University Times

“Elections, as Barack Obama was so fond of reminding Republicans last year, have consequences. I think the president will soon discover this is the case,” said Judy Woodruff, national news veteran reporter and co-anchor and senior correspondent of “PBS NewsHour,” in a presentation here last week.

Woodruff honed her experienced eye on the recent mid-term elections, analyzing results, breaking down exit polls and making some predictions, in her Nov. 15 University Honors College American Experience Distinguished Lecture titled “After the 2010 Elections: Can They Govern?” — a reference to potential political gridlock.

For the first time, the American Experience Distinguished Lecture series, launched 39 years ago, was co-sponsored by Pitt’s Dick Thornburgh Forum for Law and Public Policy. Former Pennsylvania Gov. Thornburgh was in attendance. (See related story, this issue.)

“Everybody’s on edge, especially we in the news media, as we wait to see what happens as a result of the mid-term election earthquake,” said Woodruff, who has covered politics for more than three decades, previously serving as news anchor and senior correspondent for CNN for 12 years, and as NBC News White House correspondent, 1977-1982.

Unlike the 2008 elections, when 130 million Americans — 61 percent of eligible voters — turned out, only 88 million, or 40 percent, turned out for the Nov. 2 elections.

“That is on par with typical mid-term turnout, but still disappointing in our democracy,” said Woodruff, who has garnered numerous awards, including the Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award in Broadcast Journalism/Television. “And it’s a reminder that the electorate that turns out in 2012 almost certainly will be different again, and will include many of those voters who we know did not turn out in this election: young people, Latinos, other minorities and others who for a variety of reasons decided to sit this one out.”

The most obvious result of the elections is that the Republicans won across the board. “A few races are still undecided, but out of almost 100 new members of the House of Representatives, at least 84 are Republicans,” Woodruff noted. “Of those new members, at least 63 were flipped from the Democrats. Only nine new members of the House are Democrats, and only three of them flipped from the Republicans.”

Fewer Republican gains occurred in the U.S. Senate, with the GOP gaining six seats (now that the Alaska race has been decided), to make the breakdown in the upper chamber 53 Democrats, including the independents who caucus with them, and 47 Republicans.

Republicans also gained six additional governorships for a total of 29, including, she said, “in states critical in presidential years, like right here in Pennsylvania, in Ohio and in Iowa. Very significantly, the Republicans also picked up at least 19 state house chambers, in this state as well — significant because we know state legislatures are going to be redrawing congressional districts based on the 2010 census. Every advantage counts going into the next election when those lines are being drawn.”

Voter demographics reflected the sharp shift to the Republican Party, Woodruff noted. “Women who turned out to vote divided almost evenly between the two parties, favoring Democrats by just 2 percentage points, according to exit polls. This was a major blow to Democrats, who have consistently won a majority of the female vote over the past few decades,” she said. “The tiny majority among women was easily overcome by the 12-point margin men gave Republicans.”

The only age group that voted Democratic were the 18-29 year olds, by a lopsided margin, but they made up only one out of every nine voters, she added. Every other age group, and especially those 65 and over, voted heavily for Republicans.

“Probably the most politically important demographic are the independents, people who describe themselves as going back and forth between parties depending on the election, who favored Republican candidates 55 to 40 percent. That is a big swing from 2008, in which they went solidly Democratic and solidly for Barack Obama,” Woodruff pointed out.

What voters were trying to say when they cast their ballots, however, is open to interpretation, she said.

Based on the approximately 15,000 voters nationwide surveyed in exit polls, 62 percent said the economy was the main issue that influenced their vote, which indicates a rejection of the White House’s economic agenda, Woodruff said. That rebuff was driven by 9.6 percent unemployment nationally, and the fact that 41 percent of the jobless have been unemployed for more than half the year — double the percentage in that situation during the recession of 1982-83.

“What I would submit, however, and even some Republican leaders themselves admit this: The election results are not a widespread affirmation or a clear endorsement of the general Republican prescription to slash taxes, drastically cut spending, undo health care reform, undo financial regulation reform and other regulatory changes,” Woodruff maintained.

Other results from the exit polls, which tend to be more reliable than pre-election polling, Woodruff said, highlight the sharp divides among voters:

• Regarding the new Congress’s top priority, 39 percent said it should be to reduce the federal deficit; a similar percentage, 37 percent, said Congress should spend more to create jobs, and another 18 percent said Congress needs to cut taxes, which would add to the deficit.

• When voters were asked about the new health care law, 48 percent said repeal it, but 47 percent said either expand it or leave it the way it is.

“If all that sounds confusing, it is,” Woodruff said. “The voters are very clear about what they don’t like, but they are far less certain about what they want, other than to say, ‘We want times that are better.’ I see that dichotomy of Nov. 2 playing out in the weeks and months to come. It centers on what are quite different interpretations of the results by both political parties.”

Many rank-and-file Republicans say this election was a mandate to pursue their agenda: Repeal health care reform, extend the Bush-era tax cuts indefinitely for all, even the very wealthy, and institute large cuts across the board in domestic programs, federal agencies and the number of government employees, she said.

“The White House and the rank-and-file Democrats are saying that would be an enormous over-reach and a misinterpretation of what voters are saying.”

In addition, not only Democrats are unpopular with the electorate. “Both pre- and post-election polls consistently say the Republicans are viewed favorably by only 34 percent and unfavorably by 42 percent, just about the reverse of the Republicans who controlled Congress in 1994, when we had the big Republican sweep under Newt Gingrich,” Woodruff noted.

