Stephanie
Diamond Member
- Jul 11, 2004
- 70,230
- 10,864
sounds about right
SNIP:
From the Koch Brothers to the voters themselves, Dems blame everything but their own policies.
By Tim Cavanaugh
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It’s a rebuilding year for the Democratic party, probably the first of many, made more bitter because it ends an eight-year period during which talk of permanent Democratic rule did not seem wild.
Resounding defeats on Tuesday in elections across the country stunned Democrats, who were betrayed not just by faulty polling but by their own mad hopes. The party had banked on a permanent shift — by age, gender, ethnicity, or all three — that would eliminate all Republican support and immanentize California-style Democratic permanence. (As it happened, even the Golden State turned a couple of House seats over to Republicans.) It’s the ordinariness of the news that makes it so painful. After all that hype, Democrats learn that even President Barack Obama, a figure of national transfiguration who once lifted us above rising tides and salved the trauma of history, is subject to the same six-year crisis that afflicts every two-term president. It can’t be easy to accept.
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Apparently Democrats aren’t accepting it. Some favorite explanations for the Democrats’ coast-to-coast defeats:
11. We lost because we had bad candidates.
“To explain why some Democratic gubernatorial candidates lost in blue states while others (such as Gina Raimondo in Rhode Island, Dannel Malloy in Connecticut, and John Hickenlooper in Colorado) managed to hang on, one really needs to take into account the state and local context of the races,” declares The New Republic’s Alec MacGillis. He bases his case on a single data point: Maryland gubernatorial loser Anthony Brown, who ran “who ran one of the worst campaigns I’ve ever observed up close.” The campaign was apparently so bad that nobody covering the race (including MacGillis himself) seems to have noticed Brown was in trouble until the day of the election.
To be sure, Democrats didn’t have candidates with the boiling charisma of Pat Roberts or the smoldering passion of Asa Hutchinson. But Tuesday’s GOP victories, in nearly every state and including not just federal legislative offices but governorships and state legislative positions, are not explicable through Tip O’Neill’s sometimes-true-sometimes-not observation that all politics is local. To point out that Hickenlooper and Malloy survived is merely to observe that Republicans didn’t win every race in the country.
10. Two-thirds of voters didn’t turn out.
Democrats did well circulating the two-thirds trope. By mid-afternoon on the East Coast the day after the elections, the observation that a mere 36.6 percent of eligible citizens turned out to vote had gone from Twitter to the mouth of the president, who announced, “To the two-thirds of voters that chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you too.”
This is indeed the lowest turnout of the last 20 years, but it is no departure from historic midterm voting trends. Midterm turnout was 40.9 percent in 2010; 40.4 percent in 2006; and 39.5 percent in 2002 — all of which could be rounded down to one-third without exaggeration. (Voter-suppression truthers might have pointed out that the second-lowest percentage turnout — 38.8 percent in 1994 — also resulted in a Republican rout; but so far nobody has.) This is part of a larger downward trend in turnout for all national elections: Since the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, the highest voter turnout in any election has been 63.3 percent in 1952 (Eisenhower vs. Stevenson); and voter participation has dwindled, with occasional stirrings, since that time. (Who complains when a long-sitting House Democrat wins by getting a mere 16 percent of eligible voters in her district?) This year’s turnout was not off-trend — despite the president’s pleas to Cousin Pookie and Uncle Jethro and a jarringly overt Yellow-Dog Democrat pitch by the first lady. It’s also not alarming: An opinion poll that sampled a third of the population would be considered remarkably thorough.
9. It’s Citizens United’s fault.
ALL of it here:
DEMSPLAINING 11 Rationalizations for Democrats Election Whupping National Review Online
