In political circles, Republicans and Democrats alike have begun comparing the 2010 election with the “revolution” that handed both the House and the Senate to the GOP in 1994. But how applicable is that analogy, really?

On the surface, the comparison is plausible. In 1994, as now, a charismatic outsider took office amid general unhappiness with the record of his Republican predecessor. Then, as now, the president decided to make health care reform a signature issue despite widespread concerns about the economy, taxes, and federal budget deficits. And, as now, Republicans responded with an abrasive political strategy that energized their conservative base, at a time when Democrats were seemingly divided between centrists and liberals discouraged by the new president’s perceived centrist path.

It’s impossible, however, to draw concrete conclusions from such superficial observations. A more disconcerting parallel for Democrats might be the scope of their recent winning streak. In the elections leading up to both 1994 and 2010, Democratic victories, particularly in the House, left the party somewhat over-exposed. In 1994, 46 of the 258 House Democrats were in districts carried by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. The numbers are comparable today, where 49 of the 257 House Democrats are in districts carried by John McCain, with only 34 Republicans in districts carried by Barack Obama. Similarly, if you apply the Partisan Voting Index, (PVI), which compares a district’s prior presidential results to national averages, you find that there are 66 Democrats in districts with a Republican PVI and only 15 Republicans in districts with a Democratic PVI–a similar situation to the 79 Democrats in Republican districts in 1994. Clearly, two straight “wave” elections have eliminated most of the low-hanging fruit for Democrats in the House, and created some ripe targets for the GOP.

But that’s where the fear-inducing similarities end. The Republicans’ 1994 victory in the House was also enabled by a large number of Democratic retirements: Twenty-two of the 54 seats the GOP picked up that year were open. By comparison, the authoritative (and subscription-only) Cook Political Report counts only four open, Democrat-held House seats in territory that is even vaguely competitive. That low number of open seats is significant because it limits the number of seats Republicans can win; if there is a similar wave of retirements in the offing for 2010, the signs have yet to materialize.

The 1994 parallels appear even more tendentious in the Senate. In 1994, Democrats lost eight of the 22 seats they defended, six of which were open. Republicans had only 13 seats to defend, and three of them were open. In 2010, however, the situation lopsidedly favors Democrats. Republicans have to defend 19 of their seats, seven of which are open. Meanwhile, Democrats have to defend 19 seats, only three of which are open. For Republicans to take the Senate, Democrats would have to lose eleven seats without picking off a single Republican. There’s no modern precedent for a tsunami that large.

Another disconnect between 1994 and 2010 involves patterns of demography and ideology. The 1994 election was the high-water mark of the great ideological sorting that occurred between the two parties. That made the environment particularly harsh for southern Democrats, as well as those in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain West, where many ancestral attachments to the Donkey Party came unmoored.

In the South, this sorting-out was reinforced by the decennial reapportionment and redistricting process, during which both Republicans and civil rights activists promoted a regime of “packing” and “bleaching” districts–that is, the electoral consolidation of African-American voters. While this had a salutary effect on African-American representation in the House of Representatives, the overall effect was to weaken Democrats. This dynamic was best illustrated by my home state of Georgia, whose House delegation changed from 9-1 Democratic going into the 1992 election to 8-3 Republican after 1994.

Nothing similar to those handicaps exists today. The ideological filtering of the parties is long over; any genuine conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans left in the electorate clearly have reasons for retaining their loyalties, which will be difficult to erode. Moreover, whether or not you buy the “realignment“ theories that Democrats were excited about after the 2008 elections, there is not a single discernible long-term trend that favors the Republican Party. Bush-era Republican hopes of making permanent inroads among Hispanics and women were thoroughly dashed in 2006 and 2008. Moreover, as Alan Abramowitz recently pointed out, the percentage of the electorate that is nonwhite–which is rejecting Republicans by overwhelming margins–has roughly doubled since 1994.

Still, there is one short-term demographic factor that Democrats should be alarmed about in 2010. Older voters almost always make up a larger percentage of those who go to the polls during midterm elections than they do in presidential election years. And older white voters, who contributed mightily to the Democrats’ midterm victory in 2006, are famously skeptical of Barack Obama. Indeed, they skewed away from him in 2008, even before Republicans devoted so many resources turning them against health care reform with tales of big Medicare cuts and death panels. So the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman may have been correct when he predicted that, “[e]ven if Obama and Democrats are just as popular next November as they were last November, they might stand to lose five to ten seats in the House based on the altered composition of the midterm electorate alone.”

