Relax, Democrats

[babylonsister]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/opinion/05teixeira.html?_r=1

Relax, Democrats

By RUY TEIXEIRA
Published: November 4, 2009


TO hear Republicans tell it, Tuesday’s elections, in which their candidates captured the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, were a repudiation of President Obama and indicated a voter shift toward their party. They should calm themselves down. The results don’t show this and, in fact, suggest some rather daunting challenges for the Republicans.

Start with the predictive value of the Virginia and New Jersey victories: there is none. Sometimes the party that wins both those governorships gains seats in the next Congressional election; sometimes that party loses seats. Far more consequential is the historical pattern that the new president’s party tends to lose seats in the first midterm election. Once that is taken into account, as the political scientist Alan Abramowitz of Emory University has shown, victories in Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races tell you nothing about who will gain seats in 2010 or how large that gain will be.

But perhaps voters were repudiating the president and his policies? In New Jersey, this analysis makes no sense. While an approval rating isn’t the same thing as the percentage of votes received, both figures are good measures of a politician’s overall standing. So it’s significant that Mr. Obama’s approval rating among 2009 voters (57 percent) was identical to the percent of the vote he received there in 2008. In Virginia, while the president’s 2009 approval rating was 5 points less than his 2008 voting result, the 2009 electorate was also far more conservative than last year’s. Besides being far older and whiter than in 2008, the voters in Virginia on Tuesday said they had supported John McCain last November by 8 points, meaning they were not favorably inclined toward President Obama to begin with. In fact, given that only 43 percent of these voters said they supported Mr. Obama last November, his 48 percent approval rating among them does not indicate a shift away from him but rather toward him.

If any repudiation is going on, perhaps it is of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Democrats captured New York’s 23rd Congressional District for the first time since 1872, as Bill Owens defeated Doug Hoffman, the hard-line conservative who forced a moderate Republican out of the race. Mr. Hoffman’s narrow defeat is now likely to embolden conservatives — who far outnumber moderates in the party — to challenge Republican incumbents they find ideologically impure.

That will be a problem for those in the party seeking to emulate the electoral strategies of Bob McDonnell in Virginia and Chris Christie in New Jersey. Those men sought to cover up the conservatism of their views in many areas. That was relatively easy to do in governors’ races in an off-year election. It will be harder for candidates to do in national elections in 2010 and especially 2012.

So the good news for Republicans is that they now have two more governorships. The bad news is that they’re still Republicans — with all the baggage that entails.


Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, is the editor, most recently, of “Red, Blue and Purple America: The Future of Election Demographics.”

[tblue]

1. The conservative wing of the Democratic party was repudiated, too, in Creigh "Opt Out" Deeds.

Will the Blue Dogs get that?

[Cha]

2. Or will they suck up the coporatemediawhore's

manufacturing?

[Cha]

3. Sounds like Ruy Teixeira has the

credentials to know of what he speaks on this.

Just think if we had a free press who weren't whoring for the republicons.

[lyonn]

4. Two new seats in the House, how fine is that!!

The likes of Palin, Bauchman, Rush and Beck are pure showtime. Only the mindless follow such sensationalism. We have actors and actresses to fill this slot, not for serious stuff like running our country. We are told they control/impress around 20 - 25% of the population and the media runs with this as meaningful political babble, sheesh.

I thought the Dems came out the winners.