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The Post-Mortem: Everybody, chill out (UPDATED)
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The Post-Mortem: Everybody, chill out (UPDATED)
Yeah, it happened: Corbett. Toomey. Rand Paul. Rick Scott, the Medicare defrauder who, somehow, became governor of a state full of old people. Speaker John Boehner in tears of orange-hued joy. The largest Republican majority in a half-century, probably the most ideologically conservative House since the New Deal, if not longer. Liberals aghast. Democrats in disarray. Obama's agenda eviscerated. Mitch McConnell declaring that the GOP's No. 1 goal these next two years is to — not help the economy — but make sure Obama is a one-termer. Many liberal activists are already convinced that will be the case.
Oh the humanity.
Now, everybody take a deep breath, and chill out.
Yeah, it was a big election, a big pendulum swing, a reckoning, if you want to call it that. And for all of the caterwauling and Monday-morning quarterbacking, it was basically inevitable, for one big reason, and a bunch of lesser ones.
The big reason: The economy. When the economy sucks, the in-party loses. For all the hubbub about health care, or the deficit, or whatever, this is and will continue to be the single largest determinant in prognosticating elections. Add to it the facts that the Dems had picked up a lot of red-state districts the last couple years — meaning a lot of vulnerable Blue Dogs — and that its not at all uncommon for the president's party to suffer big losses in mid-terms, and this cake was baked months ago.
The Republicans also benefited from, essentially, disengaging themselves from any actual governance these last two years: They fought everything, no matter how obvious or necessary, even if the ideas the president pushed came from Republicans or were backed by scientists or economics, and when facts didn't suit their case, they simply made shit up (see âdeath panelsâ). The political genius of not having a stake in things — and by, in fact, gumming up the works by opposing both the stimulus and other Dem efforts at job creation under the auspice of fiscal responsibility — is that they knew that, given the enormity of the problem, the economy wouldn't bounce back before 2010, and the president's party would take the blame.
In a general sense, the Republicans capitalized on anxiety, rather than their own policies: According to various exit polls, even this GOP-skewed electorate favors letting the tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent expire and is split on health care reform. In perhaps the most logically incongruent stat of the day, among those who blame Wall Street for the economy, 56 percent voted for the Republicans who uniformly opposed Wall Street reform. It's less a mandate, and more a win by default.
That's not to say campaigns don't matter: The GOP outperformed expectations a little.
Republicans, however, did somewhat better than you might expect based on having won the national house ballot by 6-7 points. There are various formulas that attempt to translate the generic ballot or the House popular vote into a seat count without worrying about how things work out at a district-by-district level. Those formulas would generally translate a 6-7 point popular vote win into something like a 50 or 55 seat gain for Republicans. Instead, it looks like Republicans will net something on the order of 65 seats. The Republican vote was evidently concentrated in a way that was quite efficient.
Conversely, were it not for candidates like Christine O'Donnell, Ken Buck and Sharron Angle, the Democrats may well have lost, or come closer to losing, the Senate. (The Republicans came closer than they should have to losing in Pennsylvania, which I'll get to in a minute.) That's something for Republicans to keep in mind while nominating presidential candidates: Congressional districts, at least in part because of how they're typically gerrymandered, are more generous to far-right candidates than are more heterogenous statewide races. There's a better-than-average shot that whoever the GOP nominates in 2012 will lose, anyway — more on that in a minute, too — but this is doubly so if the candidate is ideologically closer to Jim DeMint than, say, Mitt Romney.
Another factor: Elections are determined by who shows up. Enthusiasm gap aside, here's why the Republicans did well:
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Old people comprised a huge voting bloc; young people didn't. These over-65 voters helped shoot down that pot initiative in California, for instance. The overall demographic, especially in the Rust Belt, where the Dems got hammered, was also considerably more white than in 2008. As a rule, white, old people lean Republican. Even more so in times of social upheaval: That's why the GOP's attacks on the health care bill were so effective; the legislation was presented as an alteration of the fundamentals of America itself. You also saw this echoed in Republican opposition to illegal immigration, which in at least some cases took on an overtly racist component, and to a lesser degree in the right wing charges that Obama is a Marxist, Kenyan, socialist, Muslim, whatever. When big change happens, there is always a reaction; in this case, and not surprisingly at all, it was a move toward authoritarianism. The Republicans benefited from that — it rallied the troops and drove out their base.
I won't delve much into the billions — with a b — of dollars big corporations pumped in to races all over the country after that Citizens United ruling, mainly because I haven't seen anyone really quantify the effect yet (though I'm sure it will be a topic of discussion at APSA forums all over the country next year). But I can't help but imagine that allowing big corporations to throw around massive amounts of money from anonymous donors with no accountability or transparency didn't matter. After all, if money didn't affect anything, these companies wouldn't be spending it.
