I think the boys in Vegas are safe from the prospect of me cleaning them out wagering on political campaigns. On election eve, I posted my projected winners of those US Senate races thought to be competitive. I missed two, which, in politics, is a lousy batting average.
Congratulations to Senators-elect Whitehouse and Menendez, for they defied The Divagator’s not-so-crystal ball and were duly elected to represent their fair states in Washington come this January. During the summer, I had projected Mr. Menendez to retain his seat in the Senate, but had changed my mind on election eve. I should have known better; however, in the case of Rhode Island, I am truly surprised that voters sent Lincoln Chafee packing. In retrospect, there are several solid explanations for why Chafee didn’t win the election—each of them fairly apparent before Election Day—but at the end of the day, I think my mistake was simply believing that job-approval ratings would necessarily translate into votes, because in Mr. Chafee’s case, no such correlation existed, or, as David W. Rohde—a professor of political science and the director of the Political Institutions and Public Choice Program at Duke University—wrote in recent op-ed piece,
The behavior of voters in 2006 was perhaps the greatest sign of party strength. Voters approached the race more like British voters casting votes for a parliamentary majority than like Americans weighing the unique merits of individual candidates.
Exit polls and other research show that voting has become more strongly correlated with party identification and that ticket splitting has declined. Voters also see party control as more consequential.
No result from 2006 was more striking in this regard than the Rhode Island Senate race. Exit polls showed that the incumbent Republican, Lincoln Chafee, had a robust approval rating, 63 percent. Yet his constituents voted him out of office largely because 75 percent of them disapproved of his fellow Republican, President Bush.
On an interesting side note, a few days after the election, Mr. Chafee was reportedly contemplating a defection from the GOP, stating that he had remained a Republican over the past six years because of the amount of money it enabled him to bring home to his constituents in Rhode Island. Obviously, switching to the opposition party would have repercussions. Hypothetically, if Chafee had won re-election, would he have left his party and caucused with the Democrats? Hard to say, but I do feel that Mr. Chafee will come to symbolize, more than any other politician, the tenor and results of the 2006 mid-term elections.
It has been noted—particularly by those who favor same-sex marriage, tighter gun laws, and the status quo concerning abortion rights—that, ironically, the incoming Congress may well be more conservative in sum than its predecessor, despite the Republicans moving into opposition. Several of the Republican incumbents in the House and Senate who lost earlier this month were of the moderate variety and were replaced by conservative Democrats. Further, several of the open seats across the country were likewise filled by conservative Democrats recruited by the national party in order to win right-leaning districts. In short, when the party bus unloads its class of freshman senators and congressmen, one should not expect a gaggle of Nancy Pelosi clones to stride down the steps. These Democrats will no doubt trouble their party’s leadership as much as Lincoln Chafee troubled his, but they will also learn quickly that, in Washington, process is that part of the legislative iceberg—i.e., the bigger part—that folks often lose sight of outside the Beltway, and it is controlled by the majority party’s leadership. A freshman senator does little more during his first term than the statuary placed in the Capitol rotunda.
No comments:
Post a Comment