Heaven help me, but I'm going to take issue with a political satirist.
And not just any political satirist, mind you, but Jon Stewart
himself. On his Monday show, Stewart lampooned the tendency of
journo-punditocrats to opine that the interpretation of the election
matters as much as the election itself. The humor was based on the
premise that both sides will have their spin, pundits will dutifully
select whatever spin fits the moment, and then, even though they know
they're not telling the truth, will focus the collective mind in such a
way as to perpetuate a distorted meaning of the election.
Hey -- a stopped clock is always right at least twice a day. To read election results is to interpret them. Interpretation is an active and iterative process. And the results of one set of elections -- after being interpreted -- often influences how the next set of elections are run.
But it's important for analysts to get it right. It's important for good analysts to recognize, as many don't seem to want to do, that it's in the parochial interests of moderate Hill Democrats to interpret Virginia and New Jersey as a plea for Washington to step on the brakes or clear the slate or whatever temporal slowdown metaphor they want to use. It's in the parochial interest of Republicans to interpret New Jersey and Virginia as a harbinger for the Democratic agenda in 2010 and 2012. And it's in the self-interest (and self-identity) of Virginia and New Jersey voters to assert that their election had nothing to do whatsoever with sending a message to politicians who weren't a ballot but were, instead, about local issues.
The case of the Obama Surge Voter illustrates this fiction. There are some Virginia Democrats who are criticizing the Creigh Deeds campaign for failing to devise a strategy to turn out Obama Surge Voters -- younger, non-white, first-timers. There are Republicans who are gloating that the failure to turn out such voters is proof that the 2008 election was a one-off.
Neither interpretation comports with the way the races were actually run, the way the state political cultures work, nor with history. The idea that anyone would be able to turn out young voters and black voters like Barack Obama did is absurd. It is logically implausible that because this cohort of voters were motivated by the interaction of the candidate and his message in one year, they would automatically be receptive to an entirely different candidate and entirely different message another year simply because that candidate shared an initial.
Check out how odd-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey were won in years past. Independents in the odd-year elections tend to motivated by consistent, methodological, pragmatic leaders -- precisely the candidates that Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie were. They tend to be unusually responsive to economic conditions. In Virginia, strategists from both gubernatorial campaigns believe -- and have evidence to show -- that the bulk of the off-year undecideds made up their minds in the summer, when Virginia faced a budget crisis, and when the talk in the DC suburbs was of bailouts, trillion-dollar health care bills (note: THESE voters have health insurance), and double-digit unemployment.
Turnout in VA 2008: 3,723,260
Turnout in VA 2009: 1,842,793
And it's not as if somebody threw out every other one. The participating voter sets were far, far different.
On the other hand, turnout in NY-23 was not too terribly different from other off-year races and closer to what it's likely to be in 2010:
1998 137,735
2002 124,682
2006 169,099
2009 125,715
Hoffman would have creamed Owen if he had been the GOP nominee with backing from his primary opponent. He was an unknown running in a third party, and thus did phenomenally well.
There is little doubt that Palin-style candidates can win both primary and general elections in the suburbs and small towns. The combination of white-hot GOP intensity and tepid off-year turnout is what won for the Reps in 1994 and could easily do the same in 2010. I don't know whether the Dems need to go big or go slow on policy matters, but I do know they need to start registering voters and organizing GOTV soon.
This Saturday would be good.
I agree that Hoffman did quite well for a third party. I don't agree that he would have won had he had party backing from the beginning: voters have an inordinate fondness for politicians who actually live in the district and are passingly familiar with local matters. The failure of the Beck wing to actually find a candidate in the district is not a good sign for future Beckian hopes.
Well, we'll never know. But he had a lot of upside potential. Many voters vote a straight ticket, and he would have needed only 4,594 of them. I, for example, have never voted for a Republican in 40 years of voting, except for maybe one time back when I was still drinking and couldn't see my ballot so hot.
Dede Scozzafava got 6,976, and I have to believe there were many true-blue Republicans who couldn't bring themselves to vote at all.
The Dems in that district have never got above 60-odd thousand votes, regardless of turnout:
2004 66,448
2006 62,318
2009 61,666
Hoffman's third-party 57,073 is not so very darned far away.
The problem with low turnout elections like this one, and, more to the point, the upcoming 2010 contests, is that a candidate with very intense support can win even though lots of people hate his guts.
I'll repeat, the Democrats need to start thinking hard about 2010 get out the vote. They need to start thinking soon, and very soon indeed.
