Disconnect between the results of the races for elective office and the ballot measures

Politics & Elections
1

First of all, the Democrats clearly lost, and lost big. There were structural issues regarding which Senate seats the D’s had up, but there’s no question, these elections were a romp for Republicans running for office all over the place. (Including Republican governors in Maryland and Illinois.)

But an odd thing: Here’s a summary of ballot measures from CNN.com.

Marijuana legalization/reform came close to running the table (a medical marijuana initiative in Florida failed…by “only” getting 58% of the vote; it was a state constitutional amendment and required 60% to pass). No gay marriage on there that I can see; a pro-life measure was defeated by nearly 2-to-1 in Colorado. A moderate gun control measure passed in Washington state. Blue Illinois voted to require health insurance plans to cover birth control.

Of course the marijuana issue isn’t a hard-and-fast partisan one; there are libertarianish Republicans who are pro-reform, and there are Democrats who are drug warriors.

The Washington state vote was for universal background checks, so it’s not like Washington staters voted to send the jack-booted thugs door-to-door confiscating everyone’s guns.

While “pro-choice” and “universal background checks” and “insurance companies have to cover birth control” are all definitely more Democratic than Republican stances, it’s only a few tea leaves, and Washington and Illinois are pretty reliably blue states, and Colorado is at least bluish-purple.

To me, the really striking thing is that minimum wage increases passed in Illinois (natch), but also in Nebraska, Arkansas (by almost 2-to-1), in ruggedly-invidualistic Alaska (with a whopping 69% of the vote), and in South Dakota! Not only has South Dakota been reliably Republican since the LBJ blowout in '64, but my understanding is that they’ve been having an economic boom (unemployment under 4%) thanks to the fracking and all. If there was any place that should go for Republican economic dogma, you’d think it would be a traditionally Republican state with a booming economy. (“Raise the minimum wage?!? We outta abolish the minimum wage, so the Job Creators can create even more jobs! We don’t need socialism! If those moochers can’t make more than $1.25 a day, they just aren’t trying hard enough!” etc., etc., etc.)

In a nutshell, Americans just voted Republicans into office, while also voting for abortion rights, gun control, marijuana liberalization, and raising the minimum wage.

Does this analysis make any sense or not? (I’ve seen it elsewhere, and can’t claim to have had some great and original insight here.) And, if the analysis is valid, what do the American people want, anyway? And also, what should the Republicans do now?

2

You can’t gerrymander ballot initiatives?

3

It makes a lot of sense. People want fiscal conservatives and social moderates/liberals. Depending on which side of that coin that want more, they vote either Dem or GOP. Right now with the way the economy has been, they’re going Red hoping to help out the fiscal side of things but that doesn’t mean they’re turning their backs on their social goals at the same time.

4

You can’t gerrymander senate or gubernatorial races either and we saw how last night went.

5

And although you can gerrymander House races, the Republicans didn’t gerrymander themselves into their biggest majority since WWII. This wasn’t a “structural” loss, so much as a “lack of motivation” loss. Democrats continued their midterm malaise.

As for the ballot initiatives. elections aren’t only about issues, and even to the extent they are, some issues are high priorities and others are not. Marijuana doesn’t show up on anyone’s top 20 issue list. Same with the minimum wage. Abortion is a top 20 issue, but rarely gets up near the top. These are all low priority issues, so there’s no contradiction between those being approved and people voting Republican.

Plus, as I said, elections aren’t only about issues. They are about character, competence, popularity, and a referendum on how things are going.

Since it’s always good to learn from elections, Democrats and Republicans alike should note these ballot initiative results with interest. But assuming that the public just doesn’t know what it wants isn’t really helpful. It’s not a mystery what happened last night. Republicans were motivated, Democrats were not, and independents continued their trend of voting against the party they perceived to be in power.

6

Well, OK, but what do independents want? They want to throw the bums out; but what is it that they want the bums to actually do?

7

To echo Simon Cowell, who says simply “Sing well” when asked what he wants from singing contestants, “Govern well.” The last two administrations have seen some really shitty governance. It’s just a huge step down from the Reagan-Bush I-Clinton period. Respect for our institutions is at an all-time low. I think what independents want is good leadership in the White House.

8

Leadership requires people willing to be led. The current GOP has been the most petulant group in recent memory. They aren’t simply not voting for Obama’s initiatives, they are filibustering them all. That’s not a lack of leadership, that’s a party that decided that allowing the recovery to drag out would make it more likely for them to come to power.

