Thursday, November 4, 2010

2010 Elections - Who Voted? What Did It Mean?

Republicans and Tea Partiers are claiming victory in the 2010 elections, believing erroneously that this was a condemnation of the policies of President Obama, and believing even more erroneously that this is some sort of approval of their proposals.

They couldn't be more wrong.

Why? Look at the demographics, not only of who voted, which made a huge difference, but also look at the exit polls.

Consistently, voters don't approve of either party --- and they are even MORE, not LESS disapproving of Republicans and other varieties of so-called conservatives than they do of moderates and liberals / democrats.  Less than one in five, for example, voted because of dissatisfaction with health care reform. 


So when Mitch McConnell or John Boehner think they are 'listening' better to the electorate when they make the claim that they are going to repeal 'ObamaCare', or that the public which largely LIKES President Obama is going to share his goal of limiting Obama to a single term instead of focusing on other problems, they are seriously mistaken in recognizing what the electorate is saying.  Only 37% were 'expressing opposition to Obama".  That does not constitute an anti-Obama mandate, particularly given the amount of misinformation and disinformation that is embraced by that 37%.

I'm not asserting that there is NO basis on which to criticize Obama.  I'm asserting that a significant portion of that 37% (like the birthers, as perhaps a too-easy example, but also anti-abortion, and pro-guns/2nd amendment rightists) don't correctly identify what that criticism should be.

I base that claim on not only the exit poll studies results across the nation.  Those exit polls track pretty closely the hundreds of conversations with registered voters that I had in the weeks leading up to the election, both liberal and conservative, democratic and republican, in response to the question "what is the issue that is most important to you in the 2010 elections."  I had a laugh at the party after the polls closed, because my fellow volunteers kept coming up to me commenting that the people we phoned consistently spoke with me more and longer than they did with other volunteers.  I also 'converted' many of my fellow volunteers to becoming familiar with and referring undecided or uniformed registered voters to factcheck.org and politifact.com to challenge information in political ads, and  also certain sites which I have regularly quoted here to verify the voting records of the respective candidates. (No, I don't just do it here.  I do it everywhere.)

From that experience, I took away an appreciation of the ages and gender of the voters in multiple congressional, and state senate and house districts in Minnesota.   I took that experience and began reading as many analyses of voter participation and exit polls as I can find, both statewide and nationwide.  Because I have a lot of questions in need of answers, and the claims by both parties are both too simplistic, and in many cases don't reflect either the limitations of those demographics, or the stated concerns of those voters.  In short, the loudly claimed explanations aren't tracking with the quieter facts.

And who is that electorate?  It is MUCH older, it was whiter than the 2008 election, it was much whiter than the ethnic / racial mix of the population, and it was much more conservative overall than the overall population as well.  But even that conservative voter turnout claimed to be significantly anti-Republican, despite the number of Republican candidates that did well in the state house and senate, and in the U.S. Congress.

I won't bore readers with all of the sources I've looked at, but this is a pretty good example of what they have fairly consistently produced.  It is a good example of a fairly balanced analysis, and it tracks with my own grass-roots experience.

So, what does this mean for the next elections?  I think it means several things.  I highly doubt that in 2011, the GOP / conservatives will continue in the same lockstep.  Some of the candidates-elect are already expressing an unwillingness to compromise - with either the existing GOP leadership OR the Democrats and liberals.

I think Obama in his statements post-election, got it right that the electorate is unhappy with HOW Washington works (or doesn't work, depending on how you want to look at it) even more than it is unhappy with WHAT Washington has done in the past 2 + years.  If serious reform, including MORE, not less reform of sectors like banking and other financial industries, does not occur, I predict there will be hell to pay.

There were many single-issue voters this year - more than I think have been correctly reflected in the poll analysis, based on my own sampling experience.  That is a problem for the newly elected candidates to appease.  Make no mistake -- appeasing angry voters IS one of the tasks on the table.  That is not a good recipe for successful government.

I will predict that as angry as voters of all stripes (and stars) have been with government, they are going to get angrier, not happier, with this new group of public servants.  I believe this election is setting a very interesting and even more challenging stage for the 2012 elections.

More than one analyst I've noted have asserted that the 2006 and the 2008 election wave brought in some talented newcomers and well as returning some excellent legislators.  This is the election that, in a kind of political Darwinism, has purged some of those less effective candidates who had an easier time in the earlier campaigns.  I believe we will see an even greater performance purge of candidates in 2012, and that might well result in another flip-flop in party numbers. Potentially, if the Dems are smart, this could be strengthening their position, if they respond to this set back wisely.

I had a very modest expectation of success from the 2008 election; it is my impression that many others had less realistic expectations.  It is likely that after not voting in 2010, more of those voters might come back to participating in 2012, given the usual difference in turnout in presidential election years.  Where two years was too short a time for the results people wanted to take place, four years is not.  Those who were elected on November 2nd (or who will be the victor in the contested close elections) are going to be under more, not less scrutiny and accountability over the next two years.  I predict an even shorter honeymoon following this election.

