I wrote this on October 28th:
Let’s start with the media environment. I’ve actually been watching almost no politically related television for the simple reason that almost none of it has anything to do with the upcoming elections, let alone actual issues that might be taken up by the next Congress. The media has been keeping the country almost in an election blackout, with coverage mostly related to conflict in the Middle East and the Ebola virus (see, for example, current front-page of CNN.com). I don’t know how to account for this fear-heavy media coverage, but I do know that it cannot help the Democrats that they have not been able to get any kind of aspirational message in front of the electorate. I’m tempted to blast the party for incompetence, but the media simply isn’t covering any political messages at the moment. If the Democrats had a compelling message, I can’t honestly say that things would be appreciably better because the electorate would never hear it on the news.
So, this election about nothing is a new thing, and while I can anticipate that this favors the Republicans, I can’t figure out how disastrous this media environment is on, say, a scale of one to ten.
We have our answer now. On a scale of one to ten, the media coverage leading up to this midterm election was a TEN on the scale of hurting Democrats.
This is not to absolve Democratic Party strategists of any responsibility for this defeat, but the simple fact is that the polls were way off, basically eight or nine points too favorable for the Democrats. We cannot explain this polling error by reference to bad messaging. Something deeply emotional was going on with the electorate that caused them to break sharply against the Democratic Party beginning around the time of the first beheading by ISIS and then turning again sharply against us in the last days of the election, possibly related to anxiety over the Ebola virus.
The media are how these images and fears were primarily transmitted to the voting public, although the Republicans also made it part of their campaigns. The pollsters may find other factors that led to their epic failure, such as misreading the demographic makeup of the electorate, but the simple truth is that a lot of people either lied to pollsters about who they intended to vote for or changed their minds over the last two months and last few days.
We used to have a term for something similar called the Wilder Effect. This referred to the Virginia gubernatorial election of 1989 in which black Democrat David Wilder did significantly worse than the polls had indicated that he would do. It was surmised that a lot of voters refused to admit that they weren’t going to vote for a black candidate and that supposedly undecided voters broke against him by an anomalous percentage. This phenomenon is also known as the Bradley Effect because something similar happened to black Democrat Tom Bradley in the 1982 California governor’s race.
In yesterday’s case, it may be that a lot of people simply were influenced by a pervasive environment of (essentially) media-induced terror and it caused their brains to go reptilian. There is plenty of research to support the fact that people gravitate to the right when they feel physically threatened. This process goes on on a subconscious level which is not conducive to verbal articulation. People may not want to admit that they’re voting for the “wrong” party, but they go ahead and do it.
Unless someone has a better explanation for the results out of Vermont, I have to assume that some kind of Terror Effect is the primary culprit in the late break against the Democrats. Yes, they were in a challenging environment anyway, but that doesn’t explain why the environment suddenly grew disastrously worse.
Someone can analyze how the late money was spent as another potential explanation, but I believe that last night was caused by a media environment that made Democratic priorities impossible to communicate to the electorate. Better strategists couldn’t have changed that.
The current national media has three primary characteristics.
You have to see how a story plays from all three aspects to understand how it will be reported. A story may have good sensational content, but if it doesn’t comform, or is too “upsetting” it won’t get play. That’s why you don’t see pictures of the results of our freedom bombs on national media: that all gets sanitized.
We can imagine which agenda this media environment automatically favors. What we see is that the narratives of the “news” are now more or less indistinguishable from the narratives of professional sports or popular entertainment. Poverty, old age, sickness, trauma (unless it’s safely ensconced in a comfortable narrative framing like a police procedural or murder mystery) are all nowhere to be found. Systematic or cultural problems like racism, inequality, pollution, corruption literally can’t appear because those narratives aren’t sensational but require actual logical discourse, aren’t conformist because they lie outside the discourses of power which the media follows and replicates, and aren’t properly sanitized because they suggest a world where irredeemably bad things happen because of the nature of our society.
“That’s why poor people are invisible on tv, despite being vastly more of the population than the idle rich, who take up most commercial space. “
I used to wonder when I was a kid about those TV families. The father always did something mysterious at an “office” where everyone wore suits like it was Sunday Mass. No one worked in a factory or was a store clerk. The wives all were dressed up with jewelry when cooking or cleaning house. Their hair was never in a scarf or just loose. None of them had jobs although single women were secretaries.