The reason Dems didn’t vote is because they’re disillusioned by Obama’s lack of progress. And Obama’s lack of progress is because of the GOP deciding that they need to get 100% of what they want for any issue to go forward.

9

I think the idea that you just “govern well” is the great myth of the “independent” voter.

From what I’m reading, although unemployment is down and the GDP is up, voters are not happy that wages are still flat with respect to where they were before the Great Recession. Fair enough.

But what should we do about this problem?

If you say that we need to cut taxes on the wealthy “Job Creators” so they can create more jobs (and therefore eventually wages will go up), then you should vote Republican.

If you say that we need to raise the minimum wage (and thereby create upward pressure on wages generally), it would really make more sense to vote Democratic (since a substantial segment of the modern Republican Party says we shouldn’t even have a minimum wage in the first place, let alone increase it).

(If you say we should nationalize the means of production and install a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party to lead a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat, I guess you should vote for the Communists.)

10

And it worked, so why would they change?

11

This really was the most interesting result of the night. I’ll put myself on record here and say that it’s the only result that will have predictive power in the future.

Politics is a melange of structural issues and timely issues. Structurally, American society is like the stock market; it always trends in one direction despite the occasional temporary dip. That direction is for more social liberalism. The seemingly sudden shifts on issues like marijuana and gay rights is deceiving. They were long in coming only because of furious minority resistance. As soon as even a slight majority started approving them, the resistance was exposed for the fear-mongering that it was and melted quickly away.

Timely issues are more susceptible to fear. The number of deaths among Americans in America from casual contact with ebola or terrorist attacks was precisely zero this year. Rationally, they should be meaningless. Politically, though, they made sense as shorthand for feelings that the government wasn’t being effective, which translated as Obama not being effective. Normally the midterm elections is not a referendum on the President. (That the out party almost always makes gains is irrelevant; they make gains even when the President is popular.) This one looks like an exception. For once, the conventional wisdom may be correct. People want a president to be a fighter. Obama does not fight for his positions, does not exude energy, does not radiate conviction. He may be correct in what he does but he consistently allows himself to be portrayed as in the wrong. Whatever, he’s as easy to shorthand as ebola.

So I think we’re seeing two totally separate axes of voting. People don’t see themselves as voting contradictorily; they see correct decisions on two separate matters.

The candidate votes in 2014 will be as much of a predictor for 2016 as 2010 was for 2012; i.e. not at all. The structural votes are far more telling. That’s where society is going, and that’s not going to turn around.

12

To be fair, they also filibustered a few of their own bills even when they did get 100% of what they wanted.

13

As I keep on telling you guys, the President has 100% control over the executive branch and 235 years of laws to enforce, social programs to administer, and foreign policy to engage in. In addition, he promised change, as in changing the way the government works, ending politics as usual. He couldn’t make the Republicans change, but he could have changed the way the executive branch worked and he didn’t. His efforts to reform his own branch have been little to non-existent. And his performance managing what the government already does has been dismal, or at least the public views his performance as dismal(less than 40% of Americans believe he can manage the government effectively).

That’s why independents turned against him and why Democrats probably stayed home. No one expects him to get a legislative agenda through. But he is expected to do his job first, and let Congress worry about doing Congress’ job.

14

Specifics please.

They’re talking about enacting policy that requires the partnership of the congress.

That’s simply not what anyone on Earth actually thinks.

“Damn, I was gonna vote, but I can’t stand how Obama hasn’t streamlined Executive Branch policies!” — No One Ever

15

Maybe. But I have noticed that a lot of politicians at all levels do manage to figure out what voters want and easily win reelection. Including Presidents.

I’m not sure there’s anything that can be done. I think both parties have actually talked the economy down in recent years, or at least perceptions of the economy. Republicans for obvious reasons, but its mystifying why Obama and many Democrats would do it. Maybe they see it as acknowledging reality, but the fact is we’ve had great improvements under Obama’s watch. He should be trumpeting that achievement, instead it’s just kind of an afterthought. “We’ve made progress from the worst recession in memory, but…” He should be doing the “Morning in America” sunny optimism. Instead, he just seems pissed off, even a little exhausted.

A lot of informed voters tend to place more emphasis on ideology than is warranted, I think. Even if you are a communist, would you prefer an incompetently run, corrupt state controlling the means of production, or a relatively clean and efficient government regulating a mostly free market? I think most voters are fairly non-ideological and just want things to go well. When things aren’t going well, they seek change.

