Republican Wave a Myth - 2010 Merely an End to Democrats’ Surge

Cross posted from Rise of the Center

I’ve been kicking this around in my head for a bit, but Progressive Fix beat me to the punch. The media has made this election out to be some kind of a tidal wave… but how can you call it such when both the House and Senate, regardless of who has the majority, looks to be very closely split?

It makes a lot more sense to say that 2010 merely marks the end to the surge that democrats saw following the disastrous George W Bush years. If this was a true wave election, we’d see a number of districts that are traditionally left leaning breaking for republicans, leading to comfortable majorities in at least the House, since every member there is up for election, but that isn’t what we’re seeing. Progressive Fix hits the nail on the head here:

Do many of these contests involve longstanding Democratic bastions where incumbents are being ousted by the righteous wrath of an angry voting public? No. Eleven of these seats are open. Another thirteen are seats wrested away from the GOP in the “wave” elections of 2006 and 2008. And 22 of the 27 have a pro-Republican PVI (Partisan Voting Index), which means they tilted Republican more than the national average in the last two presidential races.

…fifteen “lean takeover” seats where the probability of a switch to the GOP is in the 60-80 percent range, there are far fewer open seats, but plenty of other factors indicating low-hanging fruit for Republicans. Aside from the two open seats, there are twelve that Democrats picked up in 2006-08, and eleven of the fifteen have pro-GOP PVIs.

It’s only in a third category, twenty “even” seats where the probability of a Republican takeover is 40-60 percent, that you start getting into a significant number of contests involving entrenched incumbents. Even there, half the seats were taken over by Democrats in 2006 or later.

(Bold mine.)

So what is really going on is we’re coming back to near equilibrium, where neither party has a wide majority or mandate. Many of the seats the republicans are losing are in districts that democrats picked up in their wave election, where they did in fact pull a number of right leaning districts over onto their side, and are now likely losing their seats because they went along with the more liberal parts of the Obama agenda that the swing voters that put them into office in those places were not comfortable with.

I’ve said this eleswhere, but while I don’t see it as accounting for more than a few percentage points… polling does seem to show a segment of the electorate that just wants there to be split government. I will say that I’m among those people… and if I wasn’t entirely disgusted with the republican idiot running in my congressional district (Lee Terry… don’t get me started) I would in fact be a little bit more inclined to find an excuse to vote for him just so neither party had near total control in DC like the Dems have had recently, and the GOP had for part of the ‘W’ years.

If there is any solid evidence of any tectonic shifts going on, its the sustained uptick in dissatisfaction with both parties. Certainly looks to be a situation ripe for the center to rise, if there ever was one. Will we? Will you? Its up to each and every one of us to make that choice, or those on the left and right will continue to make them for us… and we’ll keep getting the same results.

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