So, of course I woke up Wednesday morning and avowed "Today, I shall not poliblog." Because it's too easy to do a post-game analysis. What does it mean if NJ and VA elect Republicans after a successful 2008 Democratic year? Blah, blah. Anybody with a healthy imagination can rig the table to look like the political scene according to....well, them. Either Virginia's support for McDonnell is a referendum on how the Democrats are doing, or Deeds was a weak candidate who didn't run as a "real Democrat." Either Jon Corzine was just the victim of his own awkwardness and bad luck, or NJ was turning away from the Democrats (which, as a fairly blue state who still has a Democratic majority in the state legislature, I do kind of doubt.)
But I still found the NY-23 results absolutely fascinating. Here's why--see that picture? That's Bill Owens. I thought I was following this race a bit, but actually, I was following the Scozzafava/Hoffman drama. When Dede Scozzafava dropped out, even though she gave her endorsement to Owens, I kind of thought a good part of her supporters would still swing Hoffman's way. That Owens won tells me that perhaps NY-23 was always a Republican, but moderate district, and that despite the support from outsiders like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh for Hoffman--maybe there's something to be said for the idea that "All politics is local." I won't look at it as a defeat of Palin & Teabagger support, per se. (Because although this notion disturbs me, there may well be local politics where that kind of influence might work. One swallow doesn't make a summer, or some such Aesopian piffle.)
On the Maine "No on 1" defeat, I'm going to link to Greta Christina's Blog, because she makes an observation I've noticed too, and having someone else point it out makes me less insecure about it:
Two: I hope the people who want to put same-sex marriage back on the ballot in California in 2010 take a long, hard look at whether that's really a good idea, and whether the timing is right.
Same-sex marriage is just really hard to win at the ballot right now. I think we need to accept that. We stand a much better chance of winning in 2012 than we do in 2010. To be blunt about it: Support for same-sex marriage skews, more than with almost any other demographic, according to age. The younger people are, the more likely they are to support it. To be brutally blunt: As more old people die, and as more young people become old enough to vote, the odds skew more and more in our favor. Also, the economy in California truly and profoundly sucks right now, and people just won't be able to donate the kind of money to a political campaign that they did in 2008. And 2012 is a Presidential election year, when voter turnout is always higher -- and high voter turnout almost always means more young voters, and almost always favors liberal candidates and causes.
I remember one of the first things I wanted to know about the Prop 8 demographics was who was for it broken down by age--just on a suspicion. There was a parallelism between the youngest and oldest voters in that support for prop 8 had a pretty direct correllation to age. That this issue comes up on ballot referendums is irksome because I don't see how the rights of a minority should be determined by majority rules, but that it puts the discussion out there is important--and in time the case is going to be made to people whose positions haven't been hardened.
Anyway, that gets the post-election blogging out of my system.
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