TNR‘s Jonathan Chait, writing before last night’s results became known, quotes a bunch of GOP talking points from 2001, downplaying the significance of Dem victories in Virginia and New Jersey (e.g., “it’s laughable to suggest that this has any national implications,” and “anybody that tries to predict what this means for next year is nuts”). Chait then accurately sums up:
Of course, the hypocrisy goes both ways — no doubt Democrats were proclaiming doom for the GOP [in 2001]. It seems pretty clear that New Jersey and Virginia vote for the out-of-power party every four years now. Yes, there’s a lot more energy on the right, but no, this election…isn’t evidence of it.
I think basically everybody in politics understands this. I also think the political news media will tend to treat the elections as important, because the media has a bias toward reading importance into every new thing that happens. If you’re going to have a discussion on cable news about what the elections mean, the producer isn’t going to be very pleased if everybody says it doesn’t mean anything.
What conservatives often fail to understand, in decrying liberal bias in the MSM, is that the media has a lot of biases that are more prevalent than its mild, vanilla center-left ideological bias: sensationalism bias, for instance, and reportorial laziness bias. Chait puts his finger on a crucial one: the everything-is-important bias. That bias is the primary reason why a GOP resurgence is last night’s narrative, and any contrary views are, at best, a dissenting counter-narrative.
If you think about it, the whole thing is really rather silly. There is quite obviously no instrinsic significance to who is elected governor of New Jersey or Virginia. Why should there be? Connecticut has a Republican governor. Montana has a Democratic governor. So what? Who cares? Gubernatorial elections are different than national elections. So are low-turnout special House elections.
Losses by two awful candidates, Deeds and Corzine, in a purple state (VA) and a blue state (NJ), don’t mean the Democrats are doomed, DOOMED. (The Democrats might be doomed — but these results don’t tell us that.) They also don’t mean purple Virginia is now deep-red again, and deep-blue New Jersey is now suddenly purple. They just mean two bad candidates lost two state elections. Happens all the time. Likewise, a Democratic victory in a freakish NY-23 race tells us nothing about anything. All politics is local. Each election is unique. We all know this. Yet we can’t look away.
Nobody bats an eyelash at changes in the governorships of the other 48 states, because those states don’t happen to vote on election nights when there’s nothing else going on. But, like a Thursday-night college football game on ESPN2 between two Big East teams nobody would otherwise watch, gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia always have vastly outsized prominence in the MSM/Beltway echo chamber, simply because they’re the only game in town. The same goes for the NY-23 election, which nobody would give a hoot about if it were being held on a normal election night, along with 434 other House races.
Is it possible to glean some overarching lessons from last night’s results, like the ones Andrew Sullivan cites? Sure, maybe, but they’re the obvious, no-sh*t-Sherlock sort of “lessons” that we don’t actually need an election to teach us. Such as: Voters tend not to like incumbents, or the party in power, when the economy sucks. Voters who support the opposition party are generally more motivated. Voters typically don’t like out-of-town carpetbaggers telling them what to do. (Doug Hoffman, meet Howard Dean.) Candidates who run better campaigns usually win. Blah, blah, blah. These results don’t teach us anything we didn’t already know.
If these elections have any real significance, it derives solely from a self-fulfilling prophecy arising directly out of their artificially inflated prominence. If enough people say the results in NJ and VA are significant, enough times, then some people who matter (like blue-dog Democrats in Congress) will start to believe it, and will be influenced by this erroneous belief. They’re being swayed by an obvious lie, but that doesn’t mean the consequences aren’t real. Will ObamaCare flounder because Jon Corzine lost? No, but it might flounder because of the narrative surrounding Jon Corzine’s loss — even though that narrative is obviously wrong, and everybody propounding it knows that perfectly well. God bless America.
P.S. But, you protest, “Obama campaigned in New Jersey and Virginia! They must matter!” Maybe… or maybe Obama campaigned in New Jersey and Virginia because he knew people would portray them as significant, and thus he wanted to Corzine and Deeds to win. Again, this is all self-fulfilling prophecy: we pretend these elections matter, and by pretending that, we make them matter.
The problem with the “this election is a referendum!” narrative is that it is accompanied by oogedy-boogedy pomp without much context. Of course the election was a referendum, arguably, that’s a tautology.
