The New Hampshire Senate battle between Scott Brown and Jeanne Shaheen may depend on independent female voters.Jim Cole/The Associated Press
Debates, fundraising frenzy, posturing and a flood of campaign advertisements – this can only be the run-up to a classic U.S. midterm congressional election. The polls are popping all over the place. The pols are popping up all over the place. It's a veritable autumn political festival.
At this stage of a midterm election, the focus moves from the specific (How do things look in New Hampshire?) to the general (What's the next Congress, the 114th, going to look like?). We know some of the answers, at least tentatively, already.
But there's another question that increasingly is playing an important part in the political calculus: What will be the character of the new Republicans who will head to Washington the first week in January, 2015?
That would be an important issue in any case, but its relevance is heightened because of the growing likelihood that the Republicans, who already hold a comfortable margin in the House of Represenatives, will sweep into power in the Senate, where the Democrats now hold a 53-45 margin with two independents (one from Vermont, one from Maine) customarily siding with the Democrats. At least three of those Democratic seats are all but certain to turn Republican, and the trend lines for a half-dozen or so others favour Republicans.
This is the hidden "X Factor" in American politics. In every case in which a retiring Republican lawmaker is likely to be replaced by a newly minted Republican lawmaker, the new member will almost certainly be more conservative than the old. And in general, the Republicans who are likely to prevail in the Nov. 4 balloting – this includes those Republican replacements plus new Republicans likely to unseat incumbent Democrats – are more conservative than the Republican average over all.
Plus, in every one of the Senate races with the best chance for a Republican to replace a Democrat, the Republican candidate is younger than the Democrat.
This continues the Republican rightward drift that began dramatically in 2010 – a trend that fortifies the ideological rigidity of the party, a quality that is mirrored on the Democratic side. U.S. politics, once a fluid universe with conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, now has the ideological alignment customary in Canadian and European parties.
The difficulty for the Republicans – the flip side of the challenge the Democrats faced for a two-decade period in the late 20th century – is that as the party becomes more conservative, its presidential prospects become more complicated. Moreover, the debate within the Republican Party about the value, or the futility, of nominating presidential candidates who appeal to the great middle of American politics is becoming more focused, and more furious.
Conservatives point to moderate nominees in 1996 (former senator Robert J. Dole), 2008 (Senator John McCain) and 2012 (former governor Mitt Romney) – losers, all of them – and wonder why the party doesn't select a true conservative. In response, moderates point to 1964 (the Barry Goldwater debacle, when the Republicans lost 46 states to Lyndon Johnson) and warn of the danger of a hard-right nominee. This is the debate that will animate the Republican primaries for the 2016 presidential nomination, which begin 16 months from now here in New Hampshire.
And just to make things even more complex, the high-profile U.S. Senate midterm race in this state is going against every trend.
It's the contest between Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a veteran of New Hampshire Democratic politics who once served as governor, and Scott Brown, who actually served in the Senate from another state, neighbouring Massachusetts, before challenging Ms. Shaheen this fall.
(This sort of cross-jurisdictional exchange may be common to Canadian and British politics, but it is relatively rare in the United States, though its most colourful precedent involved a politician claimed by these same two states: the great 19th-century political figure Daniel Webster, elected to the House from New Hampshire and then, six years later, from Massachusetts, which subsequently sent him to the Senate.)
The shape of this 2014 New Hampshire Senate race has not substantially changed in the past month, with Ms. Shaheen holding a lead around the magnitude of the margin of error over Mr. Brown, who – to add to the oddity of it all – is more moderate than almost any other Republican senate candidate in the country. The Democratic advantage here is an unusual phenomenon, given Barack Obama's 38 per cent approval rating in the state, which he carried in both 2008 and 2012.
The key to this contest may be independent female voters, an increasingly important factor in presidential elections and one that is critical in Senate races this autumn in Colorado, North Carolina and here in New Hampshire.
"If these female voters stay with Shaheen, it's hers," says Neil Levesque, director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H. "If they break, it's his."
It may be the only election in the country with such a crisp shorthand. But that's what makes this election interesting – and vital.