Ask Not for Whom the Bellwether Tolls

The lesson of history is…

After winning a congressional seat that had been in GOP hands since 1872 in New York’s special election, Democrats were exultant. Bill Clinton called the vote “a referendum on President Obama’s agenda for health care and on our entire progressive agenda,” and the New York Times gloated that the vote was a “setback for national conservatives.”

Those claims were made not last week, but in 2009 when Democrats won an upset victory in New York’s 23rd Congressional District — and deluded themselves into thinking the result was a bellwether for the 2010 elections. A year later, they suffered a historic shellacking at the polls — the largest turnover of seats in the House of Representatives since 1948.

…that you have to pay very close attention to learn the right one.

The above is from Marc Thiessen’s WaPo column from yesterday, and it’s worth reading the whole thing. The lesson I took away from the NY-26 election, is that the anti-incumbent mood is real, it is frustrated, and it is growing. No one is safe.