A setback for the Ryan plan

In a stunning upset with national implications, Democrat Kathy Hochul beat Republican Jane Corwin this week in a special congressional election that centered on their parties’ stark differences over Medicare reform. Hochul, a moderate Democrat who relentlessly criticized Corwin’s support for Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare, captured 47 percent of the vote. Corwin drew 43 percent, and independent Jack Davis, who ran on the Tea Party ticket, took 9 percent.

Corwin had been considered a favorite to maintain the GOP’s iron grip on the upstate district between Buffalo and Rochester, which the party controlled for decades. Republican leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor flew in to support Corwin, but her stiff, unfocused campaign and support for Ryan’s plan turned off many voters. “The privatization of Medicare scares me,” said Pat Gillick, one of many Republicans who crossed party lines to vote for Hochul.

Let’s not “read too much into one election,” said Henry Olsen in NationalReview.com. A breakdown of the vote shows that Davis played the spoiler, drawing blue-collar votes away from the Republicans. And Corwin never convincingly dispelled working-class voters’ unfounded fears of a “secret Republican agenda to eviscerate middle-class entitlements to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.” The GOP needs candidates who can “fight the war over the future of Medicare fiercely and intelligently.” The fact that Corwin wasn’t up to the task doesn’t mean that others won’t be.

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Sorry, but “Republicans can’t really pin the blame for this result” on Davis or on Corwin, said Nate Silver in NYTimes.com. Polls gave “strong circumstantial evidence” that voters didn’t like Ryan’s plan to replace direct medical payments with subsidies for private insurance. No single special election has much predictive power, but Ryan-style Medicare reform doesn’t look like a winning issue. That’s putting it mildly, said E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post. “This is simply not a district a Republican should have lost,” not when Democrats got only 26 percent of the vote there in 2010. But Hochul shrewdly picked the one issue—Medicare—that could peel conservative votes away from the Republicans. “This is a big setback for Paul Ryan’s budget and a warning for Republican incumbents everywhere.”