Mississippi by-election really rattles Congressional Republicans

House Republicans are admitting publicly what they have only said privately earlier. The capture of Mississippi Congressional District 1 by a Democrat by a margin of 8 points points to real problems for them in the general election this Fall. Mississippi 1 was thought to be a safe Republican seat. Since this is the third straight by-election this year in a strong Republican district that has gone to the Democrats (Dennis Hastert's Illinois seat and Democrat Don Cazayoux' 49 to 46 defeat of Republican Woody Jenkins in the long time Republican seat in in a Baton Rouge, La.), they are no longer willing to believe it is just a fluke. Adam Nagourney and Carl Hulse have written a lengthy article in today's New York Times about the Republican reaction. I find several points especially interesting.

1. The Congressional Republicans had thought that by nationalizing the election and tying Democrats to Barack Obama they could get more conservatives to vote against the Democrat. They tried this in both the Louisiana and the Mississippi races, and it has clearly failed both times.
   
2. The Congressional Republicans recognize that their close association to President Bush with his record-setting low approval ratings has been a drag on Republican candidates for Congress. Republican leaders are urging Congressional candidates to distance themselves from President Bush and take a more independent stance much as John McCain has been attempting.
   
3. The Congressional Republicans also appear to hope that McCain will have coattails they can hang on to. This is going to be difficult since McCain' advisers have McCain’s advisers have said that he intends to distance himself as much as possible from Congressional Republicans.
   
4. The general political environment and the likely surge in African-American turn out seem likely to combine with the nomination of Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee to make a lot of previously strong Republican Congressional districts in the South into play in the general election. Obama' nomination is shaping up to be a threat to the Republicans, not the asset they expected.
   
5. The Republican defeat in Mississippi is expected to dampen Republican fund-raising efforts.
   
6. Tennessee Republican Representative Marsha Blackburn is quoted as saying “We need to, No. 1, prove that we are listening to the American people, and, No. 2, show that we have a plan of action to respond to what they are telling us.” I have to note that 1. Congressional Republicans have a history of enacting legislation that the majority of Americans oppose or consider unimportant while ignoring what their constituents want them to do, and 2. since the ideology on which they have run since the Reagan administration clearly states that government is not able to do anything effective and the Bush actions in Katrina and the occupation of Iraq show the Republicans can't accomplish anything, those are going to be hard sells.
   

In short, they are recognizing that their close association with the very unpopular Bush has damaged their prospects for holding on to Congressional seats, so they are trying to associate the Democrats with the "liberal" Obama. They are also seriously looking at separating themselves from Bush and trying to work McCain's coattails. This could be difficult since McCain is separating himself from both Bush and the Congressional Republicans (yet continuing Bush's policies in Iraq and on the economy while ignoring that he has two decades in the House and Senate.)

In short, the unified national Republican machine is splintering on Bush's unpopularity and record of abject failures, together with the Congressional characteristics of corruption, refusal to act for the American people when in the majority, and their constant obstructionism in the minority. The failed war on terror, unnecessary and incompetent Occupation of Iraq, and the foreclosure and credit crisis leading into greater economic woes is coming home to roost. All the Congressional Republicans have left is to distance themselves from Bush and run independent, local campaigns if they can find the money. Oh, and enact voter suppression laws and tactics.

Josh Marshall addresses the Congressional Republican effort to distance themselves from Bush.

When you step back for a second, what's weird is that we even see the Mississippi special election result as a surprise. The Republican party is tightly defined around George W. Bush. And his job approval has not consistently gotten out of the low thirties (deep crisis numbers) for almost two years. And amazingly, over that period, the congressional party has made little attempt to get out of under his mantle.

I think what we're seeing here is the fall-out of the confidence game tactics that defined Bush's early presidency -- and has oddly persisted into the present. Whether it was the Iraq War or early tax cuts of various other policy moves, the idea was always to brashly push ahead even in the face of widespread public disapproval for particular policies. Such inexplicable confidence could goad adversaries into thinking the given policies were more popular and the president's position more powerful than it was. Later, as some of these policies went south, the president's message to congressional supporters was that if they maintained a united (you support me and I'll support you) that they'd pull through notwithstanding public opinion.