Those show depicted upper middle class families — what the average folks aspired to and believed was in their future.
“The Honeymooners” was closer to reality in the fifties, but their apartment was more spartan for a childless couple and bus driver at that time.
Archie Bunker in the early seventies was closer to the economic reality of the sixties for most people (and culturally was five or more years late when it began airing). Although, the one child was not prevalent (Boomer families were large). WWII GI bill to buy the basic twin house. No car. The real Ediths would have also sewn and darned and when the kids were older have gotten a part-time job of some sort.
Drop almost any kid today into the reality of a working class, car dependent suburb of the 1950s and they would think they’d landed on poverty row.
Any kid? Really? Any kid? A lot of kids live in those very same working class car-dependent suburbs. The ones who still think that what they see on TV is what reality should be are not as universal as it seemed to middle class families in the 1950s.
However I can only speak to the conditions in the Carolinas, Baltimore, and Chicago on this.
Yes, any kid. No cable TV, fuzzy black and white pictures, no remote control, one phone, one car, basic and serviceable clothes and shoes and not many, no electronic toys and not many games that could be played without others, no junk food in the cupboards or frig. Three meals a day and snacks were treats and not daily ones. Food wasn’t wasted and pizza was for special occasions. Etc.
Yes, the media landscape was awful. What else is new?
To me, my in-box was flooded with negative, doom-and-gloom emails. If there was a positive Democratic message (mainly from Warren) it was lost in the Democrats fear mongering appeals to raise money. Yes, they raised money, but I was depressed heading into this election. I voted, but I couldn’t bring myself to do much more.
Democrats vote aspirationally, and Republicans vote from fear. And there was no universal, positive message that Democrats offered (again, outside of Warren) and no way to cut through the bullshit.
I mean, fucking Ebola…
This media environment was unprecedented. I have never seen an election carried out before in which the election was not the top story in the last two months of the campaign.
The fundraising emails I got from Dems were uniformly doom and gloom. Even the ones from Tom Udall – who won by double digits in New Mexico – were all “Weh’s closed to within single digits! We might lose the Senate! OMGAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!”
Ebola and quarantines were all I heard on talk radio too immediately leading up to the election.
Sorry that was “progressive talk radio”. I’m sure the other kind was full of “Obama’s plot to give all white people ebola.”
Notice that the only person who died got health care in Texas?
The Republicans are the Daddy Party that people trust in times of danger. It’s part of the image that they have carefully crafted starting with Reagan.
What do Republicans stand for? We here can answer that question easily even though we know each of these actually is a lie: strong defense, balanced budget, fiscal responsibility, smaller government, lower taxes.
Now, what do Democrats stand for?
Exactly.
Which is why in times of crisis low information voters turn to Republicans.
although it now would seem that the formula works with low infos even in times of manufactured, phoney crises as well….
And when they are clearly the baby hissy-fit party.
It’s easier to do when you are not trying to be a big-tent party.
Does anyone remember the “50-State Strategy”? Dean was right then, the strategy is absolutely valid, and tossed the minute Dean left the Chair. Further, within the 24/365 “media”, there are plenty of avenues to make oneself heard over the din. The leadership simply couldn’t find any of them (nor their collective asses with both hands).
It never was the media.
Obama was instrumental in tossing that strategy.
If so, it sure does make AG’s rants a lot more likely, no?
Imagine a neoliberalcon running as a D. You want to give the oligarchs everything, but you don’t want to be perceived as doing it on your own.
Clinton?
Obama?
It’s why even though I don’t agree with a lot of the things AG says, I sure as shit don’t make fun of him or attack him. His take on things is just from a different perspective than the average lefty liberal. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t at least have a glimpse of what is really going on.
Sure, it’s easy to believe there was a Terror Effect fed by our sensationalist teevee media. And of course Repubs clearly had a coordinated late game strategy of expressly arguing that ISIS was an immediate danger to the US, that beheadings in Toledo could be expected, and that we needed to be quarantined and travel-banned from all African nations in order to be safe from African Ebola. The tie was then explicitly made to Obaman “weakness” and apparently the implication was that Repubs would confront the disgraceful Obama on these deadly issues. Or that Repubs would somehow or other “do something”.