The question is, what’s it all mean? And the answer is, something big!. Woah. Being serious for a second, sometimes when it means what you think it means, it still doesn’t really mean what you think it means.
For example, Mike Marchand speculated that the 2010 congressional elections will be a bloodbath. I agree with this prediction. Looking out from today I predict that the Republicans take back the House, move several senators away from the filibuster threshhold and generally create a big thorn in Obama’s side, much like the Gingrich Republicans did to Clinton in 1994.
I believe this because I disagree with dcl and others that jobs will start coming back in mid-2010. Going back to another Mike Marchand comment, I suspect that the stimulus has indeed been mostly sizzle with no steak, as a result I predict that unemployment will be at 12% or higher in mid-2010, when the mid-term really heats up.
Oh, and, I predict that these events will work to the long-term governing advantage of the….Democrats.
I base all these conclusions on the suspicion, articulated elsewhere, that the problem in the US and Western economies resides in the loss of purchasing power among the working class, “Union Goons” as Joe Loy affectionately referred to them recently. It may be comforting to talk of retraining the former UAW employee who now makes a Target wage, but probably the best thing for that guy is to organize and re-negotiate back some of the national flow of wages up the management chain.
Did you know that Obama supports card check? He isn’t real visible with that platform, since just about every limousine liberal, really any American with an advanced degree hates it. (Full disclosure, I hate it too, from the standpoint of freedom of association/negotiation/etc).
In 2010, when the next generation Gingrichites are putting forth their new contract with America, Obama will come out with card check, to be roundly defeated by the Republican House and easily filibustered by the almost Republican senate. And those groups will be hoisted on their own petard, as the working class will come to re-embrace their Democratic Party roots.
And keeping with a 1994 theme, Obama will subsequently win his re-election by a margin that will make the Clinton-Dole election look close.
So back to the topic at hand…its a referendum, great. But what does it mean?
No one really knows.
Spot on.
Well. With two Trivial Quibbles. (aka, Tribbles. 😉 (I’m givin’ ‘er all she’s Got, Captain! 🙂
“Nobody bats an eyelash at changes in the governorships of the other 48 states, because those states don’t happen to vote on election nights when there’s nothing else going on.”
Not so Fast, oh mighty Electoral NerdKing. ;} You mean “the other 46 states which don’t happen to vote… [etc.].” Let us never forget the great Commonwealth of Kentucky and the fair Magnolia State of Mississippi. Surely you recall all the Eyelash Batting in Nov. 2007 when Steve Beshear (D) won the KY governorship even as good ol’ Guv’nuh Haley (“Magnolia Blossom”:) Barbour (R) was getting triumphantly re-elected in MS.
“The same goes for the NY-23 election, which nobody would give a hoot about if it were being held on a normal election night, along with 434 other House races.”
There I must disagree. The NY-23 scenario was so Abnormal that the wise old cableOwls [hi Wolf :] would have been Hooting about it Even in a regular Evennumbered year. (Not as Loudly, no. But it would have been on all the ‘top House races to watch’ lists.)
I think your analysis of the media is correct. I’ve had many conversations with people who attribute various motives to the media. The right claims a liberal bias, the left claims a corporatist bias.
Both of those have a slight grain of truth, but the reality of the vast majority of what we see in the media is simply that the media is lazy. This feeds into your points, I think. The easy narrative, the exciting one, that’s all much easier than actually thinking. And that goes both for the media themselves and viewers. Viewers are lazy as well. They don’t want the nuance. Somehow with 24 hours of news we can’t seem to be bothered to truly explore questions in the news.
It’s amazing how even when they do, for example, hour long specials on a topic it’s really just a longer version of what they did on CNN Headline news. There’s not a lot of thoughtful analysis, there’s just more examples of the simple story line they’ve been pushing.
uhhhhhhhhh…. uhhhhhhhhh……. Ummmmm….
Here’s what I think.
Corzine sucks…. Creigh Deeds sucks.
I think that’s why they got voted out of office. I know I know, that’s crazy talk, but just maybe that’s why the elections went the way they did.
Honestly, I didn’t vote Shwarzenneger out of office because I didn’t like Bush or Republicans. Granted, California is a failed state, but I’m pretty sure that local elections routnely don’t get voted along party lines based on the current President’s party affiliation.
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