Reading the Tea Leaves

It's primary day in New Jersey and a handful of other states.  There have been a number of these sorts of elections in the last few months.  Most of them are primaries; a handful of Congressional special elections have also been held.  Eager for evidence of how things might play out in the November 2010 midterm elections, the media has paid attention to most of these races. 

A consistent theme has been hard to find, but I think that there is one: anti-incumbency.  Many voters, frustrated by the endless list of American problems, have decided that the folks currently in office are to blame for our troubles.  And anti-incumbent waves like this, which don't come along all that often, can be dangerous for both parties.

The surprise Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts in January of 2010 was read by the mainstream media as evidence that the Tea Party branch of the GOP was ascendant.  But I believe that Brown's victory is better understood as the edge of anti-incumbent wave, one that has caught both parties in its fury.  Voters are looking to defy expectations.  In Utah, loyal GOPer Robert Bennet was seeking a third term in the Senate.  But he was cast aside by his party at their convention.  Newly-minted Democrat Arlen Specter, who joined the party after 2008, reasoning that he could not win re-election to his 5th term in the Senate as a member of the GOP, lost the Democratic primary and found that he just couldn't win re-election to the Senate.  It wasn't their party affiliation which cost Bennet and Specter their seats.  It was their insider status.

Today's races feature a handful of Tea Party candidates looking to replace party-favored candidates on the GOP line come November.  The Tea Party seems to mostly be partisan-driven and from the right, forcing mainstream GOP candidates to tack right in primaries.  But winning the general election requires a moderation that Tea Partiers might find hard to swing (consider, for example, the public relations disaster that Tea Party fave Rand Paul has proven to be in the Bluegrass State).  I'll be watching the Tea Party candidates in Nevada and South Carolina tonight.  In  Arkansas, incumbent Democrat Blanche Lincoln is hoping to avoid the specter of losing her party's nomination to Democrat Lt. Governor Bill Halter.  I suspect she's about to lose. 

There are other contests as well, as this handy Washington Monthly post notes.  It's likely to be an interesting evening, though the big meaning of it all won't be truly understood until November.  And this is politics, so November is a long time from now.

Update: I was wrong about Arkansas; Lincoln held on. The Tea Party candidate in Nevada, Sharron Angle, won the right to face Democrat Harry Reid in Nevada.  Two California Republican self-financed women, former CEOs Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, earned the right to run for Governor and Senate, respectively.  It was an interesting evening.