But this means that the mass of American voters is completely immature and childish in their political reasoning and judgment and can’t think one step beyond a particular assertion. An almost unbelievable collection of foolish medieval Know Nothings, subject to the most crass and simpleminded political manipulation.
Finally, the world always has some scary danger or other cropping up to be exploited politically by an opportunistic irresponsible party, so if this is how the mind of the American voter is going to “work”, you might as well buy your Fuhrer Ted armband today….
Every GOP political ad that I saw included a less than 2-second cut of the same format slide. The Democratic candidate on the left half, President Obama on the right half, and a big circle-slash “No” symbol superimposed on the whole slide.
I know that the Thom Tillis version of the ad was broadcast in saturation on several Hulu and YouTube craft channels that my wife watches. No doubt, the location of the client web browser triggered a similar ad tailored to the state of other ladies who do crafts. An almost hidden saturation ad campaign in the war on women.
The last capstone sales pitch of the GOP was ISIS-ebola-Obama-Guantanamo-fear. But exit pollsters claim that none of these issue motivated voters, but the Democratic failure on the economy did. So what were these ads intended to do then?
The media treated Democrats like schoolyard bullies and Republicans like colleagues. And unlike Palin and Akin the Republicans were trained to say nothing. And unlike Katie Couric, the media played along. (Really a return to the 1980 Reagan communications strategy. Say nothing and don’t look scary.)
The media got the election they wanted, just like they got the election they wanted in 2012 and just like the election they want in 2016 if Democrats (Beltway version) continue business as usual. A $4 billion bonanza in revenues every two years is not a bad business model for the news division of a media company. Just manipulate the horse race so that neither horse completely dies.
Progressives cannot compete in that media environment at all, Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, and Big Eddie notwithstanding. Primarily because all three of them are on short leashes.
We need to develop campaign strategies that do not rely on paid media and are resilient to attacks by paid media. That is just the harsh reality of the current media environment. I don’t know anyone who knows how to do this; the conventional wisdom is that there is no alternative to the present way of doing things.
But I know that people of all political persuasions are frustrated that their issues are not being handled. And that it goes back to well before the Obama administration, as Matt Taiibi’s Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History. Read the section of what drives popular moods for deregulation, for example.
One of the comments from Occupy Wall Street is that the issue is not left v. right but up v. down. And that 1%-99% framing struck so deep that the rightwing talkers have spent and extraordinary amount of time (and so did Mitt Romney) trying to turn that obvious observation around. But that 1%-99% framing comes back to bite Democratic politicians who have shied away from cogent explanations of how that relates to legislation and public policy. And Democratic politicians who never depart from their country club bubbles to go out and talk to ordinary people between elections. Informal conversation is a medium that costs very little to employ.
Let me tell about how politics operated in the early 1970s when South Carolina had only 3 million people and politicians did not expect you to arrive at a meeting with a checkbook. I was a member of Clergy and Laity against the War in Vietnam, the most active anti-war group in Greenville SC. We had networked local religious left clergy (about ten of them) and some other institutions. And we held regular briefings of our activities for the local FBI agent, who not doubt appreciated our giving him something to report to COINTELPRO. Essentially we were not a threatening movement; we just thought the war in Vietnam a moral atrocity and huge patriotic mistake. And we held a quarterly briefing of our Congressman’s local staff.
In 1974, we asked the Congressman if he could attend our summer picnic and talk with us about the war. He accepted; it was an election year and Richard Nixon’s articles of impeachment was before his subcommittee. After a substantive discussion with a lawyerly guy about Vietnam, he shared with us the fact that the subcommittee had enough Republican votes to pass the articles of impeachment with a visible bipartisan vote. Within the next few weeks that vote happened. In a subcommittee just charged to draft the articles and the articles were delivered to the full Watergate committee in the House.
I can’t imagine that sort of conversation happening with ordinary citizens today. And it isn’t just the increase in population that prevents it. It is that the Reagan communication strategy has been adopted by all politicians and the time available to spend that time with citizens is obsessed with fundraising for campaigns.
