I have a post up at Greg's place on possible electoral effects of Hurricane Sandy. No, I don't feel any need to apologize for thinking about elections at A Time Like This. Of course, everyone should deal with safety first, but I'm far from the storm, and politics and elections continue to be very important. Remember: public policy outcomes determined by many years of elections (and bureaucratic politics, and wars, among other things) will strongly influence what kinds of damage the storm causes. Not to mention, perhaps, what kind of storm it is in the first place.
Meanwhile, more on Senate elections. At PP, I wrote about the hidden story behind this cycle's GOP Senate disaster. And my Salon column over the weekend was about the effects of this cycle on the next one: my prediction is that there are enough supposed "establishment" nominees losing to ensure that Tea Party primaries escape blame within the GOP, even though Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock are the most obvious losses.
In re: the Salon column, in which you argue that conservatives will have little trouble finding counterexamples to anyone who suggests that nominating fringe conservative candidates with little qualification or apparent political skill might actually be a bad idea:
ReplyDeleteRegardless of how ideologically "fringe" they may be, it's still absurd to lump long-term Congressmen (Akin) and state treasurers (Mourdock, Mandel) or even state reps (Fischer) with the truly random people that were winning primaries in 2010. O'Donnell wasn't the only Senate candidate who hadn't previously held elected office! I guess Carly Fiorina maybe had a national profile beforehand, and was often dispatched to represent McCain in 2008. McMahon conceivably might count too. And Rand Paul is a special case, who hadn't personally held office or been prominent but of course was strongly associated with someone who had. But Joe Miller, Ken Buck (I think ... not to mention the real GOP disaster in Colorado, the Governor's race. As I recall, Dan Maes got so few votes the GOP was worried Colorado election rules might relegate them to third-party status), and ... idk probably more but I'm not going to look it up -- plus Ron Johnson who won -- I mean, that's the kind of candidate you run against Those were the real mindblowers, much more so than random former state rep (?) Sharron Angle (neither of whose primary competitors had held any elected office), let alone like ... former state House speaker (?) Marco Rubio.
Don't you think? Or what am I missing?
Also the truncated sentence should have read "That's the kind of candidate you run against safe safe incumbents"
DeleteDr. B, theclassicist,
DeleteI think the name you were looking for in that list was "Carl Paladino".
I think classicist is on to something: 2010's crop was particularly loserish. These guys are SAYING crazy, but they've at least won elections before.
ReplyDeleteOh, and you might want to get the WP to correct your column. It starts with "It’s increasingly clear that whatever happens to the White House and the House of Representatives, the 2010 cycle is going...." I think you mean the 2012 cycle?
Yeah, tried to get it fixed, but apparently the WaPo editors are a bit busy now on something...picked the wrong day for an awful typo, didn't I?
DeleteI think it's reasonable in some contexts to get deep into the comparative quality of the various candidates, but I'm pretty comfortable with talking about Mourdock and Akin as lousy candidates. Akin, in particular, has gone from one gaffe to another, and his House voting record is really full of fringe votes. All of which makes him a pretty vulnerable candidate.
At any rate: the main point here isn't those two; it's the general effect of poor nomination choices on strong potential candidates.
Oh gosh, did I sound too aggressive in my previous comment? I'm sorry! We've just been sitting waiting to see when our power's gonna go out and for how long, so I'm a little jittery, and probably an even worse judge of how my tone will come across in writing, on the Internet than usual.
ReplyDeleteNo, you sounded fine. Hope all is well there.
DeleteThanks. NH and VT seem mostly just really wet, but actually not as bad as Irene was for us last year.
DeleteAs to substance: obviously, I agree that Akin is a poor candidate! Equally obviously getting elected to Congress (even several times) does not guarantee certain relevant skills or the ability to scale up to statewide elections. But there were multiple nominees in non-blowout/potentially competitive contests in 2010 who got attention for failing the proverbial laugh test, and getting elected to Congress keeps you from that (unless you're an unusually high-profile crank, like Kucinich-level; in which case there's probably some other stuff keeping you out of statewide office too). In other words Joe Miller and so on never met a basic threshold of apparent capability, while this term we're seeing the Angle-type situation where the first thing you heard about them could have been something respectable-sounding if they had kept quiet, but then they didn't.
If you're just saying that distinction isn't super-relevant a week (!) out from the election, sure. But I do think that from an anthropological-sociological perspective the difference is relevant, which also makes it at least somewhat relevant to party-wide predictions.
