The Living Room Times

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.

Maine is the devil you know
Maine is the heaven below
Maine, at the top of the chart
Has crushed my evil heart
—John Linnell

Andrew Sullivan appears to be conceding defeat on the gay marriage amendment in Maine, but Doug Mataconis says it’s still “way too close to call.” With 69 percent of the precincts reporting, the tally is 51.8% to 48.2% in favor of repealing the state’s law allowing gay marriage.

We’ll see. I’m not terribly optimistic for a massive late surge, and am thinking that the final numbers may be distressingly close to my 51.3% to 48.7% prediction. I was hoping to be wrong, obviously. But I’m not going to stay up any later waiting to find out whether I am. Time for bed. G’nite all. Thanks for the memories, Twitter.

(Seriously: this election night was an overwhelmingly Twitter-centric experience for me. Is this the wave of the future? Or at least a preview of how I’ll follow Midterm Election Night 2010 in real time? Election-night live-tweeting makes election-night live-blogging seem so 12 months ago.)