How do you get good politicians to opt out of that system and talk to people once again?
“How do you get good politicians to opt out of that system and talk to people once again? “
Clone Sanders and Warren.
Then those are your options in 2016. But Sanders needs a third party organization behind him. Have Warren debate Sanders on key points of policy. In places that haven’t seen Democrats in years and never have seen a real live socialist.
I would like to see what these two could do in Tupelo MS, Florence AL, Murfreesboro TN, Sturgis SD, Bellefontaine OH, or Sheboygan WI. Just to name the sorts of places that could test that method.
Format: In town for a heavily promoted weekend debate.
Spend 3-5 days randomly going around town and asking people for their issues and ideas instead of pushing a message.
Event day: Have brief debate with moderator to establish key differences but keyed off the conversations in town. Then have substantial Q and A to try to break through to a real substantive interchange instead of shouting slogans and dueling talking points.
Trying to re-establish a healthy political process at the grassroots instead of pushing philosophy, principles, or policy. Intentionally make all of this not a media event and not crawling with staff. No repackaging of what they were told into political mediaspeak.
Have Warren debate Sanders on key points of policy.
Why? They tend to agree on more than a few issues. Of your suggestions, I agree with just one: spend time listening. No press releases other than local media, no ‘entourage’, no ‘event’ day, and to the extent possible no national media whatsoever – plenty of time for them later. And for crissake don’t bother hiring any f*cking “consultants”, ’cause there aren’t any worth a thin dime anyway.
As to your notion of where to tour, I like Ike: when told not to bother, he (in essence) told the consultants to piss up a rope and took a very long train ride through the South. I think either/both Warren and Sanders would be up for the ride.
I am no Hillary fan. Quite the opposite really. But yesterday’s results have convinced me we have to put the first tier candidate up there in ’16. Name recognition, a Clinton brand that is associated with economic improvement, a woman perceived as strong that can peel some older, white votes back. HRC says stuff that bugs me, but the stakes are high, and hopefully she puts together a narrative that is persuasive. Time to pull the A game out of the closet.
Does this mean that yesterday’s election was beneficial to HRC? If so, does that make her the best candidate in 2016?
Seems kinda odd for both of the above sentences to be true at the same time, no?
I blame the media, but not because of the fear-mongering directly. All the emotional stuff they do has finally jaded people, at least the people I know. No one bothers to even listen to the media or watch anything anymore- it’s all become so boring and predictable. So, people I know, if they voted at all, voted in a complete vacuum with no idea of any issues, and in the belief that there is no urgency about anything, and in the belief that the status quo will continue forever. No awareness of any environmental issues or human rights. No awareness of where Obamacare really came from even, or how our society runs. No awareness of education issues.
And if you go to the websites of the politicians, everything there is also hidden. All pretty words with the issues so whitewashed and bland that you can’t figure out where anyone stands.
Who goes the websites of politicians? What is the traffic there besides folks like us who want to see the bio so they can try to answer, “Who are these guys?”
I think people probably do, actually, because there is nowhere else to go. If we want to look up anything, we go first to the internet, and this would be a natural place to start, with newspapers and other media not helping. If you haven’t been engaged at all, and your ballot arrives in the mail or tomorrow is the day to go vote, not much other choice. Phone calls that come in great numbers are hard to trust, seems to me, because they are from the opposition’s viewpoint.
I’d bet, as my 2 cents, that it happens more than we realize.
What I noticed is dependence on personal networks for information about candidates that one does not know or dependence on various independent or special issue voter guides for issues that a particular voter might be interested in. Various conservative groups circulate voter guides through churches. Communities with non-partisan elections often evolve advocacy/endorsement organizations aligned in ways different from the the two parties; they general produce voter guides as part of their advocacy.
And these guides often include bios of the candidates.
A reminder from Salon this morning that Jim Inhofe will most likely be the chair of the Environment & Public Works committee.
How is that less important than Ebola, cause it sure as hell scares me more.
Chair Dimhofe only scares the informed person.