That’s bad, but it’s certainly not political reversal on the scale of 1994. Unlike Bill Clinton at the same time in his presidency, Obama’s approval ratings seem to have recently stabilized in the low-fifties; not great, but not that bad in a polarized country, either. And as both Abramowitz and Ron Brownstein have pointed out, in group after group of the electorate, he remains as popular as he was when he was elected. A cyclical turnover of ten House seats, which seems to be the most likely scenario in 2010, would not a revolution make.

This is a cross-post from Real Clear Politics and The New Republic.

Even as Republicans crow about perceptions of the Obama administration running aground, and look forward with growing conviction to big, 1994-style gains in 2010, an interesting thing is happening in the two big statewide races that are actually being conducted right now, in VA and NJ. After months in which Republican gubernatorial candidates Bob McDonnell (VA) and Chris Christie (NJ) held commanding leads over their Democratic rivals, both races appear to be tightening up considerably.

In VA, the last couple of major polls, from the Washington Post and Insider Advantage, showed Creigh Deeds shrinking McDonnell’s lead to four percentage points. As Margie Omero explains at Pollster.com, Deeds’ improved standing reflects ads he’s recently run in Northern Virginia linking McDonnell’s abrasively right-wing master’s thesis to his record as a public official, particularly in terms of hostility to legalized abortion. Omero goes on to suggest that Deeds can make even more hay in NoVa by focusing more on McDonnell’s expressed hostility to working women. In any event, McDonnell no longer has momentum in his favor.

In NJ, Christie’s favorability ratings have steadily worsened as he became better known, and now Democracy Corps has a new poll out showing his lead over incumbent Gov. Jon Corzine down to a single point (40%-39%, with indie candidate Chris Daggett at 11%). Republicans are probably also nervous about the general pattern of NJ statewide races in recent years, where the increasingly Democratic partisan leanings of the state seem to eventually erase early GOP leads.

This is a cross-post from The Democratic Strategist.

The long-running campaign to make inclusion of a “public option” a progressive litmus test for Democrats on health care reform has entered a new and potentially dangerous phase: growing demands that congressional Democrats use the budget “reconciliation” procedure to avoid a Senate filibuster and lower the effective threshold for enactment of a bill to 50 votes.

As Brian Buetler explains at TalkingPointsMemo, two major new grassroots initiatives–one sponsored by Democracy for America (and headed up by Howard Dean) and another by a new group called CREDO Action–are asserting that reconciliation can easily be used for health reform. The clear implication is that any failure to go this route is proof of Democratic irresolution if not betrayal.

The temptation to insist on the reconciliation route is certainly understandable. Aside from making enactment of a bill by the Senate much easier, reconciliation, if successfully pursued, might make Republicans irrelevant to the process, while vastly reducing the influence of those Democrats who are obdurately opposed to the public option. It could also narrow the gap between House and Senate bills, which currently makes approval in either House of the ultimate conference committee report a difficult challenge.

But unfortunately, use of reconciliation isn’t the no-brainer it’s sometimes made out to be.

There are two major risks to the use of reconciliation which have nothing to do with fear of Republican shrieks about “cramming through a bill” or with fading hopes of bipartisanship.

The first involves an arcane budget provision called “the Byrd Rule,” which creates a point of order in the Senate against material in reconciliation bills that is not germane to budgeting. If the Senate parliamentarian (to whom the chair invariably defers on such matters) rules in favor of such a point of order–and Republicans will raise them constantly–it requires 60 votes to override such a ruling, which eliminates the entire advantage of taking this route to begin with. Nobody seems entirely confident that, say, creation of health care exchanges would be judged as germane.

The second problem is that it’s almost impossible to enact permanent changes in law via reconciliation; provisions can only operate within limited-time “windows.” This problem is best illustrated by the consequences of the GOP decision to enact the big Bush administration tax cuts via reconciliation. The “limited window” requirements of the Budget Act explains why there is still a federal estate tax, even though Congress voted in 2001 to phase it out; and why the remainder of the Bush tax cuts haven’t been made permanent. Creating an elaborate new system for health care on a temporary basis could be more than a little hazardous.

There’s a deeper problem, too, which is reflected in the evolution of the “Byrd Rule,” named after the famously imperious appropriator, the senior senator from West Virginia: non-Budget Committee senators in both parties naturally resist the routinization of reconciliation as a way to bypass the authorizing and appropriating committees. This isn’t a matter of party or ideology, but of institutional prerogatives that are zealously defended even by senators who might favor the kind of health reform legislation that reconciliation would be designed to enact.

It’s entirely possible that the potential payoff of using reconciliation is worth all the risks, particularly if hard-core Republican opposition to health reform makes it the only viable option, and/or if Democratic opponents of a public option refuse to vote for cloture to allow an up-or-down vote. But the key point right now is this: this decision isn’t easy, and the White House and congressional leaders may decide against reconciliation for reasons that should not expose them to angry charges of timidity or subservience to the health care industry.

