The conventional wisdom is always wrong except when it’s always right

Sometimes I have to write a post just to hear myself think so that I know what I think. This is one of those posts. I’m sorting some things out for future posts.

First off, to repeat what I said Thursday. What happened Tuesday was that states that voted Republican in the 2012 Presidential election voted Republican again and states that voted Democratic in 2012 voted Democratic again, with two exceptions, Iowa and Colorado. There was almost a third, Virginia, which is going to be the point of this post. It’s just going to take me some time to get to it.

The other thing that happened was that nearly two-thirds of voters stayed home. Republicans and Democrats. It’s just that fewer Republicans stayed home in states where there happen to be more Republicans than Democrats to begin with.

I’m talking about the Senate races. The gubernatorial races are their own separate stories, and each one is a lesson in Tip O’Neill 101: All politics is local.

The Iowa and Colorado senate races probably are too.

At any rate, as you can see from the map, Tuesday was not an across the board disaster for Democrats. It wasn’t even a completely bad day for Democratic Senators named Udall. Tom Udall won re-election in New Mexico. Democrats won in twelve states (Louisiana will probably be lost in the runoff.) including states Republicans were talking confidently about being possible pick-ups back in the spring, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Michigan, and Oregon, and Minnesota and Virginia.

There’s no getting around it. Things could have gone better. The point is the Republican wave looks to have channeled itself through Republican waters. The map looks like it only needs a bit of filling in to be the map of the 2012 Presidential election results.

Again, Iowa and Colorado being important exceptions.

A conclusion to draw from this is that voters weren’t telling us anything new in this election. They were just repeating themselves, with emphasis.

That goes against the conventional wisdom which holds that this election was somehow a rejection of President Obama, but the conventionally wise often have trouble making up their minds and more trouble balancing competing thoughts.

Up until it became all about the polls and the polls were showing the Republicans were on their way to taking control of the Senate, the conventional wisdom was that Republicans needed to do more or, rather, do something, anything, to attract more women and minority voters.

Since Tuesday, the conventional wisdom has flipped. Now it’s Democrats have do something, anything, to attract more white male voters.

Both are correct.

But it depends on what you’re talking about, winning the White House or controlling Congress.

The two seemingly contradictory pieces of conventional wisdom don’t cancel each other out.

The conventional wisdom is often reliable when it’s describing the way things are, because the conventionally wise have the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight and are limited by the difficulty of making two plus two equal five and living in the world where it’s generally agreed upon that the sky is blue. (The conventionally wise, by the way, do not work for FoxNews.)  It’s not so reliable or all that wise, for that matter, when it comes to figuring out how to change the way things are, often because the conventionally wise are not clairvoyant but they are biased, self-interested, self-promoting, and, in many cases, just plain dumb.

There are more states where the majority of voters are Republicans. There just are. But in many of those states there aren’t really a lot of Republicans because there aren’t a lot of people of any Party, period.

There are, of course, fewer states where the majority of voters are Democrats, but in a number of those states there are a lot of Democrats. There are a lot of people, period, but the majorities being what majorities are, that makes for a lot of Democrats.

The effect of these obvious facts is that all together the states with a lot of Republicans get to send a lot of Senators and Representatives to Congress and the states with a lot of Democrats have a lot of votes in the Electoral College.

I’m using “a lot” a lot deliberately.

So the Republicans have the edge when it comes to controlling Congress and the Democrats have the edge when it comes to winning the White House.

I know. Schoolhouse Rock level analysis.

Bear with me.

This means that for the Republicans to have a chance of winning the White House they need to carry some states where there are a lot of Democrats and for the Democrats to have a chance of controlling Congress they need to win in states where there are a lot of Republicans.

In order to do this they have to do two things that often work against each other: get their party’s voters to the polls and convince some of the other party’s voters to change their votes.

How to do both is the problem.

I happen to think the Democrats have the bigger problem because they already have a hard time convincing their own voters to come out to vote in mid-term elections.

