Why the Republicans won

It's terrorism, stupid. It's values, stupid. It's....well, complicated.

Let us not forget that Republicans won the Presidency and the Congress. Let's look at Congress first. The Republicans increased their majorities in both the Senate and the House. The House of Representatives is dominated by incumbents, and the populous, conservative South rules the House. By dint of some unscrupulous, partisan jerrymandering of districts in Texas, the House Republicans picked up a few more seats. It's as simple as that. The idea that state politicians should get to decide their own federal district boundaries is both stupid and dangerous to our democracy. It's letting the cat guard the henhouse. One Republican or Demcratic candidate running unopposed in a artificially partisan district is not a real election: it is a rubber stamp.

As it stands, it is all too easy to water down urban Democratic counties with enough Republican suburban and rural counties to create Republican districts. District boundaries should be decided by a nonpartisan commission in each state, following simple guidelines from census data and using recognizable geographic shapes. If this is done, then maybe the House of Republicans will come to resemble the rest of the country, politically as well as ethnically, and become the Representative House once more.

The Senate gain for Republicans is more complicated, but can be traced mainly to two things: the two senator per state system and an increase in values-based voting in the South and Plains states. The two senator per state system guarantees that low-population, conservative rural areas, like Idaho and Kansas, will be disproportionately represented in the Senate. The Senate is naturally biased towards conservative representation, and the best situation Democrats in the last few decades could ever hope for is a tie or narrow lead. Their current position, a 55 to 45 minority, is not actually that bad. Democrats are winning their core states, and tying in moderate states. What has happened to Senate Democrats is a loss of moderate states overall, a movement of Southern states into the conservative camp.

In the Senate at least, moderate states include the Lower and Upper Midwest (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Dakota) and the South. After this last election, with so many Southern Democrats going down to solid defeats against Southern Republicans, the South may not be considered moderate anymore. There were also a few close races in the northern South and Midwest that Democrats lost, for much the same reasons. Why did these states defect to the conservative side?

There are two core issues that Republicans have staked our for themselves: strong on war and terrorism, and strong on family values (whatever that means). These issues matter most in a modern, macho South that is home to many fundamentalist Christian churches, military bases, and angry poor white voters. In the past, Democrats won the South because they represented and defended the values and prejudices of the Southern voter base. But with the Civil Rights Act (which alienated prejudiced white voters) and the subsequent movement of the Democratic Party towards urban values of tolerance (for abortion rights, minority privileges, and gay rights), the Democratic Party has steadily steered away from core Southern values. This is true of both black and white Southern voters, who have similar values if not similar prejudices. The Senate Democrats that were left in the South were incumbent dinosaurs, waiting to fall. Terrorism and gay rights were the two death-knells of Southern Democrat senators, finally bringing out the conservative majority in full.

That leads us to the Presidential election. The three issues that dominated the election were terrorism and the Iraq war, the economy, and social values. Kerry and Bush, demographically, pretty much tied on the issues. Bush had an edge on terrorism and the Iraq war, Kerry held an edge on the economy, they tied on social values. What decided the election in favor of Bush was much simpler than issues: it was likeability and trust. Since 9/11, Americans feel a greater need to like and trust their President, and Bush was simply the more charismatic and familiar person. Kerry could and did cast himselft as trustworthy, but he lacked a manner that allowed him to connect with voters and win their sympathy. The perception of sincerity, even in the absence of honesty, was everything. Bush was perceived as sincerely devoted to what he believed in, and voters felt that they could trust him to be steadfast and defend them against terrorists. What 51% of voters wanted was a steadfast defender, a father-figure, not a political leader.

So there you have it, my analysis of why the Republicans won big. Jerrymandering won them gains in the House, the Senate was lost to Southern issues-voting on terrorism and gay rights, and the Presidency was lost due to a lack of likeability and sincerity on the part of John Kerry.

So how can Democrats win back the Congress and the Presidency in the next decade? How can they turn their urban and liberal lackluster coalition into a political force to be reckoned with? How can they reform the institutions of our government to help everyone achieve the American Dream in a peaceful and secure America? Liberal values are shared by the majority of Americans, and liberal economic ideas are far more practical and egalitarian than conservative ideas. In all respects, they should be winning. How can they start? Stay tuned till next time.

