One thing is perfectly clear: Hawaii remains just about the bluest of the blue states, despite decades of talk that a GOP resurgence is just around the next electoral corner.
This year has been yet another chapter in that “coming soon” saga. Back in March, Republican Party insiders were crowing about the thousands of people who turned out to vote in the party’s first local presidential caucuses, likening the level of partisan excitement to what Democrat’s enjoyed during Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.
And with former Gov. Linda Lingle in a much-anticipated U.S. Senate race against Mazie Hirono, who Lingle had defeated in her successful 2002 gubernatorial campaign, the party’s fortunes seemed to be improving.
But, once again, political ambitions hit the wall of electoral reality, as voters delivered yet another sweeping Democratic victory in Tuesday’s General Election.
How blue is blue?
At the top of the ticket, Hawaii led the nation in support for native son Barack Obama, who won 70.1 percent of the vote. The only other state to come close to Hawaii’s shade of blue was Vermont, where 67 percent backed Obama.
The Democratic sweep in Hawaii was also broad and deep. Lingle, widely believed to have a good chance to claim a U.S. Senate seat for the island GOP for the first time since Hiram Fong retired in 1976, was handily defeated by Hirono, who ended the night with over 61 percent of the vote. Democrats also took both Congressional seats by comfortable margins.
In state legislative races, Democrats did even better. In the House of Representatives, Democrats had a net gain of one, and now control 44 of the 51 seats. And in the state Senate, Hawaii Kai’s Sam Slom will continue to preside over a GOP minority of one.
Five Senate Democrats pulled more than 70 percent of the votes in their respective districts, outpacing the president, and another seven had over 60 percent, all qualifying as “landslides.”
In the House, 10 Democrats won more than 70 percent of the vote, with another 11 claiming over 60 percent.
The defeat of Ben Cayetano’s unusually bipartisan but heavily GOP-influenced coalition in the Honolulu mayoral race, coupled with the fate of most GOP candidates, left Republicans with precious little to savor in this season’s political stew.
What’s next for the GOP?
Can they recover? It’s hard for me to see the party’s way forward.
It’s been a long time since the public face of the Republican Party was a figure like Hiram Fong, who grew wealthy meeting the needs of those ignored by Hawaii’s earlier plantation oligarchy, or Pat Saiki, who was able to garner bipartisan respect through a long career.
While Lingle was criticized by some within her own party for using party resources to boost her personal political career instead of focusing on building the party’s base, she has really been the only GOP figure to prove capable of reaching a broad statewide audience. With her unexpectedly weak showing against Hirono, it’s questionable whether she could mount another credible campaign, and there’s no other comparable figure standing in the wings ready to lead.
Hawaii voters have not been friendly to the socially conservative, fundamentalist Christian base that has fueled one wing of the national party and which provided the base for former Lt. Gov. Duke Aiona, calling into question his political future.
The GOP’s national image as the party of older white men hasn’t played well in Hawaii’s multiethnic environment, and post-election calls to take the party even further to the right are likely to further alienate island voters.
But if the GOP is in disarray, Democrats face their own internal challenges despite their electoral successes.
The most visible is the splintering of the coalition that swept Gov. Neil Abercrombie into office just two years ago. Progressive Democrats who threw their support behind Abercrombie have expressed frustration almost from Day 1 about being abandoned and frozen out by the new administration, and are increasingly expressing public frustration with the administration’s positions on key environmental issues. Recent protests against the controversial Public Land Development Corporation, embraced by the governor as a vehicle to bypass “not in my back yard” opposition to various public projects, are sure to grow. And Abercrombie’s attempts to bully or threaten dissenters back into line seem likely to increase, rather than solve, his political problems.
Although the mainstream Democratic big business-big union-big money coalition was successful in defeating Ben Cayetano’s anti-rail campaign, it also turned off many people inside and outside the party. If the former governor’s defamation lawsuit against the the Carpenters Union’s Pacific Resource Partnership survives the initial legal hurdles, potentially embarrassing political issues are likely to emerge as the case moves forward. They could become campaign issues in 2014.
But it seems highly unlikely that any of these issues have the potential to undermine the Democratic Party’s electoral power any time soon. For now, it’s a deep blue Hawaii, and likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future.
Read Ian Lind’s blog at iLind.net.