How do we convince white male voters to vote Democratic without turning off women and minorities?

For the record, Democrats have a problem with white female voters too. Liberal analysts just tend to ignore it because they get caught up in their own conventional wisdom about the gender gap. But perhaps Democrats should be working on attracting more white female voters, which may be easier than attracting their husbands---the white women who present Democrats with the most challenge are married with children---not by appealing to their whiteness or even their femaleness but to their middle classness. The Republican War on Women is real and must be countered, but there are other worries, like jobs for themselves, jobs for their husbands, college educations for their kids, food on the table, mortgage payments due, they bring to the polls. As it turns out, addressing those worries brings Democrats to the polls.

That’s what Al Franken did in Minnesota and what Mark Warner in Virginia didn’t.

Franken won re-election handily. Warner came heart-stoppingly close to losing

Bloomberg’s Dave Weigel thinks it was because Warner didn’t figure out something Franken did, how to appeal to voters who voted for President Obama in 2012 and voters who didn’t.

In his two previous winning races, a 2001 governor bid and 2008 Senate landslide, Warner won swaths of conservative Virginia. Not this time. "A self-described 'radical centrist' who prided himself on his appeal among Republicans and independents," wrote Jenna Portnoy and Rachel Weiner, "Warner steadfastly continued to court those voters despite strong evidence that their tolerance for Democrats had dramatically waned." Every Warner faux-bit (faux obit) features something like this—that he is no longer the invincible centrist.

But it's not as if Warner was the only Democrat who had a stubborn 97 percent record of "voting with the president" and who also tried to run as a dealmaker. Minnesota Senator Al Franken made a similar argument to voters, describing himself as an aisle-crosser, talking up the bipartisan bills he'd pushed, telling audiences that he'd called Rand Paul right after the Kentuckian's 2010 win. Mike McFadden, a moderate Republican businessman who made no big mistakes and was highly rated by reporters looking for "sleeper" races (and who shared an ad-maker with Joni Ernst), never got close to Franken. The incumbent won by 10 points, bigger than the Obama-Biden margin in Minnesota in 2012. Warner had a 56 percent approval rating from the Virginia electorate, and won 49 percent of its votes.

Weigel acknowledges the differences in the electorates Franken and Warner had to deal with, although he doesn’t mention that Warner had many more African American voters to appeal to and that the appeals he made didn’t appeal enough---not enough to draw them to polls in the numbers that would have made his winning a whole lot easier and more of the sure thing he expected---and he doesn’t get into a significant bit of history, which is that Franken squeaked into office in 2008 riding Barack Obama’s coattails and that this time out, running without the President’s help, he won re-election handily, while Warner won in 2008 too but this time out, running without the President at the top of the ticket, he’s the one who faced possible endless recounts. The point is, though, that Franken won over voters who’d voted against him before and Warner lost voters who voted for him and for the President before without picking up voters who’d voted against him in 2008. But it’s Weigel’s conclusion that matters:

I'm not making a one-to-one comparison, but I do think Franken proved that voters respond to direct arguments about their economic angst better than they respond to promises that Washington is going to Fix the Debt.

The conventionally wise are already telling Democrats what they usually tell Democrats, that the way to win elections is to screw over their own base. Weigel’s suggesting that Democrats would be wiser to listen to Al Franken instead.

Read Weigel’s whole post, What Mark Warner’s Campaign Should Have Learned From Al Franken.

Hat tip to Nancy LeTourneau at Horizons.

Map courtesy of the New York Times.

Comments

[S McCoy]

Lance, it seems to me to be impossible to really argue that there were any over-arching themes. So many cross currents allow one to put almost any spin they want on the results. Yes, red senators mostly won in red states, but what about the many red governors who won in blue states? Looking forward to that post. And then there's the oddity of red governors losing in states that were nonetheless won by red senators. I have no idea how Franken won so easily, or Roberts for that matter. The only conclusion I think we should draw is that we shouldn't read too much into the midterm results. Unlike some of your other readers, I'm excited about the next 2 years, as I think we'll see a brighter than ever distinction between the parties, which will make the 2016 election fascinating. It's good and healthy for control to change occasionally, especially if it paves the way for more clarity later on. Finally, I agree with whoever it was that posted the comment about being sick of Pres O....I'm astonished at how prickly and unlike-able he's become....maybe our disappointment is just due to how high the expectations were 6 years ago? I hope he finds a way to reconnect with the country and eventually becomes a better statesman than he's been a president. Rambling post over.