The environment will almost certainly be the main target of the poison pills in the coming Repub budgets. Obama will have to sacrifice something to keep the government open or extend the debt ceiling, and anything he’s done to address global warming is the most obvious victim. My guess is that running from global warming, the environment and EPA will be seen by Dem pooh-bahs as one of the “solutions” to last night’s bloodbath. They have to “do something” to “move to the center”, ha-ha. Of course it’s extreme lib’rulism to try to avert climate catastrophe…
The current idea that “nothing will happen” as a result of electing a Repub congress is quite naive. I will predict that a great amount of likely irreversible damage will occur in the next two years.
Energy stocks were the big gainers on Wall Street this morning. Gee, I wonder why?
You can blame the boogedy-boogedy jungle disease and jihadi slavers if you want, but you’re starting from the wrong place if your premise is that this election was anomalous.
You can complain about a small N size, but it should conceivably matter that Democrats performed at historical expectations for a midterm and the past three presidents have all had unified congressional control slip away from them over the course of their administrations.
The President hasn’t communicated poorly or had his message drowned out, he’s communicated his intentions all too well for his years in power. And 1) voters get fed up with anybody doing too well or having too much power for too long and look elsewhere and 2) whites are terribly fearful of the advancement of non-white people and have always voted accordingly.
Whatever you do, don’t blame it on the Obama Democrats, right Booman?
WTFU.
Sure the media were awful. They are always awful. But the Democrats did indeed have a message, a message that was delivered quite strongly from about the time that Obamacare was so astoundingly badly rolled out. Their message was “INCOMPETENCE,” with a subtitle of “WE LIE” generously thrown in by the whole Snowden/NSA thing. Add to that the amazingly rapid rise of ISIS (helped no end by shoving that asshole Kerry into the spotllght) and the whole Ebola kerfuffle and you had a perfect storm of dislike building in the American people. That storm finally broke yesterday. Will the Republicans be any better? Not a chance. You are a good Democrat, Booman. Your consistent support of the spineless, incompetent leadership of the Democratic Party…yours and that of truly well-meaning Democrats across the nation…has been a major factor in this loss. As I said recently in another comment, “Mediatician, heal thyself.” I meant that. You have been partisan to a fault. Wake the fuck up. You are now on the wrong side. The Republicans are also on the wrong side. We need either a revolution within one or the other party…not likely considering how thoroughly bought-and-sold both parties are now…or a third party movement with some daring to it. Some vision. Some fire.
I know how much you hate the Paulist thing; you have made that abundantly clear. But Ron Paul said some things yesterday that make perfect sense.
After this latest bloodbath, maybe it’s time you took your media-tinted glasses off and looked with clearer eyes at what he has been saying instead of what you have been told that he is saying.
It’s never too late.
Until of course it is.
Martin Niemöller, a German pastor who ended up in a concentration camp:
Why didn’t he speak up?
Because he was a good German. Because he kept hoping that things would get better. And then it was too late.
Good German=Good Democrat?
Only time will tell.
Did we just witness an electoral Kristallnacht?
I hope not, but time will tell regarding that as well.
We shall see, soon enough.
Bet on it.
AG
Well in the lunchroom I didn’t hear anything about Ebola fears. On the Mideast what I heard was, “Get the Hell out and let those bastards murder each other like they’ve been doing for 4000 years.” That Republicans and Democrats alike, although democrats were more inclined to believe that Obama knows something we don’t know. What I did hear was job fears. Our jobs, our kids’ jobs and, at least in my case, our grandkids’ nonexistent jobs. And student loans. Lots of concern about that. And, perhaps peculiarly in Illinois, high property taxes and unsalable houses.
Democrats (except Tammy Duckworth on manufacturing jobs) said NOTHING about any of these concerns. Neither did Republicans who hit the usual target of “Democrats are coming for your guns” and laughingly “nothing is happening because Democrats are causing gridlock”, “Democrats have rejected a budget six times” and similar half-truths. D3emocrats talk to beltway political consultants and not the people. republicans do talk to the people but they talk to the crazy people at Tea Party meetings.
I think that what we’ve found over the past six years is that there are no “Obama Democrats” in Congress to speak of.
