What Landslide? "The American People" have clearly spoken" Narrative - Is BULLSHIT!

[kpete]

What Landslide?: A Closer Look at the Midterm Election Results
If there was a decisive "sea change" amongst the electorate over the past two years, it has not been borne out by the facts. The only thing "clear" about the midterm elections is that the media and its "analysts" are terrible at accurately reporting on them.
Saturday 21 November 2009

by: John Kane, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

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I would strongly suggest that, while the election results are certainly a political setback for Democrats, this "Tea Party triumph" interpretation is wildly misleading once we look more closely at the actual election results. The media loves conflicts and narratives and, as Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research aptly predicted back in September, this election season was practically preordained to be the election where everyone finally acknowledges that the Obama administration and Democrats lost "because they tried to go too far, too fast, and too left for the inherently conservative American masses."<2>

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1. The Total Popular Vote
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But what happens when we actually look at the total popular vote for all US Senate, gubernatorial and House of Representatives races? When we look at the total popular vote (that is, all national and gubernatorial votes for all Democrats and Republicans combined), Democrats are, unsurprisingly, still the losers overall - just as Candidate B was in both of my previous hypothetical scenarios - but the results are at serious odds with the prevailing media narrative.

I've calculated the Democratic and Republican averages in all available Senate, Governor and House race results. In the Senate, Democrats took 43.2 percent of the vote; Republicans took 51.5 percent. In the gubernatorial races, Democrats took 43.2 percent; Republicans took 50.5 percent. And finally, in the House -where Democrats suffered headline-grabbing losses - Democrats took 47.3 percent; Republicans took 50.1 percent. Yes, in the House of Representatives, where the media has been screaming about a Tea Party-led "bloodbath," Democrats lost the popular vote by less than three percent! In looking at these popular vote results, we clearly see that the Tea Party-Republican alliance barely captured a majority of the vote. The supposed "bloodbath," therefore, only represents a large change in the party composition of Congress, not an easily discernable shift in the qualitative (that is, ideological) composition of the electorate.<5>

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2. Voter Turnout

When I refer to the supposed change in the composition of the electorate, I do so because the electorate comprises those who actually voted on Election Day, not "The American People" as a whole. According to the United States Elections Project, the estimated turnout among eligible voters for the elections was 41.5 percent.<7> When factoring in those adult Americans who cannot vote, but who are nevertheless affected by legislation and policymaking and presumably hold political opinions, the turnout rate drops to 38.2 percent. And, to add one more layer of complexity, those figures simply represent voters who went to the polls - whether they voted for one, all, or some of the candidates on the ballot is not explicitly clear. In other words, the actual percentage of people who voted for any given race could conceivably be lower than 38.2 percent. Thus, when hearing politicians and pundits proclaim that "The American People" have clearly spoken, one should be thoroughly perplexed. In the best-case scenario, among all Americans of voting age, only 38.2 percent "spoke" on Election Day <8> and, as argued above, their message was anything but clear.

If the midterm elections could be roughly conceived of as ultimately representing a vote between those who saw the elections as important enough to merit casting a vote versus those who did not feel it was important/meaningful/useful enough to participate, then it truly was a "shellacking" - by a margin of roughly 20 percentage points - in favor of the latter. Looking at this meager turnout and making generalizations about "The American People" is, therefore, woefully misleading.

more:
http://www.truth-out.org/what-landslide-a-closer-look-midterm-election-results65261

[OHdem10]

1. I saw several reports saying some very low number of people

5% even know the Republicans won the elections.

[jillan]

2. We still have the Senate and the WH - Dems control 2/3 of the legislative branch of Congress which

makes the repugs talking point utterly ridiculous. Even if Mike Castle won DE, we'd still have majority in the Senate.

[rasputin1952]

3. Mid-term election...

there is always a low voter turnout, (well, in this country, as amazing as it seems, many registered voters don't vote at all, even for local issues that affect them more directly), but the blame rests squarely on D's that stayed home. Some districts are inevitable, Beoehner, Bachman and Issa are givens for the R's, but because many D's sat on their hands, many for such obscure things like "principles", we lost control of the House and several governorships.

This was not a Teabagger "victory", it was an embarrassment pushed by those who believe they were doing the right thing by sitting at home...happens in every election. The worst thing is, those that sat at home, or didn't take time before/after work to cast a ballot sent us down this rocky path, and they inevitably will squeal in horror as they watch what little they had left gets perilously close to being lost. My son took over 40 people to the polls this past election, I was there to greet them and thank them for showing up. My R representative wound up winning, but this is NE and that is somewhat expected, but I can tell you, he was sweating bullets for a while...:D

Maybe next election those that are sitting around howling and gnashing their teeth will get up and do something.

[mstinamotorcity]

4. If they say it enough

times you will eventually believe what ever they say. How many times have we seen the Presidents Birth Certificate and there are some who still believe he wasn't born in Hawaii or that it was a state at the time of his birth??