16

I think that’s mostly right, but I’d caution that it doesn’t necessarily mean Democrats have an intrinsic advantage. These issues are not the highest priorities. Generally, it’s the economy, jobs, and when world events warrant it, foreign policy. And those issues, unlike abortion, gay rights, immigration, etc., are more about competence and performance than ideology. As long as those issues continue to be at the forefront in voters’ minds, elections will be decided mainly based on how good a job the party in power is doing to address those issues. If the economy is good, jobs are plentiful, and voters feel America is showing strong leadership in the world scene, the party doing that job will do well. If they are not, then the voters will elect the other party.

17

Transparency is a big one. This administration has not been more transparent than past administrations and if anything has often been more insular, despite some token steps in the direction of transparency.

Efficiency. The Clinton administration made the Reinventing Government intiative a high priority and continued to make it a priority even when it was no longer making headlines, which was pretty much for most of his eight years in office.

Relations with the media. The media is frustrated with this administration more than any other when it comes to access, spin, and tight control over its messaging. It’s a very tight political spin machine. The Straight Talk Express it isn’t.

Obama doesn’t need new laws to manage the IRS, VA, HHS, ATF, EPA, and CDC effectively. He has all the power he needs, the same power that many Presidents before him have had. It’s all the mini-scandals that have eroded public confidence in his ability to manage the government. And that’s entirely on him. The Republicans didn’t make him. Even Bill Clinton at least could have claimed he was distracted by all the very personal investigations into his life, and he still managed the government effectively. If anything, Obama has a lot of free time on his hands since he can’t get anything done legislatively. There’s just no excuse for him letting these agencies go rogue on him.

The problem with your argument is that while voters rarely are that specific about what they don’t like, they do believe:

  1. That Obama has not managed the government effectively, and
  2. Public trust in our institutions has hit all-time lows under his leadership.

The specifics of why that is isn’t important to voters. No voter voted for Clinton’s reelection because of the Reinventing Government initiative. But Clinton’s reelection was helped by his effective governance, of which that program was one aspect. Under Bill Clinton, faith in institutions rose. Most voters don’t know why, even most informed Dopers probably don’t know why. But there are reasons for it, it’s not just luck, and it doesn’t require a cooperative Congress.

18

Carville was right about Clinton. It was the economy. He got into office because the economic horrors of Reaganism that everybody sane knew was coming hit Bush I and wrecked the economy. Clinton got the benefit from the tech boom, although he had next to nothing to do with it. He was simply in the right place at the right time. Nothing is more effective at raising public opinion than a booming economy. Whatever he did in office was utterly meaningless compared to that.

The tech boom was a bubble and Bush II would have been badly hurt by its collapse if it weren’t for 9/11. The war threw an extra trillion into the economic. Talk about quantitative easing! That economic stimulus plus the rally 'round the President effect sustained his presidency. Whatever else he did in office was utterly meaningless compared to that.

The housing bubble and the banking idiocies certainly helped Obama get elected. They didn’t sustain him because the recovery has not been dramatic and the larger factors that kept the middle class from a quick recovery, nothing he could possibly have had any effect on even though a proper economic program would have eased the pain a bit, are weighing him down. Need I say that whatever else he did in office was utterly meaningless compared to that? Probably not, but I will anyway just to hammer home the point.

In short you’re quite right that the public perceives these events as “That Obama has not managed the government effectively.” Nothing he could have done in the executive branch could have change that by a percentage point. (There were just as many scandals in the Executive Branch under Bush. There will be under the next President of either party.) Low trust in institutions, however, is almost entirely the fault of the Republicans - Congress’ 9% approval rating can’t rationally be laid at Obama’s feet, and they certainly could have changed that. Not from any specific bill, though. As you say, specifics don’t matter.

The next two years will be fascinating.

19

the economy hasn’t been that bad though under Obama’s leadership. I know it’s unusual in politics, but I do think that voters have been influenced by the steady trickle of mismanagement stories since his second term began. I have no idea how much of an issue it is, but I do know it contributes to some extent to the view that he’s not governing well.

20

Perhaps voters are on the balance moderates, but find Republicans to be in general better at governing. Thus they vote for Republican legislators and executives, while also enacting some policies to keep things from getting too conservative.

Also, several ballot measures failed in California, including one that would increase regulation of insurance and another that would raise malpractice damages. It might just be that liberals focused more on ballot measures precisely because they knew or suspected they would have less success at higher office, and conservatives chose the opposite.