Election 2009

So as I was going down the road last night, I caught Pete's show and he asked a very interesting question; what do the results of the 2009 elections mean, if anything? Given all the drummed up hype from the radical right about this being a "national referendum on Obama", its a reasonable question.

The short version of the results is that the two governor's races in New Jersey and Virginia both went to the Republican candidates by long and narrow margins, respectively, while the Democrats one each of the House seats up for grabs, even managing to take New York District 23, a Republican stronghold since the Civil War. Finally, the same-sex marriage law passed in Maine was shot down by the locals ballot veto power, by a somewhat narrow margin. The various mayoral races are still being resolved. For purpose of my point, I'm going to stick to the specific issues I've raised.

The first thing that springs to mind is that the political right in this country may want to rethink their "referendum" line, in view of the actual results. While the Republicans did take the races in NJ and VA, they soundly lost the House seats; this could be taken as an indication that predictions of the Republican Party no longer being a national force are valid. I'm not entirely convinced of that, but it could be seen in that light. In my own opinion, I'm given to think that A: the VA race was completely predictable (massive voter drop-off), B: the NJ incumbent was very unpopular and the voters wanted something different without being sufficiently motivated to choose the 3rd party candidate (also not much of a surprise) all while C: the general opinion in national politics remains that the Republicans both screwed the electorate and refuse to help do anything to clean up the mess.

So...why did the Republicans fail in the nationals while winning in the states? For this I return us to the old debate of republicanism v. federalism. Without going into too much history, the basic point is that republicans prefer to see small, localized governance while federalists favor a centralized, accountable organization. Both positions have merits but at the moment I want to focus on the constituencies. In short, what we currently call conservatives or a traditional Republicans are all generally small "r" republicans while Democrats and "progressives" are generally federalists, and each camp is generally motivated to turn out for the issues they feel the most strongly about. In the case of the former it tends to be state and local concerns while in the latter it tends to be national issues.