Backloading to November

Prospects for Dems in the mid-terms have looked bleak for months, but things may be looking up a bit, says James Surowiecki.

That backloading of the bill was good economics: with the Federal Reserve doing less to pump up the economy, an extra half-trillion dollars in fiscal stimulus will help pick up the slack. It was also good politics, since much of that money will be flooding into the economy during the key second and third quarters. Republicans in Congress would presumably block any Democratic attempt to pass another major stimulus, both for ideological reasons and because they have no political incentive to see the economy improve. (While you might expect all incumbents to pay the price for a poor economy, in Sides’s words, “It’s really only the President’s party that suffers when the economy’s bad.”) Pushing much of the stimulus spending off until this year made that less of a problem.

It didn’t guarantee that the economy would be healthy by November, though. So it’s still possible that we may see a replay of the 1982-84 election cycle, when Republicans lost twenty-six seats in the midterm elections, thanks to a weak economy, but Ronald Reagan won reëlection in a landslide two years later. This time around, the recovery could come too late to save Democrats in November but still be in time to set Barack Obama up well for reëlection in 2012. The economy’s recent signs of life, coupled with all the stimulus money, give the Democrats a better chance of avoiding that fate. But economies aren’t machines. The Democrats will have to spend the next seven months much the way voters will: waiting and hoping that, at long last, things are finally back on track.