So Ron Paul is now holding forth on Russia Today. Sweet. He’s more conflicted about his loyalty to the corporate Republican party than his son is.
No we did not experience an electoral Kristallnacht. The duopoly doesn’t seriously damage its own glass.
Now we will see whether Rand Paul starts calling out Richard Burr’s failure to exert accountability on the intelligence community. We will see whether he can build a coalition to prevent renewal of the Patriot Act. Or a coalition to start stripping the DoD boondoggles. My guess is that he individually will talk a lot and not move anything in Congress and certainly will have no allies to bring the incipient fascist state to heel. But there will be folks who think that he’s their best shot toward sanity.
My fundamental problem is that I don’t trust a medical professional who issued his own certification. What else is he skimming on.
The duopoly narrative is one of these half-truths that crops up to depress voter turnout every election. That must be valuable to someone because it reappears like clockwork every September.
i disagree entirely, Tarheel. There are certainly not many in Congress who seriously support his platform, but then…he didn’t either. Not really. It was all mouth work buttressed by half-baked appointees. “Wink wink, nudge nudge. Don’t listen to what I say, look at what I do!!!” Was his message to the controillers. Almost all congressional DemRats are are “Obama Democrats” in terms of boondoggling, lying, bureaucratic fish mongering and taking the money that is offered to them by the controllers in order to stay elected so’s they can continue to rake in whatever they can as long as they can. That’s why they’re in office in the first place. At the first sign of principled resistance they would have been non-personed by the local media and unsupported by big money. Bet on it. Bye-bye congressional dreams; hello shoe store salesman.
And:
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. It’s not their glass that worries me; it’s everyone else’s. Most of our glass is already half-cracked. It’s only going to take about one more economic or infrastructural emergency to throw shards every which way in this country, and then the UniParty…duopoly, whatever you want to call it…will have to turn to the police and military to keep things even near sane.
You want to know my own take on what just happened here?
It was an IQ thing.
With the exception of dedicated Democrats…some of whom are also pretty damned stupid if places like DKos and some of the posters here are any indication…but with the exception of many dedicated Democrats people with higher IQs are already figuring out that the fix is in and simply aren’t voting. That leaves the dummies flocking to the pollls, and the dummies overwhelmingly vote for Republicans.
It’s simple if you ignore the complexity, ain’t it?
Wait’ll you see what happens in the next two years!!! Hell, it looks like even Christie is already halfway rehabilitated. 20, 30 pounds thinner and he’ll be “The New Christie.” Bridgegate? What Bridgegate? Can Palin be far behind?
Watch.
AG
The election results are discouraging, but I don’t think you have to look too far for the main explanation: the playing field for Senate Democrats was very bad this year, because there were so many seats at stake and they were disproportionately in conservative states.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120100/2014-midterm-races-conservative-red-states-skewing-results
While this doesn’t explain everything, it explains a lot. It doesn’t account for some of the R governor victories, like Massachusetts and Maryland.
A lot of what you say about the media, climate of fear, etc. is no doubt correct, but it had a disproportionate effect.
I also think that the possible effects of “dark money”, at a time when Pres. Obama’s USA has serious frictions (and rightly so) with such countries as Russia, China, Turkey, Israel, and big moneybags in the Arab world, is scary to contemplate.
I have read several articles about how the improving economy still sucks for a lot of people. Stagnant wages, fewer opportunities, education that is priced out of reach. Without good choices, the voters go with the party not in power. R’s know they don’t have to offer solutions, just swim the tide. If we don’t give folks a vision they can believe in, 2016 is gonna be bad also.
I certainly don’t disagree with your comment. But I would like to know how exactly a sensible voter thinks that the party that has solidly controlled the House for the past four years is “the party not in power”. Ditto the party throwing up unprecedented levels of filibusters and paralysis in the senate.
They just don’t know anything, or is it simpleminded presidentialism run riot? Obama=Bad so Obama Party=Bad. I can certainly see anti-incumbent fever, but this is anti-Dem fever–as the governorships clearly show.
Voters have now massively rewarded appallingly bad behavior; the effects will last decades.
That’s your first mistake. USians aren’t sensible. There’s emotional with a soupcon of information/knowledge, most of which is incorrect.
