Emma Ellman-Golan | What 2010 means for Dems

Like most Democrats, I am disappointed with last week’s election results. With the losses of gubernatorial candidate Dan Onorato, senatorial candidate Joe Sestak, congressional candidate Bryan Lentz and U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, I worry that we will see cuts in education and welfare spending and tax policies that increase the income disparity between the rich and the poor. We ran excellent candidates who had the potential to make this country better, and it frustrates me that such inspiring people lost.

I honestly believe that Penn Democrats did the best we could. Turnout in Philadelphia exceeded expectations, and within Penn Dems’ West Philadelphia turf, Democrats got 90 percent of the vote. Also, I estimate that 300 Democratic undergraduates voted absentee in their home states.

However, the results suggest that the rest of the state, and even the rest of the country, is upset with the slow process of change. Despite President Barack Obama’s significant accomplishments — the stimulus, credit card reform, student loan reform, the Small Business Lending Act, health care reform and financial regulation — unemployment is still high and the economy is still shaky. The election results are not a referendum on Obama, but rather a response to a weak economy that was not fixed fast enough.

We witnessed the effects of a wave year. Fueled by economic dissatisfaction, Democrats faced a political climate filled with anti-incumbency sentiment. But the results are not a mandate for the Republicans. The New York Times reported that exit polls show voters are split 47 to 48 in their support of or opposition to health care reform. Fifty-three percent view the Democratic Party unfavorably, but 52 percent do the same for the Republican Party. Democrats and Republicans alike often make the mistake of assuming that an election victory reflects a drastic change in popular opinion. Perhaps, as Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) wrote in the Times last week, “Democrats over-interpreted our mandate” in 2008. I would now caution the Republicans against doing the same.

Unfortunately, this year’s newly elected Republicans are more conservative than ever, and they seem to think they have a mandate. It is a shame that primaries often push candidates away from the center, and I believe that the emergence of the Tea Party this election cycle has made that problem more pervasive among Republicans. While the Tea Party’s efforts backfired in Delaware, Colorado and Nevada, it has been very successful at pushing moderate Republicans out of races where they would have been able to win and subsequently work on bipartisan legislation in Washington.

I worry about the next two years. While I think a Republican Congress bodes well for Obama’s re-election, I worry that we will see two more years of stalling. The Republicans have been the “Party of No” for the past 22 months, refusing to break party lines to support historic legislation, filibustering even low-level judicial appointments and attempting to thwart the President’s effectiveness to drive down his popularity. But with a Republican Congress, a Democratic Senate and a Democratic President, the Republicans in Congress will need to do more than vote “no” this time. The economy still needs to be fixed. Republicans will need to work across the aisle to support bills like the Small Business Lending Act which, based on its content, should have been bipartisan, except that its sponsors were Democrats so no Republican would vote for it.

In the next two years, I encourage students to keep fighting for progress. We can prevent Republicans from cutting the investments in education laid out in the stimulus, or from refusing to fund health care reform, which provides necessary coverage for 18- to 26-year-olds.

In the next two years, the young people who catapulted Obama to victory need to wake up and vote. We need to keep making calls, knocking on doors and supporting local progressive candidates. With the momentum of a Presidential election in 2012, we will be able to win our seats back and move our country forward.

Emma Ellman-Golan is a College junior and President of Penn Dems. Her e-mail address is emmae@sas.upenn.edu.

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