Clasically, this is bad for D turnout. But recently, numbers have shifted due to early-voting and mail-voting instead of just absentee voting.
ReplyDeleteSo in other words, I worry, but haven't a clue.
What scares me about Sandy is the possibility that it will depress turnout in the big blue states enough that Obama loses the popular vote, but not the Electoral College, but then Republicans in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio use that as an excuse to send their own electors instead of the ones chosen by the voters.
ReplyDeleteLester:
ReplyDeleteI'm no expert on Michigan/Penn/Ohio election law but that sounds super illegal. I don't think the R's are ready for that. They would do what Dems did in 2000: grumble a lot but follow the rules. I'm sort of hoping we have a split, because then the R's will all be mad and maybe they'll want to junk the electoral college. The Dems will still want to junk it because it robbed Algore (even if it just helped Obama--pain is more salient than pleasure). Then we can have a grand old bipartisan consensus to scrap the electoral college and give Utah an extra House seat--erm, maybe just the first one.
Unless it's written into their constitutions (which I doubt) they could always change the law to make it legal. Given the stakes of this election, where the right has an opportunity to undo The New Deal and Roe vs. Wade if they can just get Romney in office, I'd be more surprised if they did exercise restraint. There are not many unwritten norms that they have shown that they are willing to respect.
ReplyDeleteI instinctually agree with JS that the impact of the storm on voter preference is probably negligible, though as he writes, Obama wins or loses some based on how his response to the storm is perceived. But if it's decent, I think it plays into what small momentum back to him there may be.
ReplyDeleteThe impact on actual voting is another thing and at this point unknown, depending especially on how fast transit gets back on its feet in the swing and near swing state cities. Apparently Fugate has already told local officials that the feds will kick in for costs to make voting functional on election day.
Is there any risk of early votes being lost due to power outages or salt-corroded wiring?
ReplyDeleteYes, depending on the quality of the registrar. My local county registrar (Neal Kelley, Orange County, CA) is actually REALLY good; I just got a tour last week, and I've never seen a registrar as on the ball. Were there some freak flood in Santa Ana, I'm sure he's got a plan to save the ballots.
DeleteNow, I have no information about the registrars in the East Coast. My sense is that a lot of them are wrestling with a lot of new stuff, what with the death of lever machines and having to get up to speed on relatively new systems. If this was prior to HAVA, I'd be very worried. However, that was a large pile of money (for elections officials, at least) and it really does seem like a lot of them have used that money for good purposes. So, I have hope that the votes have been saved.
They polling's slowed or halted. the water will flood for at least two more tide cycles.
ReplyDeleteRomney said he'd eliminate FEMA. In his world, we're all NOLA now.
Perhaps Sandy is the October Surprise.
Don't worry. Romney now says he didn't mean it.
DeleteAccording to wikipedia, the 1900 Galveston Hurricane was a direct hit on that island as about a 145 MPH Cat 4. The storm surge was about 15 feet (similar to the Jersey shore with Sandy) and the people had some advance warning that they largely ignored (similar to the Jersey shore with Sandy). The pictures at the wikipedia site are not that dissimilar to the submerged houses on the Jersey shore; with some difference being more structural damage from the higher winds in the Galveston case.
ReplyDeleteOf the 37,000 or so Galveston residents that didn't flee, 8,000 lost their lives. I saw a ticker on CNN tonight where a Jersey shore official said, 24 hours later, they had "saved hundreds, with thousands more unaccounted for". That official is talking about residents of fully submerged houses - net of those among "the thousands unaccounted for" who fled, the rest are surely, 24 hours later and not-yet-rescued, in a pretty bad way. You have in mind a fatality number for Sandy, what you're thinking right now is almost certainly off what will be the final tally by a factor of around 100.
With all due respect to the other analyses of the impact on the election, I'm betting that historians will point to one thing and one thing only:
When did Obama have his "more than we can bear" moment about Sandy's fatalities, and did the people praise him for brave proactiveness or blame him for feet dragging?
Time is rapidly getting short for the praise option, it seems to me.
Ok, so I just looked up the Ash Wednesday storm, which has some parallels to Sandy, and a comparatively small number of fatalities. Could be the 100 X assumption above is hyperbole. But 10X is probably not out of the question.
DeleteAnd 10X still counts as sticker shock, no?