Republicans win in Massachussetts

In 2008, President Barack Obama amassed a huge war chest by energizing a large following that repeatedly donated money to his campaign through the Internet. This method of fundraising significantly diluted the power of big campaign donors. Millions of followers donating $200-$300 is still a lot of money, even if no one person donated lots of money. President Obama did have his share of moneyed donors, but they didn't play nearly the role as they did with his opponents. This way of raising money did allow President Obama to claim with some truth that special interests did not hold his purse strings as much as hey did for his opponents. Moreover, the Republicans failed to harness the Internet and as a result were way behind in building a war chest and had to rely on campaign finance laws which make it difficult to for donors to donate huge sums of money.

In the midterm Congressional elections, there is another phenomenon, this time taking place in the Republican Party. As both parties gravitate towards their ideological extremes, the huge middle, which Barack Obama successfully harnessed in his bid to be the first African American President, has allegiance to neither party. Many of the Republicans running for the open House seats, and some governors, do not have the blessing of the Republican National Committee and therefore do not have access to national funds. While these candidates do use the Internet and other means to raise money, the big story is that many of the grass roots organizers for the Republican party are the so-called Tea Party Activists who detest big government and government meddling into people's personal lives.

The significance of this is that the precinct captain is the one responsible for getting out the vote, registering voters and mobilizing the local political machinery to support a particular candidate. Although the Tea Party activists care little about their neighbors friends, their desire for small government outweighs their desire for the government to keep its nose out of their affairs; so many of them are running as Republicans. Tea Party activists are signing up for the precinct captain positions and are usually unopposed. So the Tea Party activists are enlisting like minded people to register and vote for other Tea Party activists with the means to finance an election or the technical saavy to fund raise through the Internet.

While the Democrats transformed the Democratic Party from the top down, the Republican Party is being transformed from the bottom up. This does mean that in areas with a strong Tea Party presence, the Republicans actually have a chance to win a Congressional Seat, even though the candidate is not "officially endorsed" by the RNC. Eventually some of the more successful Tea Party activists will work their way up the Republican Party and may start a shift in the party ideology towards the center. If this happens, expect the Republicans to gain control of Congress perhaps as soon as 2012.

How did the Democrats let this happen? Sometimes you get too cocky if you are successful. Perhaps their Congressional victories in 2008, along with capturing the White House pushed the Democrats to be too exhuberant about their victories. Essentially they took the independents for granted and assumed that the independents would rather vote Democrat than Republican when push came to shove. Some independents will continue to vote for the Democrats because they value their privacy in personal affairs more than they do fiscal responsibility. Obviously, the voters in Massachussetts preferred fiscal responsibility to social liberalism.

When a state that voted Democrat by 26 points in the last election chooses a Republican Senator, it is time for the Democrats to wake up and halt their slide to the leftist fringes of the party. Just as allowing the fringe to dictate the Republican agenda in the 2008 Presidential campaign doomed any Republican chances of winning any contested election, allowing the fringes of the Democratic party to dictate their agenda will cost them seats in the House of Representatives; they just lost their filibuster proof majority in the Senate. It is time to wake up.