The oft-discussed enthusiasm gap mattered, as well, at least in the sense that Dems didn't get the turnout they needed. But to some degree or another, this is, again, not unexpected: A lot of core Dem groups — the young, minorities — don't vote at very high rates in off-years. Philly's turnout yesterday was a dismal 29 percent.* (UPDATE: This early figure is incorrect. The correct figure is 40.18 percent.). And that's why you have Senator Toomey, who had Philly been around 40 50 percent, would have almost certainly lost. (Philly has about 1.1 million registered voters: half would be 550,000. If the 84-16 split held, that would be another 115,000 or so votes for Sestak, if my back-of-napkin math is correct. Sestak lost the statewide race by a bit shy of 80,000 votes.)
Check out these maps of the gov and senate races:
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| philly.com |
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| philly.com |
Sestak and Onorato won Philadelphia by huge numbers; but not enough of us showed up to offset the Republicanism of the T and this state's rural areas. So, Toomey eked out a victory that, in any other year, he probably wouldn't have. He'll be up for reelection during a presidential election, in 2016; he barely won, even in the biggest Republican wave since Truman. My money has him as a one-termer.
So what's the takeaway: Simply, if the economy improves, Obama will be reelected. From the estimable political scientist/forecaster Alan Abramowitz:
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| Alan Abramowitz, PS: Political Science and Politics, October 2008 |
In short, if the economy is growing by at least 3 percent in the second quarter of 2012 — and the resiliency of the American economy over the years implies that this is likely — history suggests that Obama is an odds-on favorite, no matter his opponent. There are a few exceptions: 1968, during Vietnam; 1976, after Watergate; 1992, when the economy was actually doing relatively OK, but people thought things were going poorly, and the incumbent president seemed out of touch (and also, without going too far afield, it's very difficult for any party to win four consecutive presidential elections). What's more, even if the economy doesn't rebound, the president will have what will likely be a do-nothing Congress to run against, and the probability that whoever he runs against will have to get the blessing of the Tea Party to win the nomination, which means he'll have a foil in the way he doesn't have now.
The economy is and will remain the biggest predictor, but predictions of his demise are, to say the least, premature.
Long post short: This wasn't a sea change. This was a the natural aftermath of a down economy, and a Democratic base that didn't bother to vote, while white conservatives and the elderly voted in droves. A reaction is warranted: The prez has to deal with a Speaker Boehner, and a very conservative GOP caucus. But the Democrats still control the Senate and the White House, so a stalemate is more likely than anything else (unless the Republicans decide to take at least some ownership of the problems they helped create under George W. Bush, which doesn't seem likely). That's unfortunate, given the times, but it is what it is. From Andrew Sullivan's blog:
Republicans may be claiming the latest vote was against big spending and deficits. But the GOP relied so heavily on votes from the elderly that it suggests what really upset these voters was $500bn in Medicare cuts over 10 years, and more than $1 trillion in the next 10. Anyone looking at the long term projections for spending knows that the main worry is Medicare, and this is the number one issue in any serious attempt to curb the deficit.
That Obama was willing to take on this issue says a lot for his courage and responsibility that few are giving him credit for. Of course Obama's proposals didn't go anywhere near far enough, but he seems to have breached the limits of what is politically possible in addressing the number one spending problem (and taxes too, simply by returning only the very rich to Clinton-era levels). Republicans have gotten away with a nonsense, that the government should pay for whatever health care the elderly want, but that either raising taxes to pay for it, or restrictions on how the money is spent, would threaten freedom. This is madness, and makes a budget crisis look inevitable.
And despite voters' impressions, the 111th Congress was very productive. Very productive, indeed.
Great stuff, I actually do feel a bit better, thanks!
A decent analysis Billman...it IS the economy stupid! We've been sold "jobs saved" for two years, a nebulous intangible concept that is virtually impossible to prove..."jobs created" are real tangible things which after a trillion dollar stimulus and chronic 10 percent unemployment are virtually nowhere to be found. The GOP will probably keep a low profile and let Obama and Biden flail around with the "jobs saved" bullshit until the turds are voted out and we get some real leaders and managers.
Didn't the Inquirer say that turnout in Philly was at 40%? "Philly's turnout yesterday was a dismal 29 percent. And that's why you have Senator Toomey, who had Philly been around 40 percent, would have almost certainly lost." Toomey still won.
Anon, I saw that last night. The 29 percent number came from something Committee of Seventy sent out election night. Those numbers may have been wrong/revised since then. I'll check into it and see if there's an official tally. In the meantime, the point is, improve Philly's turnout by a few percentage points, and Sestak would have won.
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