7 comments:

  1. In the referenced Atlantic article, Thompson (a writer for the liberal Slate and Daily Beast) says:
    But beware arguments that boil down causality to a single variable -- an "it."

    Was "it" health care? Only 17% of the voters considered health care the most important issue in this election. Of those more than half voted for Democrats.

    Was "it" the president? CNN's exit poll found that only 37 percent of voters "meant to express opposition to Obama."

    Was "it" the economy? Of the 16 congressional districts hit hardest by the recession and represented by Democrats, just one of the 16 leaned Republican on Monday.


    You see what Thompson has done? In the first two cases he uses exit poll data to make a point. In the third he does not. Thompson's metric switches from exit poll data to a measure of Democrat controlled congressional districts that may flip Republican (he notes their scarcity). Thompson has thrown an apple in with two oranges.
    Why doesn't Thompson tell us which districts he was using as a measure of voter dissatisfaction with the economy? Why use 16 districts rather than 15 or 17? Why didn't he use the exit poll data regarding how voters feel about the economy? This seems a little strange, since exit polls covered the economy. This is akin to measuring the nationwide popularity of a war by cross referencing safe incumbents with the number of casualties in the 16 hardest-hit districts. Your not really measuring what you claim to be measuring.
    So let's look at the exit poll data on the economy.

    Sixty-two percent of voters said the economy was the most important issue facing the country and 61 percent said the country is on the wrong track.
    . . .
    Nearly nine in 10 voters said the state of the economy was not good. And nearly 90 percent of voters were also pessimistic about the nation’s economic future.

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39976300/ns/politics-decision_2010

    And you have this from ABC:

    That dissatisfaction pushed voters into the Republican column in a big way. Nearly two of three voters picked the economy as the single most important issue in their vote – and they voted 53-44 percent for Republicans for House. It is the first time, in exit poll since 1992, that economy voters have favored Republicans.

    http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/vote-2010-elections-results-midterm-exit-poll-analysis/story?id=12003775

    The “demographics” angle is a canard. How in the world could you make the argument “Our policies aren't unpopular, we just can't get anyone to show up and vote for them” with a straight face?

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  2. Terry wrote:
    "The “demographics” angle is a canard. How in the world could you make the argument “Our policies aren't unpopular, we just can't get anyone to show up and vote for them” with a straight face?"

    I can make it as a serious argument with a straight face because multiple polls and surveys and flat-out straight-up statements from the tea partiers and others have indicated they were unhappy with BOTH parties, not just the democrats. I can make the statement with a straight face because comparing all of the different polls - not just the ones in the Atlantic article or the ones you cited - were always going to be uneven comparisons, and not precisely alike.

    What I am attempting to understand is the explanation for so many democrats being voted out of the U.S. Congress, and some of the governor's races --- but not others. The pattern only superficially supports such a simple conclusion as the one you make.

    I have actually made the phone calls which ask voters from the last election if they were voting in this election........and there were some noticeable absences from the 2008 election in the younger and even mid-aged demographics from last time --- people in many cases who were not first time voters, and who were not voters in the primaries either.

    So, I want to understand what at first glance appears to me to be contradictory.

    I personally heard more complaints about where Minnesota ranks among the other states in education, and complaints about things like the ratio of students to teachers MORE than I heard jobs, for example. In CD 6, those voting for Bachmann were less enthusiastic about her track record in Congress or her economic ideas - but anti-abortion positions - single issue voting was the norm about 90%+ of the time. I'd give another 5% voters who were for example voting straight NRA endorsed candidates regardless of party.

    Another question we had to ask - and record answers - were "Do you consider yourself a member of any particular political party". Very very few said Democrat, Republican, Independent OR Tea Party. Most said undecided or they vote the candidate. And they were pretty emphatic about it.

    I'm NOT saying we just couldn't get anyone to show up in favor of these policies btw - I'm saying that an important segment of the population that voted last election didn't vote this election.

    Given the close race for governor, given the close race for CD8, and given that no other congressional districts changed hands.....I'd be looking very closely at assumptions about demographics, because the change is very, very uneven. It is far from a clear mandate for anyone. Ditto the other races nationwide. That pattern the right is claiming is not such a sharp one.

    Look further than the contrary sources you cited Terry. The larger pattern only gets more confusing, not more clear for either party, or for specific policies.

    I will say when I was offered the VIP tickets to the Obama rally for the democratic ticket.....the place was packed (possibly exceeding the authorized capacity, but that is another story) with some people having waited outside since 4:30 in the morning - per Mpls and campus police. But the Bill Clinton event the next day was much harder to get a ticket to attend ----harder than tickets to see a sitting president, up close, front few rows.

    Go figure what the heck THAT says about comparative popularity.