UPDATE: The indispensible Jonathan Cohn has a post up at The New Republic on reconciliation and health care that makes a similar warning about its perils.

Suzy Khimm’s post at The Treatment about Howard Dean’s latest remarks on health care reform strategy shows the perils of the obsession with the public option on both sides of the barricades. After a fiery demand that progressives refuse to relent on the public option, the good Doctor allowed as how if we can’t get that, he’d be fine with legislation that just regulated health insurance abuses.

Ironically enough, Dean seems to be embracing the same fallback position as his old adversary Joe Lieberman, who’s said regulate-only legislation is all he’d be willing to support if a public option is included in a comprehensive reform bill. The problem, of course, is that absent an individual mandate to bring healthier people into the risk pool, or significant subsidies to lure them in, imposing a national system of community rating or guaranteed access to insurance on behalf of less robust Americans will likely boost private insurance premiums for everybody–not exactly an ideal outcome.

Now it’s likely that Dean is really just engaged in a tactical effort to keep progressives fired up for the public option in order to keep pressure on Senate Democrats and the White House to insist on some competitive mechanism–perhaps a “triggered” public option, perhaps strong national or regional co-ops–that’s significantly stronger than the weak state co-ops in the Baucus bill. And perhaps the reconciliation route means a “robust” public option can still be passed by the Senate. But at some point, when you keep urging people to say “my way or the highway,” you have to look down that highway to see where it leads. And if the end-point is going to be a regulate-only bill, both Dean and Lieberman need to acknowledge that may actually be no better than the status quo, and could possibly be even worse.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic

After a long and difficult gestation, the Senate Finance Committee has finally given birth to its plan for overhauling the nation’s health care system. Like many newborns, it may not be particularly pretty, but it has potential.

Although it’s the last entry into the health reform sweepstakes, the plan fashioned by Committee Chair Max Baucus is widely seen as the most important. That’s because Baucus, with President Obama’s explicit blessing, tried harder to win Republican backing for comprehensive health care reform. Even if he didn’t immediately succeed, his bill lies nearer the nation’s center of political gravity.

In today’s rancorous climate, that naturally means that Baucus is getting hammered from both ends of the political spectrum. Liberals hate his bill because it embraces (costly) nonprofit health care coops rather than the public option. Senator GOP leader Mitch McConnell wasted no time blasting the bill as partisan and senseless, even though three of his fellow Republicans were part of the “gang of six” who labored with Baucus for months to find common ground.

One of them, Sen. Chuck Grassley, was more circumspect than McConnell. Noting that the “chairman’s mark” is merely the starting point for committee deliberations on the plan, he added, “So if you don’t have the whole thing worked out yet, it would be intellectually dishonest for me to say, you know, I couldn’t vote for it or vote for it. Let’s see what the final package is.”

Whether any Republicans wind up supporting the bill, however, is less important than holding together the coalition of insurance companies and other key players in the health industry who this time around have lined up behind reform. His bill is also calculated to appeal to the moderate Democrats Obama will absolutely have to win in order to pass any reform of consequence.

With a price tag of $856 billion, the Baucus blueprint is cheaper than other Congressional plans. Best of all, it’s paid for — though the particulars will spark fierce debate. The financing package includes $507 billion worth of cuts in public health programs, mainly Medicare and Medicaid. Hospitals will take a big hit, and some providers may stop taking Medicare patients if reimbursements are cut. The bill also envisions $349 billion in new taxes. Most of that would come from taxing the most expensive health insurance policies, though medical device makers would also get nicked.

Complaints about these and other provisions of the bill are piling up thick and fast. Democrats say it doesn’t extend subsidies for buying taxes far enough up the income scale, forcing many families with modest incomes to pay more for coverage or face penalties if they couldn’t. That’s because most people will be required to buy insurance, regardless of how much subsidy they receive.

Republicans don’t like this mandate, or another one on larger businesses that don’t provide their employees with coverage. And with consummate chutzpah, given his party’s ferocious opposition to government-run health care, McConnell has shed crocodile tears over the bill’s Medicare cuts.

The Baucus bill will be, and should be, substantially modified as it runs the gauntlet of the Finance Committee, the full Senate and then a House-Senate conference. But it contains the insurance market changes, subsidies and mandates that are the guts of health reform, and it meets President Obama’s demand that reform seek to restrain health care cost growth while adding nothing to the federal deficit. And conservatives can sleep easy in the knowledge that it contains no death panels, no abortion funding and no insurance for illegal immigrants.

Most important, it moves the arduous legislative process forward, giving critics not only a target to attack, but a mark to beat.