Bell Curve The Law Talking Guy Raised by Republicans U.S. West
Well, he's kind of had it in for me ever since I accidentally ran over his dog. Actually, replace "accidentally" with "repeatedly," and replace "dog" with "son."

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Election Reflections: The Democratic Center

The state of affairs as I write:
House: 231 D, 199 R, 5 Undecided (NM1 and WY-AL lean R, CT2 leans D, WA8 genuinely undecided, 1 TBD in a runoff (TX22)). Likely result: 232D, 202R – precisely the opposite of the last Congress.
Senate: 49D, 49R, 2 Independent (VT/Sanders and CT/Lieberman, both expected to caucus with D). Likely effect: 51D, 49R.

1. Democrats captured the national political center. The big story of the night was not the happy rejection of certain right-wing red-meat Republicans (like Santorum). It was the ejection of "moderate" Republicans in favor of truly moderate Democrats in the North, Midwest, and West. In 1994, as in 1974, the tide was carried by the radicals of the winning party. In 2006, it was the moderates who won. This was a vote for normalcy.
2. This is a huge boost for the DLC, and – oddly enough – for ur-liberal Howard Dean with his 50-state strategy. Tom Vilsack's (2-term D governor of Iowa) announcement of a presidential candidacy this morning is symptomatic. Evan Bayh (D-Senator Indiana) was also hitting the airwaves this morning.
3. This is a huge victory for the American West. The Speaker of the House is a Californian. The Majority Leader in the Senate is a Nevadan. Democrats now control the governorships of: Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, and picked up key senate and house seats there too (Montana Senate, CO7, AZ5, AZ8). In statehouses, Dems made significant gains in the Mountain West. The gravity of the Democratic party is shifting to the West, giving the libertarian wing of the party the boost. In fact, the Libertarian party made substantial vote gains in the West this year (their votes were crucial in Montana and will be crucial in WY-AL if it goes to the Dems), a clear symptom of the abandonment of the GOP by the small-government voters. Montana's legislature is now split exactly 50/50 – in both houses! Nevada's legislature is split also.
4. New blue states: Ohio, Colorado, and Iowa. All three have Democratic governors, one Democratic senator, and new Democratic representatives. Democrats control both houses of the CO and IA legislatures. This has huge implications for 2008.
5. New purple states (swing states): Arizona and Virginia. Yes, both states have Democratic governors. In AZ, the Dems made legislative gains, getting 28 of 60 seats in the House. Same in Virginia. AZ became the first state in the union to defeat a gay marriage ban on the ballot. AZ banned smoking in public places and raised the minimum wage. John Kyl(R)-AZ re-election was closer than predicted. In VA, there is a new Democratic senator, who would have won by a larger percentage but for 26,000 Green Party votes.
6. State results shows this national shift was not just about Iraq. 6. At the state level, Dems now control 23 state legislatures, Republicans 16, 10 are split (one, NB, is 'nonpartisan'). Democrats seized one legislative house in MI, PA, WI, OR, IN, two in NH. http://www.ncsl.org/statevote/StateVote2006.htm# . Even where parties did not shift, Dems made gains almost everywhere outside the South. Only in CA did a moderate Republican hang on, because he went to the center-left.

I welcome your comments on this analysis.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

LTG, some of your comments got truncated. However, you raise a point that I myself was thinking about this morning. Moderates. It is good that you end up with people who must and who can compromise. That when things get done. It is good for the country and good for politics. The key will be to have real debate now, not just sound bite competition. 

// posted by USWest

Anonymous said...

Fixed it. 

// posted by LTG

Anonymous said...

I've been saying since 2004 that the Democrats should focus on "libertarian" voters rather than trying to play up their "faith" based policy motives.

I'm also glad that Republicans I've heard on the news and radio still don't get it. They keep saying, "The Democrats didn't win, the Republicans just lost." It's as if they think it was a fluke that they'll be able to fix next time without making any substantive changes to their approach to government and their platform.

Democrats need to make a big show of being a big enough tent to let in the Small Government voter. The Mountain West is a great opportunity to show that.

Also, if Pelosi adopts an approach of moderation that will be good. If she tries to run the House of Representatives according to the preferences of her ultra-lefty San Francisco constituency, the Republicans could be right about this being a fluke.

THE CENTER HAS HELD! FINALLY! 