This confidence got a hard knock in the November 2006 elections. But the White House managed an odd after-the-fact success in putting this on the congressional party and removing the blame from the president. And now we're surprised that a party that has tightly defined itself around the most consistently unpopular president in modern political history is tanking at the polls?

Seriously, what's the mystery?

...I don't expect congressional Republicans to successfully separate themselves from President Bush. It's too ingrained at this point. And making the effort would be similar to what happens to an Army that breaks and buckles into a free-for-all retreat -- perhaps inevitable but still insuring an even worse result as the stragglers become easier to pick off one by one.

So the upcoming general election looks like a blowout for the Democrats, right?

Not so fast. The Republicans may be unpopular, but they have worked for decades to win elections in which they were unpopular with the majority of the voters. Digby discusses the disenfranchisement scheme that is going on in Missouri right now.

"There's a big voter disenfranchisement scheme unfolding in Missouri this week. It could be a very big problem --- they want it in place before November:

Missouri, the battleground state that has accurately picked the Presidential winner in every election since the 1950s, now faces an unprecedented peril this week: the theft of the voting rights of at least 240,000 of its citizens (nuns included) and the sure loss of the swing state of Missouri to Republicans in the Presidential race in November. And If Obama, the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party loses Missouri, he will likely lose the fall election as well.

Unfortunately, the wily "Thor" Hearne, the St. Louis-based voter-fraud propagandist and Republican lawyer who has been the leading GOP operative promoting vote suppression since 2000, has been working closely with the key Republican legislator promoting a new constitutional amendment requiring photo ID. Republicans are rushing to pass the measure before adjournment this Friday and bring it to voters in August, in time to stop enough blacks, the poor, the elderly, students and the disabled from voting Democratic in November.

As John Hickey, the executive director of the advocacy group ProVote, told me, "If you exclude 240,000 people from the electorate, that is plenty to swing the election in Missouri," with state-wide races having razor-thin victory margins as little as 21,000.

This is one state where it really could make the difference.

Thor Hearne is one of the preeminent vote suppression experts in the Republican party. I've written about him many times. Brad Friedman has been following his every move for years. His involvement means this is a serious move to steal Missouri.

We know this hits African Americans and Latinos hard and it's designed to make them think twice about putting themselves through this legal hassle. But there's another group that's going to be hard hit by this ---- the elderly. And in Arizona, where they now require proof of citizenship, even though they've been voting for 60 years, they are now just out of luck

It was a voter suppression scheme run by then Secretary of State Katherine Harris that removed tens of thousands of African American voters from the voter rolls in Florida in 2000 that allowed the election count in that state to get close enough so that Bush could - with Supreme Court connivance - steal the election.

The Republican Party has groups of experts who have worked for decades to implement such voter suppression schemes and to outright steal elections.

This Fall's Presidential election is going to go down to the wire, and while the Republicans will lose some Senate and House seats, they are working hard to minimize those loses. While the Republicans would lose in a blowout in a fair election, they are not going to let that happen.

They will use every trick they can find to both suppress voters (remember the Ohio Nuns!) and to steal votes where they can.

Then in California the Republicans have had a Constitutional Amendment already registered at the Secretary of State to outlaw Gay marriage. This will be really hot after today's ruling by the California Supreme Court that the earlier law preventing gay marriage was unconstitutional. This kind of hot-button cultural issue is something Republicans are famous for exploiting to get out conservative voters. Digby thinks that the expected high turnout of the California youth vote that Obama's race promises will swamp the conservative turnout, but that is something that we will just have to wait and see.

As I have said before - this is going to be the dirtiest election in living memory. The Republicans should be soundly defeated, but they will react like cornered rats all the way into defeat. They have to. Bush and the Congressional Republicans together have destroyed the Republican "brand" for at least a generation.