{"id":13389,"date":"2010-11-03T19:08:18","date_gmt":"2010-11-03T23:08:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2010\/11\/03\/13389.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:58:05","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:58:05","slug":"what-it-all-means-or-doesnt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2010\/11\/03\/what-it-all-means-or-doesnt\/","title":{"rendered":"What it all means, or doesn&#8217;t."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Your Humble Blogger doesn&#8217;t have much to say about yesterday&#8217;s election. It was what it was: my Party had an unsustainably large majority in the Senate, and were bound to lose some of it, and held a bunch of House seats that were on the edge anyway. I mean, it&#8217;s a Bad Thing, for the country, because I think that my Party (disappointed as we often are with ourselves) has much better policy ideas than the Other Party, but it is always a Good Thing when we have elections and people who are voted out of office leave office to be replaced by people who were voted into office. Democracy. It works that way.\n<P>I am trying to avoid reading too much about what happened, and am particularly trying to avoid hearing or reading any <i>analysis<\/i> about why and how and whatnot. I am curious about a few numbers, but too lazy to find them out, so if any Gentle Reader has any of these, please let me know.\n<p><ul><li><strong>Defectors<\/strong>: What percentage of people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 voted for a Republican for the House in 2010? My guess is that it is very, very few. 5% maybe? A lot less?<\/li><li><strong>They&#8217;ll pass<\/strong>: Of the people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and did <I>not<\/i> vote in 2010 (many, many people), how many <i>did<\/i> vote in 2006?<\/li><li><strong>The Swing<\/strong>: Given those numbers, what percentage of the country as a whole can be said to have abandoned their previous support for my Party?<\/li><\/ul>\n<P>If it isn&#8217;t obvious, I am very skeptical of the idea that my Party alienated people by overreaching or passing unpopular policies or even by failing to pass popular policies. I think my Party set themselves up for this wave election by (a) winning two consecutive wave elections, thereby giving themselves a lot of seats to lose, and (2) being the in party when the economy is really bad. Furthermore, we set ourselves up to lose midterm elections in bad economies very badly because our constituency doesn&#8217;t vote as consistently as the Other Party&#8217;s constituency. There are more of us, but more of us pass on the midterms.\n<p>I would like to say, though, that <I>of course<\/i> I am skeptical of the idea that the country realio trulio rejected my Party. It&#8217;s my Party. I recognize that my skepticism is born of desire and belief, not empirical analysis. That&#8217;s why I would like to know the numbers.\n<p>Of course, we won&#8217;t really know those numbers. The exit polls are just polls, for one thing, samples rather than full info, and for another, people are not unlikely to lie or even just misremember who they voted for two years ago. And they people doing exit polls don&#8217;t get to ask the people who didn&#8217;t vote yesterday whether they voted in 2006, even if they would report it correctly, because the people who didn&#8217;t vote yesterday weren&#8217;t there to ask. You could look at demographics, and locations, and likelihoods, and that sort of thing, to get an impression. It wouldn&#8217;t be terribly accurate, but it would be better than what I got now.\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Which Your Humble Blogger is sort of asking a rhetorical question, in that the phrasing of the question is intended to be persuasive on a related issue, but sort of is looking for information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13389"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19204,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13389\/revisions\/19204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}