Wednesday, November 3, 2010

What hath the midterms wrought?

So, what do we know about the election results?

Well, New Mexico just installed a teabagger in the governor's mansion, so where does that leave us? Well, I can be glad that I decided against a second career in the police, or as a teacher, when I got out of the military.

Then again, I'm working in a hospital, and Medicaid cuts are pretty much a certainty, so little comfort there.

GOP lapdog Steve Pearce got his old job back as Congresscritter, so at least our newly-crowned Governor Martinez won't be lonely.

On the national front, the candidates endorsed by Sarah Palin didn't fare as well as some people expected: if you discount the ones who were already shoo-ins before the Palinator bestowed her blessing on them, her batting average was about 0.5 or so. (It hardly matters - even if she'd had a 100% failure rate, her followers have long since proven themselves to be invulnerable to little things like "logic" or "reason.")

Jerry Brown has been reelected as governor of California, with just a little gap of twenty-seven years between his second and third terms.

(I know Ahnold hasn't been working out as much as he used to, but who would have thought he could be beaten by a 72-year-old former Jesuit seminarian and law clerk?)

Harry Reid held onto his seat, despite a particularly mendacious campaign by teabagger favorite Sharron Angle. In fact, the Tea Party candidates didn't do well overall - not a single teabagger picked up a contested seat in the Senate, with national jokes like Angle, Joe Miller and Christine O'Donnell going down in flames. (Admittedly, Kentucky elected Rand Paul, but that's more a symptom of inbreeding than anything else.)

To counteract the GOP depression brought on by Reid's continued presence in the Senate, Alan Grayson lost his House reelection bid, which probably gives John Boehner as much of an erection as he can get since that horrible melanin overdose.

Regarding the "traditional wisdom" of Grayson losing because he was an "outspoken liberal," Southern Beale pointed me to an analysis by Digby, who said:
Regarding Grayson, well, we have a little controlled experiment. His neighboring first term Democratic congresswoman Suzanne Kosmas, in a very similar district, took the opposite approach to Grayson. She ran as hard to the right as she could get away with, never had a controversial thought much less uttered one, was rewarded with big money and support from the DCCC --- and she lost too. This race was bigger than both of them. Florida is turning hard right.
But more than that, having landed on Digby's Hullabaloo, I was led to this statistical recap of the election by Ed Kilgore.
Finally, something must be said about the electorate that produced these results. According to national exit polls, 2010 voters broke almost evenly in terms of their 2008 presidential votes; indeed, given the normal tendency of voters to "misremember" past ballots as being in favor of the winner, this may have been an electorate that would have made John McCain president by a significant margin. Voters under 30 dropped from 18% of the electorate to 11%; African-Americans from 13% to 10%, and Hispanics from 9% to 8%. Meanwhile, voters over 65, the one age category carried by John McCain, increased from 16% of the electorate to 23%.

These are all normal midterm numbers. But because of the unusual alignment of voters by age and race in 2008, they produced a very different outcome, independently of any changes in public opinion. Indeed, sorting out the "structural" from the "discretionary" factors in 2008-2010 trends will be one of the most important tasks of post-election analysis, since the 2012 electorate will be much closer to that of 2008. That's also true of the factor we will hear most about in post-election talk: the "swing" of independents from favoring Obama decisively in 2008 to favoring Republicans decisively this year. Are these the same people (short answer: not as much as you'd think), or a significantly different group of voters who happened to self-identify as independents and turned out to vote?
Or to put it another way, the party in power always loses in the midterms. It is as it always has been. Nothing new going on here.

And in barely related news, McDonald's has brought back the McRib sandwich, which is an interesting coincidence: with Republicans on the rise again, pork is back in fashion. Imagine that.
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Update (11/4/10): It has been suggested that Ahnold wasn't running against Jerry Brown; Meg Whitman was. Noted. However, I refuse to give up on a perfectly good joke based strictly on something as minor as "reality."

9 comments:

  1. I still don't get how Russ Feingold lost to a neocon. WTF? People who voted for Russ for years suddenly got bit by the Rethug bug? How do they go from left to hard right? What can the asshat w/the R after his name accomplish in the Senate for them that Russ couldn't? Other than cutting all the social programs and building up the military's budget of course..

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  2. Voters under 30 dropped from 18% of the electorate to 11%;...

    Thanks for the stats, this one particularly caught my attention becasue it bears out what I kept reading on blogs from the under 30 set--plans not to vote in order to teach the Democrats not to take them for granted. I suppose that when I was that young that I also had some misguided notions as to how to make a point.

    Or to put it another way, the party in power always loses in the midterms. It is as it always has been. Nothing new going on here.
    I agree. It's just a wave, not a tsunami.

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  3. Those of us living in Florida got the worst of the worst ... Rubio and Scott (of $1.7 billion-fine-for-massive-medicare-fraud fame). From gobbledygook to outright crook. I'm outa here (hope my condo sells ... quickly).

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  4. Just wanted to point out that here in California, Jerry Brown defeated Meg Whitman, not "Arnold" -- the Governator wasn't running for re-election. I don't think Whitman's campaign ever really caught on, in spite of all the money she spent. Arnold was initially successful because of his Hollywood status; it seems that even a high-level businessperson doesn't have the same allure for voters, in the absence of any experience in government.

    And Octo, yeah, you guys in Florida REALLY got struck with lightning! My condolences.

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  5. Thanks for the link to the Kilgore piece.

    With all the problems we face it's depressing to realize (though not surprising) that just a over half (60% or so) of all eligible voters can be bothered to cast a ballot at all.

    So a slight majority of 60% means our august elected officials are elected by roughly 1/3 of the voters.

    So much for tyranny. Tyranny is the least of our problems.

    Complacency rules.

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  6. From Politics Plus:

    " Twenty eight nations regularly have voter turnout over 75%. But according to US Election Project, only 38.2% of the 218,054,301 eligible voters went to the polls and voted."

    http://www.politicsplus.org/blog/?p=3276

    But you're right Arthurstone. Complacency does rule. While some Dems are angry because they didn't get everthing they wanted when they wanted it and stayed home, others are simply too complacent - and have been since Obama was elected.

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  7. Thanks.

    I guess my guesstimation of 60% puts me squarely in the cockeyed optimists club.

    Be that as it may as much as I detest the politics of the right, and I do, credit where credit's due.

    Those folks get involved, the make a lot of noise and they vote.

    We could learn a lesson or two on their current take on squeaky whee theory.

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  8. Want to increase participation? Then offer more than two parties. There is a correlation between number of parties and voter turnout.

    If you go to tnlib's link you can figure that one out real quick.

    I voted FOR Barack Obama because he represented to me exactly what the Democratic Party stands for....

    Sadly, its all the other democrats that remind me exactly why I cannot stand the democratic party....except Howard Dean and Russ Feingold.

    ...and no, I did not forget Bill and Hillary Clinton....All the other democrats I respect are dead.

    In fact the party is living off of the fumes of memories and has morphed into the moderate wing of the republican party...what we used to call the country club republicans have now become democrats.

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  9. Nameless,

    Reality is greatly overrated, no doubt about it. Arnold, by the way, has been a mixed bag as guv'nor -- he has become very unpopular in the polls here, but he's also taken some worthwhile stands on major issues, such as global warming. It's going to be interesting to see what Jerry Brown will do with this struggling state's budget -- I remember him from when I was a young dino, and he's certainly gone on quite a political journey in the last three decades or so: a veritable "wily Odysseus" of American politics: a clever, educated, experienced pol, to say the least. I was almost certain from the outset of his campaign that he would win.

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