// posted by RBR

Anonymous said...

Oh, by the way, I wouldn't say a state is blue just because the most recent election result favored the Dems. If a state alternates between the parties over time, it is a swing state.

OH is still a swing state, the Democrats are just the most recent beneficiaries.  

// posted by RBR

Anonymous said...

Absolutely, RBR. To win as the center, Dems must govern from the center. 

// posted by LTG

Anonymous said...

Another observation that's related to this discussion...The 1994 set a record for low turnout. That's why the far right of the GOP was able to dominate. In low turnout elections, activists run the show and the GOP was fired up.

2006 was different. Turnout this year was high - at record levels in many areas. When turn out is high, broad coalitions that include the center dominate.

This is an important observation for two reasons. First, it means that the Republicans' problems won't just go away if they hunker down down South and pray hard enough. Second, it means that dismissive criticisms about the lack of coherence in the Democratic party miss the point...the Democrats won this week BECAUSE OF THAT DIVERSITY!

2006 was a victory of American Big Tent Politics of the Deomcrats over the Parliamentary style party discipline of the GOP.

To keep that tent nice and Big the Democrats have to govern from the center. The far left will have to realize that they don't represent the current median views and accept half a loaf. It was the far right's refusal to do so that resulted in the Democrative wave of 2006. 

// posted by RBR

Dr. Strangelove said...

There is another story here.

a) The defeat of Santorum was not trivial. Pennsylvania threw the right-wing's poster-boy by a margin of 19 percentage points, even though he was an incumbent untainted by scandal.

b) The hotly contested anti-abortion initiative was defeated South Dakota. Abortion restrictions were also rejected in California and Oregon. Stem-cell advocates defeated the pro-life forces in Missouri as well, passing a hard-fought initiative to allow research.

c) Anti-gay marriage initiatives fared worse. The anti-gay marriage initiative in Arizona failed--the first time one has ever been defeated--and where such measures succeeded, the vote was surprisingly close: South Dakota was 52%; Colorado was 56%; Virginia was 57%; Wisconsin was 59%; and even Idaho was only 63%. (South Carolina and Tenneesse were both about 80%, but that's not news.)

d) By comparison, initiatives to raise the minimum wage passed in a landslide in all six states: Missouri 76%; Montana 73%; Nevada 69%; Arizona 66%; Ohio 56%; Colorado 53%. And note that none of them are "Blue" states!

e) Despite the presence of hot-button gay marriage on the ballot in Colorado, Virginia, and Wisconsin, all sent Democrats to the Senate, all now have Democratic governors, and the legislature in Colorado went Blue as well.

The story here is that, over the past six years, there has been a small but definite shift to the left on many issues--a shift which voters have finally able to express now that they are waking up from the 5-year-long Republican-imposed nightmare of fear.

(One other note: I agree with RbR: I would put Ohio in the swing state column. It looks like Schmidt and Pryce are going to keep their seats by razor-thin margins, so only House 1 seat will have changed hands--leaving a majority Republican. And unless I am mistaken, the OH legislature remains in Republican hands.)

Dr. Strangelove said...

To make my point, I should have listed the percentage numbers in parallel orderings. Here they are:

Ban Gay Marriage:
AZ 49%
SD 52%
CO 56%
VA 57%
WI 59%
ID 63%
SC 78%
TN 81%
(61% average)

Raise Minimum Wage:
CO 53%
OH 56%
AZ 66%
NV 69%
MT 73%
MO 76%
(67% average)

Dr. Strangelove said...

Tidbit of good news from MA: the legislature, meeting in a Constitutional Convention (delayed from May until after the November elections) have recessed today without taking up the ban on gay marriage amendment. They recessed until Jan. 2--the last day of the legislative session.

If they do not vote on it, the anti-gay marriage amendment will be dead. The move to recess was a deliberate tactic to quash the amendment, which only requires 25% of convention's electors in this session (plus the same in next legislative session) to put the amendment before the voters on the 2008 ballot.


Most agree that supporters of the ban could muster about ~50+/200 votes, so the measure would likely pass (narrowly) were it brought to a to vote. Next year might be better though: the Republicans lost 3 seats in the midterms (they now only have 24/200, believe it or not) so even if it passed this year, it might not pass next year.