Not deeply when they bother to think at all. Few could pass a test in simple logic. I’ve always been grateful for the 8th and 9th grade teachers I had that required us to learn how to think logically and make sure the facts we used we authentic.
The actual logic is “Life = Bad, so Obama = Bad and Obama Party = Bad”. There’s a similar chain starting with “Obama = Black”. The main difference is that after 6 years of depression for normal people they’ve finally stopped cutting Obama slack. I suspect the ads from the Republicans may have intensified the “Obama = Black” chain.
We have been in a depression, even if it’s not “official” because the “official” economic definition of depression is pretty bogus. First, the depression is defined as ending when growth resumes. A normal definition would be “when the economy gets back to where it was. So officially the Great Depression ended in March 1933 – seriously. By a more sensible definition it lasted to about 1940.
Second, depression is defined based on GDP. It should be on something like median income. Sometimes GDP is close enough, but lately median income has been going down as the economy “recovered” so right now it’s not.
But I would like to know how exactly a sensible voter thinks that the party that has solidly controlled the House for the past four years is “the party not in power”. Ditto the party throwing up unprecedented levels of filibusters and paralysis in the senate.
How many people, besides political junkies, knew what Yertle the Turtle was doing in the Senate? Next to no one. The TradMed never talked about it. Harry & Co were afraid to nuke the filibuster.
I seem to recall that George Wallace did much better than polled. People were ashamed to admit to a stranger that they were voting for him.
The Republicans in my neighborhood used to put up the Jesse Helms signs in an in-your-face place. No Thom Tillis signs in the neighborhood at all this year, just signs in highway right-of-way and voting places.
My three kids live in Denver and are in their mid twenties. They all worked for the Democratic Party during Obama’s 2008 election. I worried about them getting hurt by the police during the Denver Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. After that they went into isolation. Not only do they not have (or afford) cable but consider commercial television a waste of time. They surf the web but only for pop culture or to binge watch crap on Netflix. I’m in CA for the moment so I called to ask if they were voting. The answer, “Why, is something close?” (They did vote) This is how things are. We live in isolation and just ignore the crazy people living in crazy land. They have responded to progressive ideas in the past and they would again. This isolation thing is starting to sound better and better.
here on the debate in the NH Senate race. It encapsulated everything that is wrong.
One hour debate.
Mentions of:
Positive mentions of the President – 0
oh, by the way:
Shaheen % among those who approve of the President’s job approval:
Strongly: 15%, Shaheen 96, Brown 3
Somewhat: 28% Shaheen 94, Brown 6
Strongly disapprove: 45% Shaheen 7, Brown 92
So what did refusing to stand up for the President get her? She won because people who supported the President voted for her. Period.
Any incumbent, no matter where they are located, who distanced themselves from Obama is a fucking idiot.
Of course, the corollary is that any Democratic candidate who distanced themselves from Obama, the Democratic party, and Democratic policy, is a fucking idiot.
You want to know why there is a whole faction of lefties who attack Democrats?
Because of the fucking Democrats who refuse to be…Democrats.
Would Chuck Todd accept a challenge to a duel? I’m good with anything from pistols to banjoes (this is Kentucky, after all) but I’d prefer knives.
Before we draw any conclusions, we need to know what happened. Did Republicans come out to vote in unusual strength? Did Democrats stay home? Did independents break for the Republicans in unusual proportions?
I think your explanation in terms of the media environment implicitly assumes the third account. After all, it’s only people in the middle who are going to be affected by the general media environment. Republicans have their own media world in which Obama is the antichrist, the ACA is the worst thing to ever happen to the country, and the brown people are always about to rise up and slit the white people’s throats. That was always going to be there, even if there wasn’t any Ebola.
Speaking of this last point – I suspect that you can add Ferguson to your list of implicit threats. Remember that the whole reason we have a second amendment is that the southern states wanted to ensure that they would have a militia to guard against a slave uprising. The original sin of this country keeps coming up in our politics, again and again and again.
“original sin”
Yup. And the more one tries to talk about it–the central problem of American history–the more enraged the angry whites become. With the always responsible GOP dog-whistling in the corner…
There were turnout problems in states like New York where Democrats were complacent or unwilling to dance with Andrew Cuomo who they knew was a lock to win anyway.