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  3. I believe, Dog Gone, that all of the exit polling comes from the same place. Some outfit called "NEP". You pay them money (a lot) and you get the full data set with cross tabs.
    I think you can discount your personal experience. Too parochial, and you are too partisan.
    The reason I don't think too much of the demographics narrative is because it is too simple. "We Republicans lost because the election demographics were bad." "Yeah. Not enough Republicans voted". Obama seemed to be aware of the demographic issue before the election, he spent his last few campaign appearances and words to the troops urging groups he should have had in the bag to vote. Blacks, hispanics, young people.
    This can't be spun as anything other than a rejection of the Democrats. Incumbent or not, Republicans lost few seats at the national and local level, while Democrats lost many. This does not mean that it was an endorsement of the GOP.
    Thompson's "16 Democratic districts hurt the worst by the recession . . . " graf still strikes me as almost comically partisan. It would be as though a conservative writer said, the day after the 2006 elections, "This election wasn't about the Iraq War! The sixteen republican held congressional districts with the most Iraq War casualties didn't change to Democrat so the election couldn't have been about the Iraq War!".

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  4. Terry, if the conservatives had won the house AND the senate, if races had been decided by larger margins (in many cases less than 2%, quite a few less than 1%) or if the results in state elections had been more consistent, I might agree with youi.

    The difference in voter turnout was smoething on the order of 14 million who voted for Obama and the dems in 2008, compared to dem votes in 2010. That is a big difference; overall the difference between GOP and DFL voters was in the vicinity of closer to 5 million.

    Specific demographics made up that 14 absent million; it was not evenly distributed over the population as reflected in voters. That makes who, not just how many, an issue.

    But beyond that are the mysteries, the conundrums - take NY 23, the seat that had GOP candidate Scozafava (sp?) dropping out just before the election, throwing her support to the Democratic candidate.

    You may recall Mitch and I debating if this was a loss to splitting conservatives, or a win for the tea partiers.

    Well ----they had another election for that CD this past Tuesday, and the democratic winner of the special election handily won this regular election in a traditionally conservative district.

    Who won and by how much, and who is a returning incumbent - there are surprisingly more than you might expect, is signficant.

    To assume that the numbers represent some consistent pattern is, I would argue, too simplistic. I think it is in fact more complex, and more contradictory, if you take a further look at the results.

    Obama still has pretty fair numbers, depending on how the questions are phrased - and those numbers were going up, not down, last time I checked.

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  5. As to my own experience, my calling range was over three Congressional districts, comprising roughly 1/4 of Minnesota.

    Going into that experience I was very knowledgable (in my own opinion) about national issues and Congressional reps' (and senators) voting records. I was distinctly less so about state candidates and state legislative controversies.

    But I did study up; to the point I would think it fair to say I was an informed voter - but still not with the depth I had in national politics, or MN re federal issues.

    I can tell you from having conversations with literally hundreds of people - dem, gop, and self-identified independent - in the course of seeking specifically to identify those preferences for purposes of categorizing the voter registration-originated phone lists - that overwhelmingly, very very few of those I spoke with knew who any of the house or senate candidates were that were running. They didn't know who they were by name. When names were provided, they didn't know which was which - dfl, gop, or other.

    When asked voting preferences for candidates, I was consistently asked, nearly every phone call, what the relative positions were for each - and we were provided fact sheets in order to correctly answer those questions (and yes, I did make very sure that those fact sheets were accurate before using them).

    When I have had the opportunity to speak with other people who were volunteering in different parts of the state, their experiences were similar - as were others in the same general area I was volunteering.

    That suggests to me that the support for the 2010 conservative wins in MN, other than single issue voters (almost exclusively anti-abortion voters, who were numerically significant but by no means a majority of any kind)is probably far softer than what is being claimed. Tea partiers are numerically rather limited, but loud. Louder isn't more of anything, other than noise.

    Don't even get me started on the numbers of voters operating under misinformation and disinformation. If those people ever catch up with the facts, they are likely to be royally p-o'd.

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  6. A lot of the democrats that lost were from traditionally republican districts. They won by a narrow margin in 2008 because a lot of republicans were pissed at their own party and did not vote or voted for an independent. Once the dems got in office and started voting for health care and talking about cap and trade the usual voters showed up and voted them out. I think that situation explains about 10 of the congressmen that lost. The rest, well you can argue it all you want, but Obama and the democratic congress have done nothing for unemployment. It has been between 9.5% and 10% since a couple months after he took office. The only reason it is not 17% is they don't count the people who have quit looking. Whether people showed up and voted republican or just did not show up to vote does not matter a lot, either way they did what they did because they are dissatisfied with the economy. They voted Obama in hoping he would fix it and he spent most of the first two yrs fixing health care. The problem is that the people who care the least about health care and the most about unemployment are the young voters that put him in office.

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  7. Obama and the democratic congress have done a great deal for unemployment and for attempting to reform the abuses which put our economy in this situation.

    The conservatives make a lot of noise about how tax cuts for the rich will result in jobs -- but there is zero, zip, nada to suggest much less prove that is true. NO empirical evidence whatsoever.

    There is ample evidence it is all about the conservatives treating the rich as a special interest, simply helping them to get more rich at the expense of everyone else --- and raising the deficit while they are at it.

    This election was no landslide; it was an example of the kind of midterm swap that is exaggerated during bad economies.

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