[Lance Mannion]

S McCoy, that post is already in the works, but...

I wouldn't have voted for Martha Coakley.

But Ed Markey was re-elected Senator and in Illinois Dick Durbin was too.

In Colorado, Hickenlooper was re-elected governor, by 11k more votes than Gardner was elected Senator.

Maryland I don't really understand, but, my post is actually going to be a lead in to an article that tries to explain it.

You can ask me what Michigan and Wisconsin are doing with Republican governors, and I'll ask back what are West Virginia and Kentucky doing with Democratic ones?

Until Tuesday, we could ask what was Pennsylvania doing with a Republican governor and Arkansas with a Democratic one?

What it adds up to is I agree with you, no over over-arching themes and not much should be read into the results.

As for the President's becoming more unlikable: to whom? I like him better than I did during his first term. Chuck Todd of NBC doesn't like him. But I don't know anybody who likes Chuck Todd.

Eye of the beholder, and all that.

By the way, that was my friend Chris the Cop whose arguing with me about people becoming sick of the President in the comments on the previous post.

You know what he has grown? Tired and older, a lot older.

[S McCoy]

I don't know Chris, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume you mean O is the one growing tired and old?!?

And forget Chuck Todd...even Chris "thrill up my leg" Matthews is down on the president. Surely you're somewhat disappointed in how this administration has turned out so far? And how that must have impacted the election at least to some degree?

But my main point is still that the midterm electorate is a whole different world, and HC is still the favorite in '16. The thing I'm most interested in is how the new congress and the president interact these next 2 years. Will Obama emphasize his party, his legacy, or his country. Wouldn't it be something if he found a way to do all 3?

[Lance Mannion]

S McCoy, :) Yes, I meant Obama. Chris seems to be holding up pretty well.

FTR, I'm not a big fan of Matthews either. He's too much of a sentimentalist and he blows hot and cold. Too hot and too cold.

And of course I'm disappointed. I wouldn't be a good liberal if I wasn't permanently disappointed. But if you're asking if I'm disappointed that the Republican controlled House hasn't done anything but vote to repeal the ACA, name post offices, shut down the government, cut the budgets of vital services like the CDC, and find meaner ways to screw the poor and unfortunate and that Republican senators have been filibustering everything that crosses their desks including birthday cards from their kids, then you bet I'm disappointed.

And I think Obama has been doing all three all along. I just wish he'd been a bit better at emphasizing his party.

[S McCoy]

Yes the Republicans in congress gummed things up. But you wrote a post a few weeks back where you ascribed at least partial blame to the president for his sour relationship with the press corp. Don't you also think it's part of his job to find a way to win over his foes in the house....at least a little bit?

Personally, I blame a lot of that on Harry Reid, who I can't stand. I think the Dems need to pick a new senate leader NOW and I think that'll help with a few purple senate races in '14 as well. Am I wrong about that?

[S McCoy]

Sorry....senate races in '16.

[Audrey]

S McCoy; when the only position your opposition will accept is your unconditional surrender and they don't particularly care if they tank everything else in sight in order to accomplish that, how do you negotiate and win over said opposition?

I think you are being wildly optimistic in thinking that the Republicans were budgeable.

[Chris the cop.]

For the record and out of nowhere, I think Chris Matthews is the worst interviewer I've ever seen. He makes Bill O'Reilly look like Edward R. Murrow. And also for the record, I don't feel that tired today. I'm roughly Lance's age. Great turkey dinner, Lance. Thanks much for everything.