Any corrections or hope gratefully received.

:-)


Ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I've started seeing it everywhere

Bwahahahahahahaaaaah

Of all the ways of organizing banking, the worst is the one we have today — Mervyn King, 25 October 2010

In all likelihood we will be in the same economic funk, or worse, in 2012 as we are now.

Which means that the Republicans will suffer a crushing defeat like 2006.

The simple truth is that until there is deep, structural change in the United States to limit the power of the financial sector over the economic and political system, we are going to suffer from this sort of political whiplash every 2-4 years.

The bottom line is that the status quo doesn't work, but we have two parties basically dedicated to perpetuating it.

I give it six months before the the honeymoon is over for the Tea Party.

Remember that many people in the Obama White House wanted Democrats to loose the House of Representatives, because they thought that it would allow Obama to look "progressive" compared to the guys trying to privatize social security and repeal the half ass healthcare law.

And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg

Voters under 30 dropped from 18 percent of the electorate to 11 percent; African Americans from 13 percent to 10 percent, and Hispanics from 9 percent to 8 percent. Meanwhile, voters over 65, the one age category carried by John McCain, increased from 16 percent of the electorate to 23 percent.

This is just a rehash of the ancient "voting doesn't influence the political process" vs. "no, really, it has actual implications," but I will go there anyway.

The Obama Brand^tm is so 2008, and those are the demographics within which he was able to evoke a strong, positive emotional reaction and "connection." The way we conceptualize politics on this site has no connection to how it works in practice, even as everyone here understands what the article I linked to means.

you are the media you consume.

IOW, the US slipping into a Depression is the wrong verb tense. IF the US allows a double dip recession to occur, then given that the best that broad unemployment will have reached before rising again will have been 16%+, we will have been in a Depression since the Panic of 2008.

The reason this was not a New Deal style Roosevelt first midterm election is because we did not have sufficient New Deal style effective policies to drag the real unemployment rate down toward 10%. We've got the headline rate down below 10%, but only at the functional equivalent of counting the hobos riding the rails as if they were fully employed ... counting people getting any number of hours down to 1 hour a week in low paid, uncertain, week to week or day to day temp work as fully employed.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

• The results should be seen as variation within a narrow band. There's a floor of about 50 Democratic Senate seats and about 200 House seats, and a ceiling of 60 Dem Senate seats and maybe 250 House seats. The swing is determined by what extent the Democratic majority in the electorate actually shows up. When they showed up in 2006 and 2008, Dems hit the upper end of the band; when they didn't show up to the same extent in 2002 and 2010, Dems hit the lower end.

• The above is a function of deeper economic and demographic trends. Those parts of the country most deeply linked to the 20th century industries of real estate and oil are still voting Republican; those parts more linked to a 21st century "creative" economy are more willing to vote for Democrats. And states where the Latino vote is decisive, like California and Nevada, are much more Democratic than those that aren't (Florida being an exception because of the Cuban exiles).

• Obama's presidency is a failure, and voters know it. He's clearly revealed his stripes as a centrist agent of the bankster/corporate elite, and voters are coming to the depressing realization that he isn't going to provide change, whether they believe he was ever sincere or not.

• Republicans are absolutely going to crash the economy, because they realize Obama will lose if things get worse between now and then - and that with Democratic Senate and a Democratic White House, they can get away with pinning the blame on Obama. An outright Depression is probably already here, but if not, it will be by 2012.

• The American political system will become increasingly sclerotic. At best we're witnessing a replay of the 1850s, where a similar situation ended in a civil war between two political parties. At worst we're witnessing a replay of the early 1930s in Germany, where a similar situation ended in an authoritarian coup.

