More on the instant revisionism from the Republican Noise Machine in the wake of Barack Obama and the Democrats’ victory – this time scatterplot and red state blue state rich state poor state make a graphic point about the claims that the Republicans’ loss was somehow artefactual. It’s worth adding that the problem of the under-representation of Democratic votes in terms of seats adduced also goes to the horrendous architecture of the American political system – entrenched and partisan gerrymandering in many states, the two party monopoly, disenfranchisement and appallingly conducted elections, and all the other factors which distort popular will and poorly represent it.
…the last time Democrats won 50%+ of the House popular vote: November 4. The last time the Republicans did? 1946. The graph of the House popular vote is rather telling… Yes, the policies of each of these parties are shifting/emergent. But I must confess that I read this chart with a degree of naive hope: that our brief experiment with conservatism is over. I can even imagine the tombstone:
Conservatism
1992-2004
<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/house-1942-date.jpg"
red state blue state rich state poor state:
<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/democrats-house-vote.png"
The US is swinging to the Left, and has been since 2004. At the same time leftists from the rest of the world will never view the US as a particularly leftist society.
Every nation has its own history and its own myths. The myths of democratic socialism don’t graft onto the root-stock of US culture and history.
Speaking as one of the piglets in danger of being squashed when the huge American sow rolls over, I’m just glad that she’s rolling to the left at the minute, squahing some nasty, vicious little rightist pigs and not nice little lefty piglets like us.
For a fair part of the last 10-15 years, Republicans controlled many state legislatures and governorships. It may be instructive to examine whether they gerrymandered congressional districts leading to the claimed underrepresentation of democrats in Congress. (Of course, democratic controlled states may have done the same with the opposite intended effect.)
There are well-known examples of this in Texas and Pennsylvania.
It’s pretty much endemic in a lot of states, Sacha, as is the practice of drawing “minority-majority” districts which in some Southern states has the effect of electing a minority of African-American congressmen and leaving the rest to the GOP most of the time.
Voting among Southern whites suggests that without ‘majority-minority’ districts African-Americans would struggle to win Congressional representation from the South in fair numbers. Partisans on both sides do spin bad election results, but it is worse on the right, is this because many lefties deep down are pessimistic about their chances of winning popular support (ie. Bill Maher?). Defeat is expected, thus lefties can more easily rally to centre-left pragmatists, whereas many on the right really believe their ‘true America’ crap. But many of those currently wrapping themselves in the banner of fidelity to true conservative principles are playing to the base rather than actually opposing a more pragmatic turn.
I think it goes without saying that the American political context and culture (and thus the left/right distinction) is different from ours. Nevertheless, it’s still useful, I think, to combat some myths about it – and there’s significant interest from a political science/sociology point of view in doing so as well as other imperatives.
Just on white Southern voters, this post from Nate Silver is really interesting:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/for-obama-will-familiarity-erode.html