On Tuesday in the mid-term elections, the Republicans gained at least eight Senate and fourteen House seats. They are also likely to win the December Senatorial run-off in Louisiana (where no candidate beat the 50% threshold required to win outright on election day). They have the largest GOP margin in the House since 1946. They were able to win not just blood red states in the south and mid-west but also purple Colorado and Iowa, and they protected their gubernatorial majority by picking up Massachusetts, Maryland and Illinois while defending themselves in Wisconsin and Florida. They also won control of twenty-four state legislatures to the Democrats' fourteen; the other twelve were split.
Gallons of ink are now being spilled explaining these results.
The favorite culprits are President Obama's low approval rating, the state of the economy, and a general hatred for things governmental. On this narrative, a center-right country reclaimed its rightful control in the wake of executive fecklessness that has bloated the budget, stalled the economy and made a mess of health care. With the Keystone pipeline unbuilt thanks to Harry Reid, and our enemies abroad untamed thanks to Barack Obama, the electorate deprived Reid of his majority (and Obama of his Presidency) on its way to re-claiming the big prize in 2016.
The only problem with this narrative is that . . .
It is false.
Start with the Senate. All of the seats contested last Tuesday were previously filled in the 2008 election, which was a Presidential year. The eight seats lost by Democrats this year were in Montana, South Dakota, West Virginia, Arkansas, Iowa, Colorado, North Carolina, and Alaska. In all of them, turnout compared to 2008 was down by orders of magnitude. Nationally in 2008, more than 50% of registered voters went to the polls, record numbers for a modern Presidential election; last Tuesday, slightly more than 36% of registered voters went to the polls. Those that voted, moreover, were older, whiter, and less Hispanic than their 2008 counterparts. In other words, the Democratic vote in 2008 stayed home in 2014.
Turnout aficionados are now comparing this year's electorate to 2010's, the last mid-term, and finding out that the turnout difference was about 6%. About 42.2% of the registered electorate showed up in 2010 compared to the 36% that voted last Tuesday. These same aficionados are also pointing out that in some of the eight states won by the GOP, to wit, North Carolina, turnout among minorities and Hispanics was at or above 2010 levels.
The problem with this approach is that it understates the Democratic vote that stayed home and creates the space for the false narratives spinmeisters at Fox are now falling in love with. Turnout is always lower in non-Presidential years. All this means, however, is that mid-terms do not provide an accurate picture of where the country stands. They therefore should not be used to fashion false trends or to confirm what are necessarily incomplete indictments.
No doubt the Democrats would not have done as well this year as they did in 2008 given Obama's unpopularity, however undeserved, and the country's continuing economic problems, however much they are a product of Republican-led spending cuts that created a form of quasi-austerity on this side of the Atlantic. But if the electorate this year had been as large, as young and as diverse as it was in 2008 and 2012, it is highly doubtful that Democrats would have lost eight seats, especially in view of the fact that two of them were Colorado and Iowa, neither of which is red.
On the House side, I suspect the same variables are more or less at play but will defer here to analysis by Steve Kamp, a law school classmate who has written a yet to be published tome analyzing every House race from 1788 to the present and who sent me and others some preliminary thoughts on last Tuesday's results. Steve notes that, going into this election, Republicans held House seats in seventeen (17) districts where Obama won in 2012 and Democrats held House seats in nine (9) districts that Romney won.
On Tuesday, Democrats won back only one of those Obama districts but Republicans took back four of the nine Romney districts and won additional districts taken by the President in 2012, facts which collectively suggest that turnout was determinative. Of course, the swing itself -- fourteen (14) seats in a body with 435 of them -- was pretty small, largely owing to the fact that the House has been so thoroughly gerrymandered that few if any races are competitive in any election years, Presidential or non. The same, moreover, can be said for the legislative races, where the GOP took control of only one more legislative body.
On Tuesday, Democrats won back only one of those Obama districts but Republicans took back four of the nine Romney districts and won additional districts taken by the President in 2012, facts which collectively suggest that turnout was determinative. Of course, the swing itself -- fourteen (14) seats in a body with 435 of them -- was pretty small, largely owing to the fact that the House has been so thoroughly gerrymandered that few if any races are competitive in any election years, Presidential or non. The same, moreover, can be said for the legislative races, where the GOP took control of only one more legislative body.
Finally, there are the gubernatorial contests. The GOP picked up executive chambers in three Democratic states -- Massachusetts, Illinois and Maryland -- and defended what it held in Wisconsin and Florida. These states always hold their gubernatorial elections in non-Presidential years so we'll never know what would happen if the electorate were larger, younger or more diverse. Or put differently, in those limited elections, and for reasons based only on the anomaly of schedule, the turnout differential doesn't matter.
Everywhere else . . .
It does.
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