The outgoing Gov. Mitt Romney could call them back into session--but although he excoriated the legislators for recessing, Romney has not said he will force them to reconvene. If Romney does not call them back into session, gay marriage will be safe in Massachusetts until at least 2010.

Anonymous said...

I am not sure if I can put this well. But Michael Moore said after the 2000 election that if you asked everyone in this country what they thought about social issues, you'd find that most of them would lean left. I don't get around the country much, so it was easy for me to agree with that statement since most of the people I am surrounded by seem to be OK with things like gay marriage and abortion. But then, birds of a feather . . .

When long held social values or even accepted paradigms are challenged, the initial reaction is opposition. But as the debate heats up, people become more and more numb to the conversation. So the opposition, realizing that it is loosing the debate, ratchets up its opposition. By then, if it hasn’t succeeded in wearing people down into agreeing with it, it starts to turn people off. And suddenly, things that seemed so impossible to accept don't matter to people so much. It just takes them a while to get used to the idea.

I say that because this election is proof of something that I have long suspected . . . this Republican experiment would be just a temporary trend. My concern was that the facts and the ground, like districting, would prevent that trend from turning around quickly enough. But Americans like to move and no district looks the same for very long.

I sort of hoped, in my brighter moments that these conservative forces would huff and puff and blow down the houses made of straw and wood, but eventually they’d run into brick. They’d have their last gasp, and people would eventually return to a more happy medium when they got disgusted enough. You can’t stop progress. The anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-minority types will be drug along kicking and screaming into acceptance, just like they did with integration and civil rights.

My concern now is how long it will take to turn the current mess around and how will this period mark us as a nation. We have a lot of work to do. And we will only be able to correct the ship of state by getting back to civility. My hope is that we won’t be at this all alone. One of my colleagues asked me today what I thought a new Def. Sec. could do to change the war in Iraq. I pointed out that it isn’t just about what he does or what we do. It is about our allies as well. Maybe seeing Democrats back in Congress and a new Def. Sec will renew just a little bit of the goodwill we lost with out allies. And they will make adjustments as well, adjustments that may be helpful in saving us from our folly.
 

// posted by USWest

Anonymous said...

US West,

Young people (voters under 24) voted in record numbers this year. They voted overwhelmingly for Democrats.

In other news: they are still counting in OH-15 and OH-02. OH-15 is more likely,  the outstanding votes are mostly provisional ballots issued to people Ohio State student neighborhoods (expect most of these to go for Democrats). Absentee ballots (another 20,000) are also being counted. These ballots are also from the marginally more Democratic Franklin County princincts. There are no more votes to be counted in the rural areas and semi-rural exurbs where Republicans have big margins. The remaining votes will likely break either close to 50-50 or big for Democrats. 

// posted by RBR

Anonymous said...

I assume that you are trying to tell me that the youth vote dilluted to cogger vote? One generation replacing another? So it wasn't people changing their minds? Actually, I think there is some mind changing going on out there.

I am moving on to a more philisophical plane now on these elections. 

// posted by USWest

Anonymous said...

More information on the Democratic revolution of 2006:
1. Democrats took unified control of government (leg and exec) of the following states that previously had split government:
WA, OR, CO, NH, MA, IA, and MD (7). It raises interesting redistricting possibilities. They control 15 states in all, . Republicans control just 10 states, only two of which (MO and FL) are even swing states.
2. Democrats control all state legislatures in the West Coast (WA, OR, CA) and all of New England.
3. Republicans now control both houses of only one state, PA (1), that voted for Kerry, and that is actually up for grabs as we speak with a couple contested races and an independent.
4. By contrast, Dems now control the legislatures of following states that voted for Bush: NM, CO, AR, LA, MS, AL, WV, NC (8).
5. Republican governors control only the following few states that voted for Kerry: CA, MN, CT, RI, VT (5), and all, save Palwenty in MN, are very moderate Republicans totally out of step with the radically-right-wing party.
6. By contrast, Democratic governors control the following states that voted for Bush: MT, WY, AZ, NM, CO, IA, OK, KS, AR, LA, TN, VA, NC, OH, and WV (15).

 

// posted by LTG

Anonymous said...

US WEst, I was just adding that the youth are breaking for Democrats and that's a good thing. The future is blue (and tolerant of others!). 

// posted by RBR

Anonymous said...

I just wanted to have it clarified so that the point was emphasisized. ;-) 

// posted by USWest