Murkowski Loss on Tuesday Would Certify This Year's Key Election Trend

The Washington Post reports that incumbent Alaska governor, Frank Murkowski, is at risk of losing his state's primary as he vies for re-election this coming Tuesday. The Post notes:

A defeat on Tuesday would make him the fourth incumbent to lose a primary election this month. On Aug. 8, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) and Rep. John J.H. "Joe" Schwarz (R-Mich.) were defeated in primaries. Murkowski, who has been running third in recent public polls, may be headed for the same fate.

In American primary elections, incumbents lose about as often as unopposed candidates for the Politburo used to be defeated in the late Soviet Union. So, this string of losses by incumbents is notable.

With a nod to the maxim, "all politics is local," one must acknowledge the peculiarities at play in each of the races where incumbents have lost--or may lose.

Nonetheless, one can see a trend among the American electorate, as well as the mood in which it's rooted.

The trend: A rejection of the usual suspects, be they Democrat or Republican. The mood: Full-scale, widespread anger with politicians for their seemingly governing life styles.

Probably both rightly and wrongly, Americans are ticked off at their government and the pols in charge, irrespective of their party, and they're finding ways to express their rage at the voting booth.

Whether all of this anger will devolve to the Democrats' advantage in November is still being decided. In the normal course of things, one would expect that a midterm election in the second term of a President's tenure, especially one coming after a period in which his party has enjoyed majorities in both houses of Congress, would go decisively against the incumbent's party. That may happen this year. But if it does, it will be apparently be accompanied by little enthusiasm, as polling shows that voter anger contains almost no impulse to turn to the Democrats for new ideas. Ideology will prove to be even less important in 2006 than in most elections.

My guess is that as the fall campaign season unfolds, the people in trouble will be incumbents or candidates representing the parties of incumbents.

The electorate's anger is going to make credible independent candidacies, such as those of Kinky Friedman and Carol Keeton Strayhorn in Texas, attractive to voters, whether those candidates win or not. If it weren't so prohibitively difficult for independent parties to get on ballots around the country, the current angry mood of the US electorate would possible result in a real apple cart-tilting election in November. As it is, candidates best able to articulate, harness, and express positively Americans' anger with politics-as-usual, as Ronald Reagan did, will have a real advantage.

But candidates who win on the basis of such voter impatience with the political process will have to deliver change...and quickly. Voters are unlikely to be very patient with pols who ride to office on a wave of discontent and then appear unable or unwilling to change the things they railed against when they were campaigning.