Posted on 05/06/2013 10:29:35 PM PDT by neverdem
With black and Hispanic support clustered by district, Democrats in 2014 will have a hard time retaking the House.
Psephologists—the fancy word for election analysts—like to talk about change and transformation. One party or the other, they say, is on the verge of forging an enduring national majority. One party or the other is doomed.
What I have come to see in my number crunching is not change and transformation, but continuity. Three presidents in a row have been re-elected with 49%, 51% and 51% of the vote. Over the past two decades, Democrats won four of six presidential elections and won a popular-vote plurality in a fifth. But starting in 1994, Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives in eight of the 10 congressional elections.
That is not the result of massive ticket-splitting, as in the years from 1968 to 1988, when many Southern whites and others voted Republican for president and for Democrats in the House. On the contrary, the number of congressional districts electing a House member for one...
--snip--
These developments, plus the shrewd sponsorship by then-Rep. Rahm Emanuel—as Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman—of moderate candidates in conservative-leaning districts, enabled Democrats to win 53% of the House popular vote in 2006 and 54% in 2008.
--snip--
My conclusion: Republicans were hurt when voters doubted their competence, Democrats when voters opposed their ideology...
--snip--
Democrats have a clear problem with clustering. They cannot expect to improve on their performance with black voters in the two Obama elections, and they need to expand their appeal beyond their clusters of support to win congressional majorities. That may be difficult since their party tends to be defined, as it was not in the breakout years of 2006 and 2008, by a liberal incumbent president...
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
This time it might be true. By economy etc., 2012 was a wave year for Republicans, and they still lost handily. If they couldn't win in 2012, it may not be possible for them to win. They had the complete wind at their back.
>> The Gang of Ocho
I’m partial to: The Gang of 8holes.
Barone said Romney would win.
If Bernanke continues QE through next year, we are more likely to see a stalemate in the mid-terms. Hate to see it, but it will take more financial distress for the Republicans to take back that. That, or start letting Cruz and Paul be the face of the Republican senate. Otherwise, we are stuck with the same House, same Senate to the end of Obama.
Barone forgot to account for fraud...
Barone cites some interesting stats, such as Romney carrying 226 congressional districts to Obama’s 209.
Given that the ‘Rats won’t turn out as many voters in 2014 as they did in 2012, it does not appear likely that the ‘Rats can flip control of the House.
...and Capt.Wrongway Peachfuzz at the helm
And he was wrong.
It shouldn’t have mattered if Boris Badenov was the candidate. The numbers aren’t there.
“Barone said Romney would win.”
What you said.
I’d have liked to see him address the fact that at the Presidential level, 2012 was a low turnout election, despite the Democrats’ vaunted round ‘em up and turn’em out high tech get out the vote operation(even if it is conceded , which I don’t, that voter fraud played little role). Did that low turn-out at the Presidential level play a large role at the Congressional level? How could it not have? The extent to which the media have been willing to avert their eyes from examining that is not surprising given their subservience to Obama, but is astonishing in their dereliction of duty. The Wikipedia article on voter turnout is laughably deceitful (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_elections), claiming that the US population of eligible voters declined by 18 m between 2008-2012, in a country that is apparently gaining population at a rate of several million each year. Dave Leip (remember he stuck with the old color scheme of Democrat red when the networks decided to change it to avoid the connotation that Dems were commies http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/ )hasn’t completed his bar graph showing voter turn out. I suspect that the reason is that the percentage of voting age population that turned out was down near 50%, which hardly goes along with the media theme that the Democrats have created a voting juggernaut and Republicans need to cut deals with that in mind.
Predicting presidential elections and other things
It was "The economy stupid", but that the US economy was recovering too well for voters to fire Obama, and not to fire him because of the dismal recovery. (Roosevelt managed reelection with a similarly dismal economic performance.)
IMO (not Dr. Fair's) if the presidential election had been held in 2010 or was to be held in 2014, the outcome would be completely different. The economy has been in a historically muted recovery, but still doing well enough that a few % of voters didn't want to rock the boat.
Coupled with a Republican "GOTV" strategy that imploded on election day. This wasn't a rejection of conservative principles (Mitt Romney? Conservative?) or affirmation of nanny liberalism. People "vote their wallets" and for the first time in a few years their wallets weren't completely empty back in November. That's all this was. If it's any consolation, Obama is tracking Bush #43's second term approval ratings pretty closely. And we know what happened in 2006 and 2008.
But Democrats were in charge of the vote count, especially from the touch-screen machines. They will not lose again unless we have a revolution in voting methods i.e. go back to ballot boxes. Cheating there is tedious and depends on machine control in areas that are already heavily Democrat. The electronic machines are easy. Once they are "downloaded" there is no further record of the vote. The download will say whatever it was programmed to say and depends on who is in charge of the count. A Soros company does that. There is no way to second guess the machines.
That could be a very long time.
Something that’s being taken into account is the number of Conservatives who have given up on the GOP and won’t waste another vote on that bunch of back-stabbers.
Think “President Boehner”
You can tell he is right by the increasing number of shrill, whiny rants about gerrymandering in the DUmmysphere.
I’d rather not. I already have a headache.
And face it, a majority of the low info Obama voters haven't been impacted by the sour economy.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.