A Midterm Election Autopsy

Ever since election day, grossly overpaid media pundits who contribute little to intelligent discussion have been offering all kinds of reasons for why the Democrats got their asses kicked. The theories range from, “The Obama Democratic agenda is just too far Left” to “The Obama Democratic agenda is just too moderate,” and everything in between. But they all have the same theme: Democrats have done X, but the American people wanted Y. So Democrats were defeated on Tuesday because they spent the last two years doing one thing, while the American people wanted them to do another, and perhaps in a different way.

One great thing about these kinds of analyses, for pundits anyway, is that they lend themselves to endless possibilities in argumentation which amount to little more than quasi-educated spit-balling. The postmortem of the 2010 midterm elections, like all others, is a vague and subjective hazarding of guesses and proffering of pseudo-insight. It relies on this ambiguity in rendering a seemingly plausible but ultimately untestable and therefore useless explanation as to why one party won more seats than the other. Such analyses require amalgamating millions of voters from across the country into a singular entity with a coherent political ideology, or at least giving the American people a mathematically mean ideology which can be placed on somewhere on the Left/Right political spectrum. But this assumes that The American People have a coherent political philosophy, and care enough about it to vote their ideology regardless of whether they think the country is on the right track. This assumption is wrong. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald puts it well:

[W]hat voters care about are not cable-news labels, but results. Democrats didn’t lose because voters think they’re too “liberal.” If that were true, how would one explain massive Democratic wins in 2006 and 2008, including by liberals in conservative districts (such as Alan Grayson); were American voters liberal in 2006 and 2008 only to manically switch to being conservative this year? Was Wisconsin super-liberal for the last 18 years when it thrice elected Russ Feingold to the Senate, and then suddenly turned hostile to liberals this year? Such an explanation is absurd.

The answer is that voters make choices based on their assessment of the outcomes from the political class. They revolted against the Republican Party in the prior two elections because they hated the Iraq War and GOP corruption (not because they thought the GOP was “too conservative”), and they revolted against Democrats this year because they have no jobs, are having their homes foreclosed by the millions, are suffering severe economic anxiety, and see no plan or promise for that to change (not because they think Democrats are “too liberal”).

To Greenwald’s assessment, I would add that because we only have two parties that really matter, election results often furnish us with a skewed version of reality. In 2006, Republicans were voted out because their war in Iraq had turned sour. In 2008 Republicans were voted out because the economy was in the tank. In 2010 Democrats were voted out because the economy is still in the tank and they were replaced by the Republicans who were just recently thoroughly repudiated in the previous two elections. Notice that Americans don’t vote parties in; they vote parties out. Republicans took control of the House and made gains in the Senate last week not because Americans think they’ll do a good job, but because they’re still nervous about the economy and they don’t have any legitimate choices left at the ballot box.

- Max