“One other important point: Among the 60-plus incumbent Democratic House members who lost their seats, almost half were moderates, members of the so-called blue-dog caucus, who urged their party to try to adopt a business-friendly, fiscally conservative agenda. So the remaining Democrats in the House are, on balance, more liberal,” she said.

In contrast, more Republicans are conservative than before, because many of them were backed by the tea party movement.

“There’s no real official tally of who was supported by the tea party, but the number of winners who claim some tea party backing includes at least five new Republican senators and as many as 40 new House members,” Woodruff said.

“The result: It sets up a Congress that is even more divided philosophically than the current Congress. And it raises serious questions about what they are going to be able to work together on, what it is they are going to be able to accomplish,” she said.

Woodruff doubts that much of the tea party agenda will be enacted, at least in the short term, due to the Senate’s Democratic majority and the president’s veto power.

“But they will certainly help to frame the agenda in the next few years on spending cuts, taxes, on regulations and on investigations, with subpoena powers” now in the hands of the House majority Republicans, she said.

“The question there is: Will Republicans focus on productive oversight of issues like outsourcing, lack of transparency in many agencies, what really happened to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in terms of the mortgage meltdown, or will they choose to go for the headlines investigating issues like ACORN, the group working for Democratic turnout that used Black Panthers in an attempt to intimidate voters, at least in one instance?”

So the battleground areas — taxes, spending cuts, government efficiency — already are drawn.

“My best guess over the next few weeks is that the Bush-era tax cuts are going to be extended for everyone, including the wealthy, for at least a year or two, and perhaps longer for the middle class,” Woodruff said.

She also predicted some spending cuts will be enacted. “There is movement in both political parties to do something about attacking the deficit, although the plan that came out of the Republican leadership of the House to cut something like $100 billion — a 21 percent cut in discretionary spending — could end up being more political rhetoric than a realistic legislative goal, because it would entail making huge cuts in programs like Pell Grants for middle class college students, and cuts for the National Institutes of Health for things like cancer and Alzheimer’s research. Those cuts are not politically popular,” Woodruff pointed out.

“Curiously to me, one of the great uncertainties and almost completely absent in all of the intense pre-election debate were the issues of national security and the war in Afghanistan. We know there are several hundred thousand brave young Americans risking their lives around the globe and, shamefully, politicians in both parties largely ducked the issue,” she said.

“At some point, important decisions are going to have to be made, and it astonishes me that there was almost no debate about it over the several months of the campaign.”

Regarding the national debt, while there is a broad consensus to tighten monetary policy in the short run because of the poor shape of the economy, she said, “there is in this country a serious, long-term chronic debt problem. When we talk about the debt, the issue of record consumer debt, household debt, is every bit as serious as the public debt, the government debt. Both of them in the long run imperil our prosperity and the country as a whole.”

She said the recent plan proposed to reduce the national debt by the Erskine Bowles-Alan Simpson bipartisan commission “shows the one thing that is clear in all serious analyses for minimizing the deficit, let alone reducing it, and that is it is impossible to do it without cutting back entitlements like Social Security and Medicare and raising taxes.”

Woodruff urged the American citizenry, as well as the national media, to drive home that point.

“So when politicians engage in these vague statements that we need to ‘cut government,’ make them talk specifics! When they say cut, ask ‘Cut what’? When they say, ‘We need to get rid of waste, fraud and abuse,’ hold their feet to the fire,” she said. “I think the media do a somewhat better job than normal in covering this tough issue, but you also need to hold our feet to the fire.”

The point is not to embarrass anyone, but to raise the level of the debate by not letting politicians get away with misleading statements.

“We allowed that in the campaign; now we’re getting to crunch time when everyone on both sides of the aisle agrees that hard decisions have to be made and they owe it to the American people to be honest about what the options are,” Woodruff said.

As for her near-term predictions, Woodruff expects that the health care reform law will not be repealed, although she said it’s pretty clear there will be tinkering around the edges.

“We’re going to hear a lot about it, and I think it’s a healthy debate to have,” with Americans divided equally over its merits, she said.

“Whether much occurs or not, the next year is certainly going to set the agenda for the 2012 presidential election. Make no mistake, Barack Obama will have his work cut out for him over the next two years. His coalition has frayed, the best prospect for economic recovery is an unemployment rate of 8 percent and uncertainty abounds in Afghanistan,” Woodruff said.

“Moreover, it’s been more than nine years since there’s been any successful terrorist attack in the United States, and yet every single terrorist expert says it would be foolish to assume there will not be a terrorist attempt on this country. There are bad people out there and they’re trying every day to find new ways to attack us,” she said.

Even Pennsylvania, which Obama carried by a comfortable margin in 2008, he could have trouble carrying in 2012, based on the recent election results, she said.

“He does have one advantage at this stage and that is there is no obvious strong Republican candidate to defeat him, but we know there are a lot of possible names out there,” Woodruff said.

She downplayed the possibility of a third-party candidate getting elected president, based on American political history, but noted that third parties have influenced election outcomes in the past.

“There also are a lot of issues that we cannot predict now for the next two years: How will the economic recovery go? Does the health care law become any more popular? What will happen in Afghanistan? Will there be any terrorist attacks? All that is what makes my job so interesting,” Woodruff said.

She warned Republicans not to underestimate Barack Obama. “On the other hand, four years ago in 2006, no one could anticipate that the junior senator from Illinois would have won the nomination and gone on to win the White House.”

—Peter Hart