Underestimationism

Editor's note: This was posted as a comment and we felt it deserved to be a full article.  //  

    It's hard to know how the voters responded when all you're looking at is a room with about 150 people in it, all of whom look pretty much the same and don't look like random crowds you see anywhere else.

The Democrats underestimated the backlash, didn't understand that they needed to hold together the coalition from 2008, and suffered from the usual division between grassroots and the labor machine.

In simple terms, the turnout shifted from the last presidential election, and the Democrats, nationally and locally, had no plan and no counter to the Republican's well-funded and highly organized comeback operation.

The handwriting was on the wall a year ago when the Tea Party, an astroturf operation that developed its own legs, thrashed the Dems in town hall meetings over health care.  The deal was sealed when the persistent refrain was that the Tea Party was too extreme for Americans and would fragment the Republican party.  That was nonsense then and it should be pretty obvious now.  The Tea Party demonstrations were turning out several thousand people along the Guide Meridian.  Interpreting that as a weakness was exactly the same self-delusion as underestimating the convergence of the far-right after Clinton's election.

This was mostly a rerun of the backlash we saw in the 1993 (local) and 1994 (national) elections.  The Democrats got blindsided there also, but this time history repeated itself and they don't have the excuse that they didn't see it coming.  They saw the light of the onrushing train and declared it the end of the tunnel.

We've been sorting through the mass of political mailings and one fact is salient: most of the money was spent through state or national parties or influence groups.  Not much was controlled locally.  So this was a campaign where most of the mailings came from outside the area.

I may be blowing pickle-smoke here, but the test is simple: once the precinct returns are complete, look carefully at the demographics of the voting.  I'll wager drinks (in a quiet bar where you can get service and be heard without hurting your throat) that a review of the polling stats will show:

* The turnout shifted the geographic center of voting to the northeast of Bellingham.  This is typical of older turnouts and also of elections where infrequent voters turn out.  I'll bet the turnout in places like Kendall and Ferndale was up and places like the area around the center of Bellingham was down.

* The turnout was depressed among young voters and increased among older voters.

* The turnout among 1 of 4 voters (occasional voters who turn out for 1 of 4 elections) was up or equal to 2008, and turnout among 4/4 and 3/4 voters (frequent voters) was down.

This is information that rarely gets made public unless public interest groups report it. The information is being avidly gathered privately, as you may have noted the very high level of "polling" calls asking: a) how are you going to vote? and, b) how did you vote?  These private polls are expensive and not something you are going to read about in the papers.  They are going to be used in future elections to influence and manipulate the vote.

Given the deflationary nature of the current recession, the conservative prescription of budget and tax cutting will do about as much good as reviving the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs (protectionism for American industry that killed trade,) though that probably will look attractive to Glen Beck's fan club.  We can count on the stalemate in Congress to get worse and federal intervention to reboot the economy not happening. So we can look forward to dysfunctional economic policy for another couple of years, with probably another backlash election in 2012.

We'll see how it goes in next year's local elections, but I'm predicting more of the same, not less.