Turned Out / Turnout
Turned Out
Many conservatives are interpreting the mid-term election results as a punishment for abandoning conservatism. George Will, in his election post-mortem, states that Republicans are “guilty of apostasy from conservative principles at home (frugality, limited government) and embrace of anti-conservative principles abroad (nation-building grandiosity pursued incompetently)”. The idea of limited government may be often stated as a conservative ideal, but it has seldom been followed in any administration since the New Deal. In particular, it was certainly not followed by that conservative deity Ronald Reagan, who merely ballooned the deficit with tax cuts while paying mere lip service to reducing the size of government. And nation-building was fully embraced by conservatives in Vietnam and to some extent (again, during Reagan’s administration) in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
But contrary to the protestations of old-line conservatives, there were only two main factors in the fall of the Republicans from power – Iraq and Katrina. While Katrina was seldom mentioned, and, it seems, is almost forgotten, it was the turning point in the public’s perception of the Bush Administration and it’s Republican enablers in the Congress. It emboldened the media, finally, to engage in full criticism of the government, and revealed to the American people the government’s outright incompetence. There was no filter available to the Bush Administration to obscure the results of their inaction, no ability to claim that dissent was unpatriotic as they had done with any critique of the Iraq War.
And this change in perception, in full circle from when President Bush stood on a pile of rubble in Manhattan after 9/11, carried over into the administration’s conduct of the Iraq War. Instead of the public continuing to give the government the benefit of the doubt, aided by the rampant spin of the conservative public relations machine, the debacle of Katrina has continued to color every statement uttered by the administration. In the “fog of war” it is difficult to prove incompetence – it is easy to point to a evil and clever enemy as the reason for any setbacks. But Katrina was the proof. And Iraq has become a dull pain in the American side, killing soldiers and draining the treasury with what seems to be no change for the better.
But if it were not for the current quagmire in Iraq and the devastation of Katrina, would the American public have noticed the “apostasy from conservative principles” that George Will describes? The same cronyism, the same profligate lobbyist-directed spending, the same hubris has infected the Bush Administration from the very beginning. The great nation-building exercise that is the Iraq War was well under way in 2004, yet George W. Bush was reelected. Abandoning conservative principles had nothing to do with the election results – this election was about competence, or the lack thereof.
Turnout
Depending on the source, percentage turnout for the 2006 mid-term elections was estimated at either the average since 1972 to the highest since 1982 – in both cases the percentage turnout is around 40%. One estimate has the Democratic share of the vote at 17.9%, with the Republican share at 16.8%. These numbers could be interpreted to mean that less than one-fifth of the voting age population have decided which party controls Congress, along with the fate of 36 Governorships.
The highest turnout occurred in Minnesota with more than 59%; the lowest was a close race between Mississippi and Louisiana, with between 26 and 28%. The turnout numbers seem to lack correlation with the closeness of the major races in the states. South Dakota had the second highest turnout at almost 58%, yet in the two statewide races, for Governor and the single House district, the margins were 26% and 40% respectively. Yet Maryland, with seemingly tight races for both US Senator and Governor (several late pre-election polls had both races within the margin of error), registered between 40-50%, depending on the estimate.
There’s been much gnashing of teeth from Joe Lieberman’s win over Ned Lamont in Connecticut. But here are the numbers:
Sources
Many conservatives are interpreting the mid-term election results as a punishment for abandoning conservatism. George Will, in his election post-mortem, states that Republicans are “guilty of apostasy from conservative principles at home (frugality, limited government) and embrace of anti-conservative principles abroad (nation-building grandiosity pursued incompetently)”. The idea of limited government may be often stated as a conservative ideal, but it has seldom been followed in any administration since the New Deal. In particular, it was certainly not followed by that conservative deity Ronald Reagan, who merely ballooned the deficit with tax cuts while paying mere lip service to reducing the size of government. And nation-building was fully embraced by conservatives in Vietnam and to some extent (again, during Reagan’s administration) in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
But contrary to the protestations of old-line conservatives, there were only two main factors in the fall of the Republicans from power – Iraq and Katrina. While Katrina was seldom mentioned, and, it seems, is almost forgotten, it was the turning point in the public’s perception of the Bush Administration and it’s Republican enablers in the Congress. It emboldened the media, finally, to engage in full criticism of the government, and revealed to the American people the government’s outright incompetence. There was no filter available to the Bush Administration to obscure the results of their inaction, no ability to claim that dissent was unpatriotic as they had done with any critique of the Iraq War.