The Dem party has overall been steadily moving to the left over the past half dozen years.  For the previous twenty (at least) it was moving to the right.  This can be obscured by the continued presence of a powerful minority right wing faction that needs to be cajoled and bribed into voting with the majority of the party through watered down legislation, pork and endless begging. Still, back in 2004 not a single non token protest run Dem candidate in the primaries was willing to propose even the most watered down health care bill, not even as a throwaway primary promise to satisfy the much more progressive primary electorate. In 2000 the Dem elites were pretty universally on board with the full neo-lib Rubin-Summers package. Now you've got plenty of very vocal dissenters. (Think of the evolution of a Paul Krugman, try to imagine a Brad DeLong type calling for the nationalization of the energy industry ten years ago  Related, the emergence of outspoken voices in the media and the now actually somewhat important online sphere who clearly are aligned with the progressive wing. (compare CNN c. 2000 with MSNBC c. 2008).  Remember just how long the right has been working on turning the Repubs into a coherent, disciplined vehicle for their ideas while pushing a new ideological discourse to replace the one that emerged from the New Deal.

None of this applies to those of you who would like to kill off capitalism rather than tame it into a capitalism with a human face a la the vision of postwar European social democracy.

The big picture isn't about winning or keeping power. It's about using it. I've made this argument before, but David Frum, the former speechwriter to President Bush, has made it better. In March, when Democrats secured enough votes to pass the bill, he castigated fellow conservatives who looked forward to punishing Pelosi and President Obama "with a big win in the November 2010 elections." Frum observed:

"Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now. ... No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the "doughnut hole" and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents' insurance coverage?"

Exactly. A party that loses a House seat can win it back two years later, as Republicans just proved. But a party that loses a legislative fight against a middle-class health-care entitlement never restores the old order. Pretty soon, Republicans will be claiming the program as their own. Indeed, one of their favorite arguments against this year's health-care bill was that it would cut funding for Medicare. Now they're pledging to rescind those cuts. In 30 years, they'll be accusing Democrats of defunding Obamacare.

http://www.slate.com/id/2273708/

So I modeled Democratic vote share in contested House districts using this count of "yes" votes, plus campaign money in 2010 (from here and here) and each district's House and presidential vote in 2008 as controls (here).1 The model also estimates whether the effect of roll call votes depended on the partisanship of the district, as captured by the 2008 presidential vote. This model predicts a Republican majority of 242 seats, compared to the 244 it currently looks like they are going to win. So the model is pretty good, understating Republican performance only a little bit.

What does this model tell us about roll call votes on these four bills? Simple answer: they mattered. A lot. A Democratic incumbent in the average district represented by Democratic incumbents actually lost about 2/3 of a percentage point for every yes vote. That doesn't sound like a lot, but that's for incumbents in districts that voted 63% for Obama.

For Democrats in the least Democratic districts (Chet Edwards of TX or Gene Taylor of MS), the model suggests a loss of about 4% for every yes vote. Does that mean poor Chet lost 16 points on roll call votes alone? No, because he wasn't a big supporter of Obama's agenda. But he did vote for both TARP and the stimulus. In fact, virtually every Democratic incumbent on the ballot yesterday supported at least one of these four bills. That support was costly.

That just reinforces my feeling that the only thing that would have helped in any significant way is a better economy. Running hard on liberal base motivation themes wouldn't be that helpful.  That sort of messaging also motivates the opposing base, and in swing and right leaning districts motivating your opponents base is not an optimal strategy.  Nor does it tend to convince the small but significant for close races number of genuine swing voters.

emocrats have lost the House, and health care is getting the blame. Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, a retiring Democrat, says his party "overreached by focusing on health care rather than job creation" and by spending $1 trillion on "a major entitlement expansion." Sen. John McCain's economic adviser agrees. Pundits say the health care bill killed President Obama's approval ratings, cost congressional Democrats their jobs, and snuffed out the legacy of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "Virtually every House Democrat from a swing district who took a gamble by voting for the health law made a bad political bet," says the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times laments that "the measure of a leader in Washington isn't how much gets done, it's who holds power in the end. On that scale, Pelosi failed."

I'm not buying the autopsy or the obituary.