To be fair, while much of this welcome pushback is against the idea that today’s results will help predict next year’s outcomes, that claim is not often made, at least not quite so boldly. More often, journalists who hype off-year outcomes do so with hand-waving references to the “national mood” or the “political climate;” or they comment about how a certain result will allow one side to more effectively present its spin—or, more politely, its “framing.”
But while these claims are less demonstrably wrong, they’re just as lacking in value. They’re also unnecessary. Today’s elections are opportunities for voters around the country to elect their leaders, choose their representatives, and, in some cases, directly decide on matters of public importance. That’s plenty of meaning. We don’t need to manufacture any more.
I would agree that today’s elections aren’t going to mean much come next November when the real Mau Mauing is going to take place, but there seems to be this reflex from some quarters in the media to write off the elections as meaningless because it does reflect the national mood and Obama’s declining numbers to some extent. How to quantify this “extent” is certainly open to interpretation but what’s coming out of the left right now seems to be a lot of truthie spin about how meaningless these are. To say that New Jersey is “meaningless” is a good indication of how hard some are trying to unspin what is going down today. Obama has been campaign both publicly and privately for Corzine and a loss for Corzine today, in bluer than blue New Jersey no less, is a fairly significant bell weather of the wider national mood.
Ignoring it, as you and your friends quoted above are, doesn’t make it go away.
#1 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Tue 3 Nov 2009 at 04:39 PM
Note to journalists: it is OK to emphasis the low party identification with the Republicans. But it is also worth noting that Gallup finds people self-identifying as 'conservatives' over 'liberals' by about 2:1. Evidently a lot of 'independents' identify as conservative without identifying as GOP.
This is borne out by the tendency of independents in yesterday's elections to lean away from the Democrats after the latest round of policy overreach following a Democratic victory for the White House. The interpretation of the 2006 and 2008 cycle that the outcomes were not a rejection of 'conservative' social and economic themes. Rather they were a 'time for a change' sensibility, to a pragmatic judgment that Bush's Iraq policy and economic policies were not succeeding, and above all to the scandals plaguing the GOP.
Changing some names around, you could say the same things about the current administration going into the 2010 elections.
#2 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Wed 4 Nov 2009 at 12:29 PM