A Red Nation

It's November, and the election is past. For those of you who spent the fall hiding out in Antarctica, the Republicans won big-time. They won the Presidency, they won the Senate, they won the House of Representatives. Stay tuned for a massive make-over of the United States government in their collective conservative images. So, in other words, expect things to get much better for rich, intolerant white men, and worse for pretty much everyone else.

By now, if you are Republican, you've probably already quit reading this blog in disgust. But you have to ask yourself, why? Why do you Republicans and we Democrats only read that which pleases us, that which fits nicely with our pre-conceived ideas about morality and history? Is it too hard to read a different point of view, to watch someone else play with our facts?

I don't know the answer. I do know that my girlfriend and my sister are the main readers of this blog, but my girlfriend has abjured me to write in it again, so I am. And I do have an idea why this nation is now a Red Nation.

Cast yourself back 50 years, all the way to 1954. All of your information came from the radio, the newspaper, and 3 (that's right, 3) TV channels. You are starved for information, for news about your specific interests and for facts about the broader world. You learn much from what others tell you. Since you hear so little, you have time to think about everything you hear. You and your neighbors process the facts, fit it into your Ideas about the world, morality, and history. You can agree more, since you hear so much less to disagree about.

Fast-forward to 2004. There's cable and the internet. We are awash in a sea of information, of facts. Some are trustworthy, some are dubious, some are constructed out of statistics like great mechanical boondoggles. We are overwhelmed by fragments of information, distrusting of the conflicting stories told to us by strange men. So what do we do? We focus on the facts that are interesting to us, and the facts that agree with our Ideas about the world. That bears repeating. We focus on a subset of the total facts. We believe in a subset of the truth. And since there is so much information out there, it is inevitable that we all believe in very different subsets of the truth.

What happens when people believe in drastically different subsets of truth? Why, people of like mind talk to each other without rancor, and people of different minds JUST DON'T TALK. Instead, conservative people watch Fox News, read the USA Today, and worry about abortion and gay marriage as the main threats to public morality. Liberal people watch the Daily Show, read the New York Times, and worry about tax cuts for the rich and unneccessary wars as the main threats to public morality. Indepedents shake their heads at the system and shift camps whenever their personal subset of the truth is threatened.

Red and blue households, even if they agree on fundamentally the same values, drift apart. They drift apart on what they believe are the most important voting issues, they drift apart on agreeing what are the important facts.

Even a factual story can seem false if the facts are unfamiliar, or from sources you distrust because they are from liberal or conservative news gatherers. We, as a nation, are losing our heritage of common discourse: debate over established facts. Now, our politicians spin facts (i.e., distort, lie, cheat, steal) and deny uncomfortable truths. We do not call them to account.

We are forgetting how to compromise. How do you compromise when there is no common ground, when each side is full of rhetoric and its own pet facts? If you do not believe the true facts of your rival, Republican or Democrat, then you cannot come to agreement. You cannot even talk.

Let's take a look at the statement I made earlier, and analyze it in this new light:

"So, in other words, expect things to get much better for rich, intolerant white men, and worse for pretty much everyone else." Most Republican Congressmen ARE rich white men, and trickle-down taxation, war contracts, and less regulation DOES benefit the rich white men who have the money and corporations in this country. That much is an established fact. I admit it, the intolerant remark was a dig at the Moral Nation they want to build. Feel free to disregard that, but one people opposed to equality for gays are, by definition, intolerant. That's an uncomfortable fact, but if you believe in it then why quibble? Be proud of your beliefs.

So all true facts--what's the big deal, what's so offensive? Maybe the last part, where I state that Republicans are going to make things worse for everyone else. That's an opinion, and a pretty mild, unoffensive one. If you disagree, there are facts you could marshal against it. But here's the long and short--at no time did I lie in that statement. I simply stated my opinion. Why should it be so hard to hear an opinion that you disagree with? If you already know everything, how are you going to learn anything new?

It's simple. You aren't. You are never going to know what your neighbor thinks, or why he thinks it. One morning, you are going to wake up in a Blue Nation, and not understand why. Most of my liberal friends woke up ten days ago in a Red Nation, and they are still scratching their heads. So why are we in a Red Nation? More people voted Republican than Democratic. Why might they do that? Shouldn't you know that already?

I will give you my liberal-in-a-Red-State thoughts on why the Republicans won in my next blog, but maybe you should watch some Fox News in the meantime and talk to your conservative friends. Or vice versa, conservatives...if you made it this far.