Victory at what price?

Megan McArdle writes at Bloomberg View,

Whatever your opinion on the merits of Barack Obama as a president, his tenure has been rough for his party. As Republican strategist Rory Cooper tweeted last night, “Under President Obama, Democrats have lost 900+ state legislature seats, 12 governors, 69 House seats, 13 Senate seats.” And while this may be coincidence, unrelated to anything Obama has done, I suspect that these two things may be connected -- that parties are most vulnerable at precisely the moment when they feel themselves strongest.

...The midterm elections of 2014 did not necessarily shake this conventional wisdom. But two recent pieces of news ought to. Tea Party favorite Matt Bevin just won an upset election in the Kentucky governor’s race. Not only did he take back a seat that Democrats have controlled for 40 of the last 44 years, but also, he won by a smashing margin, 53 percent to 44 percent. This after polls had shown his Democratic opponent, state attorney general Jack Conway, in a narrow lead and the New York Times was speculating that Bevin might “eke out” a victory by driving conservative Christians to turn out.

Meanwhile, the latest Quinnipiac poll shows Clinton losing to every major Republican primary contender except Trump. Even if you believe the more favorable polls, a Democratic strategist probably does not want to see them so close -- not when Clinton is a widely known name with the nomination practically sewed up, while most Americans probably know Rubio as “Marco Who?”

...Beshear built Kentucky’s comparatively successful exchange and expanded Medicaid by executive order when the legislature wouldn’t give him what he wanted. This is a great strategy -- as long as you think your party will continue to hold the executive pen. Now both the exchange and the Medicaid expansion are in danger, though Bevin has recently weaseled over exactly what he’s going to do with the folks in Kentucky who got insured through the Medicaid expansion. This should give pause to fans of Obama’s similar strategies at the national level.

Moreover, what you get through executive order is probably more radical than you’d get via the legislative process, because it has input from only one half of the political spectrum. That appeals to the base, but also has political costs. I doubt that the Obama administration would have put its weight behind a bill to force schools to let trans girls change in open locker rooms, but that’s the rule the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has apparently now adopted with a school district in Palatine, Illinois. Its actions on greenhouse emissions from power plants are almost certainly stronger than what would have emerged from a bargaining process with the Republican-controlled congress. And however laudable these moves may be, they make a difference in down-ticket races. I’d guess that the Palatine school board elections will make this a prominent issue, to the detriment of liberal candidates. And it seems quite likely that the power plant regulations contributed to Conway’s loss in a coal state.

...Nothing is forever in politics -- not "permanent majorities," and not structural defeats. I expect that Democrats will reverse their down-ticket problems through assiduous labor. But that labor will not be done by 2016. And it will not be done at all unless the non-professionals -- the donors and the activist base -- stop pouring all their energies into winning Pyrrhic victories.

Read more here.