new friends, FRC stood behind faithful ones. Ninety-eight of the members who’ve voted with FRC’s position 100% of the time were reelected (with a very real possibility of crossing the 100-member mark once all the ballots are counted).
Exit Wounds
For all the talk that the evangelical movement is dead or irrelevant, [Tuesday] night’s results should put those rumors to rest. Thanks to the momentum from I Stand Sunday, Star Spangled Sunday, and unprecedented church engagement, 26% of the voters in [Tuesday’s] midterms were evangelicals (1% higher than their turnout in 2010). A whopping 78% of them broke for the GOP. And that’s just the tip of the evangelical iceberg. Experts believe there’s plenty of untapped potential in the pews, especially if a third of possible evangelical voters stayed home. Imagine the growth possibilities for the GOP if it did more to mobilize its social conservative religious base! Meanwhile, the non-churchgoing vote fell heavily Democratic – a reminder of how important the evangelical movement is to the Republicans’ success. Once again, the youth vote was an unreliable one for either party, with a 12% turnout for 18 to 29-year-olds (a seven-point drop from 2012).
Social Security
Heading into [Tuesday] night’s vote, most experts pinned people’s frustrations on the economy. But with unemployment falling, gas prices dropping, and the stock market making a slow recovery, there was obviously a lot more to Tuesday’s victory than the market. Social issues continued to play – not just a key role – but a deciding one in several Senate races. Senator-elect Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) ousted Kay Hagen, at least in part, by standing alongside voters on issues like marriage. Like several other states, North Carolina’s constitutional amendment was toppled by an activist judge, and Thom Tillis refused to stand by and watch. With the support of his party, the state House Speaker went to bat for the people’s vote and hired attorneys to defend the amendment in court. And based on exit polls, he couldn’t have made a better decision. While the media likes to characterize Republicans as out of step with voters on marriage, there was plenty of exit polling saying otherwise in Virginia, Arkansas, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Ohio. While the Establishment runs from the issue, winners like Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) ran toward them and picked up plenty of support along the way. In Kansas, Senator Pat Roberts’s ® campaign was left for dead but the embattled incumbent ignored the D.C. political consultants and campaigning on his social conservative record. In Iowa, even the most expensive race in U.S. history was no match for Joni Ernst’s pro-life, pro-marriage convictions. The first female Senator ever to be elected in the Hawkeye State stood strong on her values – and the people of Iowa stood with her.
Consent of the Gov Earned
Congress may be gobbling up all the headlines, but the real story may be in the states. Overwhelmingly, voters turned out to protect their conservative legislatures, with several results still pending. Heading into the evening, Republicans completely controlled the state house and the legislature in 23 states, and worst case scenario, will still control them in 20. By contrast, Democrats came into the election controlling only 13 state governments and could close out 2014 with losses in half or more of those. But the biggest stunners of the night may have been in the Governors’ column. In states where the phrase “Republican leader” is a foreign concept, voters evicted Democrats from their gubernatorial mansions in three of the most radically liberal states in America. After piling up the wins in Arkansas, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, New Hampshire, Florida, Georgia, New Mexico, Maine, voters delivered their biggest jolt in a generation painting the governorships red in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Obama’s home state of Illinois – a net gain of four for the states’ chief executives. Although the focus is often on Congress, one or two people can change the dynamic in a state legislature – which continues to be the venue where good pro-family policies are being advanced.
Ballot Busters
After putting hundreds of miles on the FRC Action bus, FRC Action couldn’t have been happier to see the people turn out to support Amendment 1 in Tennessee. Thanks in large part to the work of David Fowler and his Family Action Council of Tennessee (FACT), the people in the Volunteer State rejected the media’s talking points and voted to empower the state to defend innocent life. “Today is a great victory for the people of Tennessee, who have reclaimed from our state Supreme court their right to have a voice on abortion policy in our state. It is a victory for a government of and by and for the people, and a victory for the protection of women and their unborn.” Under the measure, state lawmakers – not courts or activist judges – would have the final say in abortion clinic regulations. “If you look at veterinary clinic standards in the state of Tennessee,” Josh Duggar told crowds in the state, “those are higher than abortion clinic standards, and that is really just a slap in the face to women in this state.”
The War on Women’s… Intelligence
For a party that claims to represent women, they certainly didn’t resonate with them. Despite an eleventh-hour push from Planned Parenthood, contraception and abortion not only failed to pull Democrats over the finish line – but may have distanced them from it! In Colorado, where Sen. Mark Udall bet his whole campaign on “reproductive rights,” the gamble hardly paid off. By an eight-point margin, voters told their Senator that they didn’t appreciate his pro-abortion tunnel vision and elected Republican Cory Gardner instead. In Texas, abortion extremist Wendy Davis’s one-trick contraception pony was a monumental failure. Not only did Attorney General Greg Abbott win with men, he had a nine-point edge with women! Look for liberals to start searching for a new battle plan now that their “war on women” has failed.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
