Democratic county clerk Kathy Hochul has both a tea party opponent and a congressman from Wisconsin to thank for boosting her to a win last night in New York's 26th District special election.
Democrats were able to make Medicare an issue in last night's contest because House budget chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) included Medicare reform in his GOP budget proposal. Democrats said from the start that they relish the opportunity to cast Republicans as extreme in the coming election cycle, and�Ryan's proposal to shift Medicare into a subsidized private insurance system was the perfect opportunity.
Democrats put those attacks to the test last night for the very first time--and they won.
Hochul received 47 percent, Republican state Assemblywoman Jane Corwin received 43 percent, tea party candidate and businessman Jack Davis received 9 percent and Green candidate Ian Murphy received 1 percent, according to the latest totals available Wednesday morning from the Associated Press.
As expected, Democrats cast Hochul's win in the GOP-leaning Western New York district as a referendum on Medicare, but Republicans also joined them to express concern over how Medicare may have contributed to Corwin's demise.
"It's a Republican district with a solid Republican candidate," Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) told the New York Times. "What went wrong? We definitely have to determine the extent to which the Medicare issue hurt us."
Tom Davis, a former GOP Congressman from Virginia and former National Republican Congressional Committee chair, told Politico that Republicans "were on defense the whole time on Medicare, not on offense on the deficit or Obamacare or anything else. You can't just sit there and be a punching bag on this issue, and that's what they were."
Even Donald Trump, the businessman-turned potential 2012 candidate warned of Medicare's effect on the special election. "A very popular Republican woman is running for the office. She was expected to win easily," Trump said of Corwin earlier this month. "She's having a hard time defending that whole situation with Medicare."
Hochul employed the slogan "Save Medicare/Vote Hochul" as part of Democratic efforts to portray Corwin as someone who will put Medicare in jeopardy. The issue even became the focus of last week's NY26 debate as Hochul hammered home the Democratic line--Corwin will "help destroy Medicare as we know it" Hochul stated at one point.
By the end of the election, a Siena College Research Institute poll (pdf) found that Medicare had become the top election issue for voters.
Ryan himself agreed that Medicare played role in the election, but blames demagoguery--not the issue of reining in Medicare--for steering voters away from Corwin.
"Look, I saw the ads in that district. I saw burning people's Medicare cards. If you can scare seniors into thinking that their current benefits are being affected, that's going to have an effect, and that is exactly what took place here," Ryan said Wednesday morning on MSNBC's "Morning Joe. "So yes, it's demagoguery, it's scaring seniors." Ryan referred to the tactics as "Mediscare."
But Ryan added that he believes Davis' campaign was the primary reason Corwin lost.
Davis' tea party candidacy acted as a spoiler in last night's election. Preliminary totals show that if Corwin had received just a few percentage points from Davis, she would have been in a stronger position. Even if that had not been the case, Davis' presence complicated GOP strategy by creating divisions on the right.
Davis, a perennial candidate and who has previous run as a Democrat, had been vying for the GOP nomination. But after learning that the party would pick Corwin over him for the party nomination, Davis jumped to the tea party ballot line.
Though Tuesday's race offers a snapshot of how Democrats plan to use Medicare as an election issue, overall, it is difficult and oftentimes misleading to extrapolate national trends from a single special election.
The National Republican Congressional Committee--the House campaign arm-- noted Tuesday night that Democrats won several special House elections in 2009 and 2010 before losing their House majority last November.
(Photo of Hochul: David Duprey/AP)
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