You make a lot of assumptions about the NY-23 race you simply can't make. And one of them is that if he had been the GOP nominee that would have any intense intense support at all or that he would have had any support at all.
His supporters were only intense about him because the official candidate was dictated upon the electorate from above. Had there been a primary his backers wouldn't have had a rally point to unite behind and his complete lack of knowledge about any local issues would have hampered him far more. His race wouldn't have attracted the national attention it got, Without his out of district donations he would've been severely strapped for cash. etc. etc.
It's a bit difficult to claim he's an unknown third party candidate when the race is getting national coverage. Especially since the conservative party is taken reasonably serious in New York compared to other.
It's very true that in low turn out elections candidates with very intense support can win even though lots of people hate his/her guts. And that's something that Democrats should be worried about. Alot...
But you simply can't claim that candidates like Hoffman would each turn out like him. You can't even say he would've turned out the way he did had circumstances would have been different. He was a flash in the pan. And that's the difficulty with running candidates like him. The successes are spectacular, but they hardly ever occur. 9 times out of 10 the McDonnell type candidates are a far, far better bet.
I see plenty of troubles for the Democrats, but not cause the Palins and hoffmans. They'll flame out more then they're going to win after all, the conservative did lose while running in a conservative district. The lesson is just as much that these sort of shenanigans could lose you seats.
But there are plenty of weak apples who cruised to victory in democratic years who are very vulnerable to another McDonnell. Virginia is the lesson Dems must learn. That's were there attention should be.
i don't get how you're taking issue with john stewart here.
Jon Stewart on Monday was good. Jon Stewart on Tuesday was sheer genius.
As for the rest: Whatever. You guys just make stuff up even when the only real data you have is telling you different. There's no penalty for being wrong in your world, and failing upwards is practically a hallmark of your profession. It's not your fault, per se, but it is reality. The presidential debates were the clearest indication of this. The punditocracy would go on and on about how McCain "won the night" until the snap polls came in that indicated otherwise. You all can sit there and claim that voters didn't really believe what they were telling you, but the final result said otherwise.
Of course people don't always know the reasons they do stuff. But are we seriously supposed to believe that you all have any more insight into us than we do? If you based your speculation on something even remotely meaningful, that would be one thing. But you don't. Or, if you do, you certainly hide your work really well. So, to the rest of us, you look like the Borg--all plugged into a single predictable and utterly trivial narrative.
However, you're free to keep trying to convince yourself you are highly self-aware just as Virginia voters are free to keep trying to convince themselves they are highly self-aware. And then, we can all relish in our delusion while Jon Stewart mocks us mercilessly. Because he'll be right, and we'll deserve it.
I'd like to revise the above remarks, because upon reflection, they seem overly harsh and somewhat personal. That wasn't intentional. So, I want to clarify.
Probably the most frustrating aspect of punditry, in general, is the apparent disregard for actual evidence. Polls are taken, numbers are shown, and then pundits regularly "analyze" the situation as if none of that ever happened. Even worse, the analysis is often completely contrary to the evidence and not only lacks a thorough explanation for the disparity but doesn't even bother to acknowledge that the disparity exists. That's a firing offense in my world. It seems to be just another day on the job in yours. Again, not necessarily your fault, but it does provide an occasion for humor. Better than an occasion for despair.
Also, Joel's right. Some of your analysis in this post is relatively logical and fact-based, and that's not what Jon Stewart was taking aim at. At least not as I saw it.
I wrote an apology for the seeming invective in this comment, but it appears that the server ate it. So, you'll just have to take my word for it.
The overall gist of the problem is this: If a pundit's analysis deviates from the only data they have to offer us, then they have a choice:
1. Present a detailed explanation--using both facts and logic--of why the data is wrong and the analysis is correct;
2. Rethink the analysis.
Notice that there is no "just pretend the data doesn't exist and go for it" option. Any other profession I've been in you get fired for doing something like that. Unfortunately, in the punditry world, you seem to get promoted for doing something like that. As a result, the punditry world comes off as baselessly arrogant, which prompts a certain amount of--sometimes seemingly personal--derision. Whether wholly deserved or not.
A democrat won a congress race in a red district. The lesson is if Republicans do too much infighting they will get clobbered.
It will be interesting to see if young voters again turnout strong for Obama in 2012. He was the fresh change candidate, in 2012 he's just an incumbent. Blacks will turn out as he's still black.