And this change in perception, in full circle from when President Bush stood on a pile of rubble in Manhattan after 9/11, carried over into the administration’s conduct of the Iraq War. Instead of the public continuing to give the government the benefit of the doubt, aided by the rampant spin of the conservative public relations machine, the debacle of Katrina has continued to color every statement uttered by the administration. In the “fog of war” it is difficult to prove incompetence – it is easy to point to a evil and clever enemy as the reason for any setbacks. But Katrina was the proof. And Iraq has become a dull pain in the American side, killing soldiers and draining the treasury with what seems to be no change for the better.
But if it were not for the current quagmire in Iraq and the devastation of Katrina, would the American public have noticed the “apostasy from conservative principles” that George Will describes? The same cronyism, the same profligate lobbyist-directed spending, the same hubris has infected the Bush Administration from the very beginning. The great nation-building exercise that is the Iraq War was well under way in 2004, yet George W. Bush was reelected. Abandoning conservative principles had nothing to do with the election results – this election was about competence, or the lack thereof.
Turnout
Depending on the source, percentage turnout for the 2006 mid-term elections was estimated at either the average since 1972 to the highest since 1982 – in both cases the percentage turnout is around 40%. One estimate has the Democratic share of the vote at 17.9%, with the Republican share at 16.8%. These numbers could be interpreted to mean that less than one-fifth of the voting age population have decided which party controls Congress, along with the fate of 36 Governorships.
The highest turnout occurred in Minnesota with more than 59%; the lowest was a close race between Mississippi and Louisiana, with between 26 and 28%. The turnout numbers seem to lack correlation with the closeness of the major races in the states. South Dakota had the second highest turnout at almost 58%, yet in the two statewide races, for Governor and the single House district, the margins were 26% and 40% respectively. Yet Maryland, with seemingly tight races for both US Senator and Governor (several late pre-election polls had both races within the margin of error), registered between 40-50%, depending on the estimate.
There’s been much gnashing of teeth from Joe Lieberman’s win over Ned Lamont in Connecticut. But here are the numbers:
- In the Democratic primary, Lamont won by 146,587 to 136,468 for Lieberman out of 696,823 registered Democratic voters. Although turnout increased to 40% from the average primary turnout of 25% (the Connecticut primary is held in August), Lamont was determined to be the Democratic candidate by only 21% of registered Democrats. His vote in the primary was 12% of the total votes cast in the general election, and 7% of the voting age population.
- In the general election, Lieberman won by 563,725 to 448,077 with a total vote of 1,131,692 from a voting age population of 2,086,609. Although Lieberman received 50% of the votes cast, he was elected by only 27% of the voting age population. Such are the vagaries of the American election system.
Sources
- United States Elections Project: 2006 Voting-Age and Voting-Eligible Population Estimates (Excel spreadsheet: Turnout 1980-2006.xls)
- Center for the Study of the American Electorate: Bush, Iraq Propel Modest Turnout Increase Ending 12-Year Republican Revolution: Dems Higher Than Gop For First Time Since 1990 (PDF)
posted by balto at 11:53 AM
1 Comments:
I wish there had been more of an outpouring of outrage from the public in the aftermath of Katrina, which remains largely out of the public's consciousness, despite the fact it's in our backyard. Every American should feel the sting of homelessness, lost relatives, the thought of drowning, a city called home demolished, photo-ops under eerie kleg-lites while the rest of the city remained dark due to deliberate neglect, an occupation by para-military forces; as if this were their homes, their relatives, their city. Bushco depends on our experience of the aftermath of Katrina to be like an out-of-body experience of a trauma victim; too overwhelmed to come to grips with his ineptitude, indifference, deliquent disregard for American lives in the face of disaster. We came back to earth, if only for one day on November 7th. Let's stay here.
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