But the surprise in the polls was mainly in two other forms.
I believe the turnout estimates will turn out to be more accurate than the estimates of how people would actually vote.
Vermont governor. Sorry.
in mid-Oct about the unusual number of candidates under 50. It was really astonishing. Shumlin was under 50 in Vermont for example.
The evidence was there that this was anti-incumbent. What is frustrating is that this turned into anti-Dem incumbent.
North Carolina, for all the activism by Moral Monday movement and GOTV activities came in at 44% of registered voters–same as 2010. That was an absolute 200,000 more voters but the population has increased in four years.
I canvassed in this red state for Nunn, Carter, and all Dem candidates and have commented about my experiences at this blog already. Someone, an AA lady who sits with my Mother-in-law, asked me this morning if other AA’s were rude to me and my canvassing partner, both white ladies, southern by birth, culture, and accent. I said No, they were largely unfailingly polite and, on many occasions, appreciative of our efforts in their mostly not-yet-quite-blighted neighborhoods.
The worst reactions were from two white citizens, one man, one woman, who continued to live in these now mostly black neighborhoods. It was then I realized how difficult it would be for us to win against the far more motivating factors of deep-seated fears, anger and hatred of President Obama and their black skinned neighbors.
Orginal sin is indeed the historically correct explanation for many of yesterday’s results.
But a bit of good news. The last Democratic candidate for a Senate seat in 2010 won 39% of the total vote in this county. Nunn won 58% of the total votes here yesterday in this county, admittedly a minority-majority one. Data source was one of the 3 young guys running the local GOTV campaign. So, I’ve not yet checked his data, but will be interested to see the turnout numbers versus 2010 as well. We did encounter many committed AA voters;did not canvass any others.
I live in Gresham Park, a 95% AA neighborhood. Love it here, but I’m also not a fucking bigot.
Where did you canvas in Ga, if you don’t mind me asking? Atlanta, or elsewhere?
Black = fear. Between the coverage of Ebola, the African disease, and the unrest in Missouri, white people were scared out of their minds by the media coverage. The Democratic party was then represented as led by a Black Man. It was a perfect storm of anti-Democratic Party backlash. I’m sorry, I refuse to blame the Democrats for any of this. Who owns the media? White Men. Who contributed obscene amounts of money to the Republicans? White men. Who mostly votes Republican? White Men.
If anyone had any notion what-so-ever that White Men don’t control this country, this result will disabuse you of that notion. White Men are responsible for pretty much all the problems in this country. They have no desire to fix any of it. In fact, they’d be perfectly happy to make it worse for everyone who isn’t them.
So let’s do stop pretending the Democrats are to blame for not being able to fix everything, and start looking at who is the real culprit here.
Who paid obscene amounts of money for airtime for political advertising? Democratic media consultants for campaigns.
Does that not seem like subsidizing the enemy?
Who is to blame? (Кто виноват?)
Let me start w/ “I’m tempted to blast the party for incompetence, but the media simply isn’t covering any political messages at the moment. If the Democrats had a compelling message, I can’t honestly say that things would be appreciably better because the electorate would never hear it on the news.“
We can blame the media and we can blame nameless Democrats, but until we internalize that we are the Democratic party and take responsibility for crafting a message and getting it communicated to voters who show up election after election after election, we’re just spectators in a contact sport.
I’m not going to pontificate, but ask yourself this “How many Democratic votes did I deliver to the polls on November 4th 2014?”
If you can’t count 50 votes that were entirely your effort, your really not even in the game let alone being a part of the change you believe in.
If you delivered 1,000 votes yesterday, you did not deliver enough.
Кто виноват? Я
The media is a for-profit division of weapons manufacturers and oligarchs.
Who do they want in office? Democrats who can play Empire fairly well, or Republicans who are guaranteed to go country-to-country breaking shit, which means weapons need to be made and sold to both the US and its allies?
How does the media get away with this?
By claiming that BothSidesTM do it. The Big Lie.
If you want a detailed, brilliantly-written archive of BothSidesTM propaganda, see Driftglass.