120 million Americans didn't vote in 2002. According to Jack Beatty, writing in the Atlantic Monthly [link], this makes the non-voters the largest political block in the country, larger than either the Democrats or the Republicans. Beatty's point is that whichever party figures out how to mobilize this group will change the balance of power in American politics.

Beatty suggests that the Republicans have at least made an opening bid for this group (many of whom are young and working in low-paying service-sector jobs) with the "personal spending accounts" reform of Social Security. But Beatty notes that in order to close the deal with this group, the Republican party will have to deal with the fact that the disaffected cohort is generally more socially liberal than the Republican party as a whole. Something to think about.

Coming attractions:

In response to my post about mandate (11/11/02), it was pointed out to me that there were three weaknesses in my argument. First, perhaps the Republicans did get a mandate because, after all, given the choice, the voters chose Republican candidates, and shouldn't that occurence ought to count for something. Second, my analysis didn't account for concentrations of votes (that is, that New York and California, each with two senators, will necessary poll more votes for those senators than Montana and North Dakota, which also have two senators each, and that there's not much to gleaned from the disparity in vote totals). Finally, this critique continued, without analyzing the relative margin of victory in the House of Representatives, my analysis was incomplete and doesn't necessarily support my conclusion as to the existence or non-existence of a mandate.

I intend to respond to those critiques in an upcoming post. For now, though, I will note that in response to point #3, above, I confess that when I started thinking about "mandate", I initially assumed that since each House district is roughly the same size, a Republican majority in the House probably roughly equated to a majority of votes polled. I have decided that that assumption ought to be tested. I have started pulling together the polling data for the House, and hope to have that done as soon as possible. Stay tuned.

Sorry for the long hiatus -- I've been consumed in a project at work. Anyway, the Washington Monthly has an interesting article about Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman. [link] I found the most interesting tidbit to be a brief explication of the mindset of the center-left columnist. According to the article, most came out of the ranks of reporting journalists, and therefore maintain an intellectual distance from their subject matter, just as a good reporter should. By contrast, many notable conservative columnists have come out of politics, where one-sidedness and intellectual fealty to your subject matter is considered a virtue. The result is that center-left pundits are afraid to grab a reader by the lapels and keep shaking him until the point is made; they tend to follow the he-said, she-said model. And therein lies Krugman's appeal to liberals -- he is more apt to make points, with examples and hypotheticals and well-conceived theories, that favor liberal ways of thinking, and to do so over and over and over, in the manner of his conservative brethren.

By now, it's old news that control of the Senate has changed from Democratic to Republican. This, more than most other developments from Election Day, is being heralded by Republicans and pundits as a sign that President Bush and the Republican Party have received a mandate from the American people.

Or have they?

Let's look at the numbers. The Senate of the 108th Congress will consist of 51 Republicans, 48 Democrats and 1 independent.* Now, consider this: the 51 Republican Senators collectively received 44,265,695 votes in the most recent election for their seats (1998, 2000 or 2002).** If you count Senator Jeffords, who was elected as a Republican, but subsequently became an independent, the total votes for Republican senators is 44,454,828.** Now look at the Democrats: the 48 Democratic Senators collectively received 53,425,954 votes** -- between 8.9 million and 9.1 million more votes than the Republicans.

So what does this mean? Let's start with what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that the Democrats were robbed, or that the Republican control of the Senate is illegitimate, or that the Democrats didn't lose the Senate. They weren't, it isn't, and they did. But here's what I am saying: the Republican control of both the Senate and the Presidency is based on winning less than a majority of the votes cast. While this is how our system is designed (that is, sometimes, the minority can control), it isn't any kind of mandate when it comes to matters of national policy. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.

Moreover, as we saw in 1994 and 2000, Republicans have in the past overstated the mood of the voters and, by going hard to the right wing, snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. And, certainly, the stage is set for a reprise of that scenario -- just over half of the respondents in a recent AP poll indicated that they were concerned that the Republicans will move the country too far in the conservative direction, while almost two-thirds said they were at least somewhat concerned that Republicans will push through tax cuts that will increase the budget deficit. [link]

I guess my only questions are these: First, what is the Democratic Party doing to capitalize on its numeric superiority, and second, how long can the Republican's control by minority hold out?

*The actual results in the Senate may be 52/47/1, depending on a run-off election in Louisiana, where the Democratic candidate won, but failed to garner more than 50% of the total vote. My analysis assumes that the Senate seat stays Democratic, but in fact, the actual result in Louisiana won't affect my analysis, since it is not a large enough pool of voters to swing the total number of votes cast nationwide from Democratic to Republican (there were approximately 1.3 million votes cast in total).

**Vote totals were taken from the Federal Election Commission website [1998 results] [2000 results] and from the New York Times [2002 results]

Ah, November, when a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of Election Day.

Norman Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute, has an interesting Op-Ed in the New York Times today. [link] He posits that closely divided governments skew the governance process by transforming every act of governing into an act of political theater designed to affect the next electoral cycle.

Ornstein's article made me think of a tangential point about the even split between Republicans and Democrats in state houses, governors' mansions and the federal government: How is it that anyone can claim a mandate for anything other than centrist policies? As an example, (and not to raise the "we was robbed" banner), President Bush got fewer votes than the other guy in the 2000 election. How is that a "mandate" to do anything other than play to the center? And what does it mean for the future, also known as Wednesday, when, I suspect, we will wake up to Republican gloating and Democratic handwringing?

Perhaps the Democrats -- who, by most "professional" counts, aren't likely to win control of the House of Representatives, and could lose control of the Senate by one senator -- should just declare victory and go home. How about this: If the Republicans don't substantially increase their lead in Congress, let the Democrats assert that the American public, when presented with an opportunity to show that it endorsed the policies of the President, roundly withheld its support. Then, at every turn, tell the Republicans that they have no mandate for their actions, and make the case for 2004 that the Republicans are out of touch with what a majority of Americans actually want.

Who cares whether it's true? As President Bush proved, it's not whether you have the mandate, it's whether you act as if you have the mandate that matters.

Of course, one caveat here is that the Democratic Party would actually have to behave like a party in opposition. Perhaps the one flaw of Ornstein's analysis is that in point of fact, the Democratic Party -- on the Bush tax cuts, the war resolution and other "platform issues" -- has often been a far left wing of the Republican Party. As a result, many issues of policy have been exercises not in electoral politics, but in political me-tooism. A true back-bench party would cry "Foul!" as often as it could, in order to point up the difference between itself and the party in power.

[Truth in advertising, there are glimmers of this in the Senate, where Senator Leahy has used the Senate Judiciary Committee to point up the hard-right turn that the Bush Administration has made in its judicial appointments, and earned the appellation "obstructionist" for his efforts. You know that a back-bencher is successful when the ruling party calls him an obstructionist! Way to go, Pat!]

****

And now for my election picks.

N.Y. Governor: I will hold my nose and vote for Carl McCall. He'll lose anyway, but the cynical political corruption of the Pataki administration is just too much to stomach. (By the way, I define political corruption as cronyist vote-dealing that subverts the interests of the commonweal for political considerations. This is distinct from ordinary corruption, of which I have no evidence and make no accusation).

House of Representatives. I will vote Charlie Rangel, although neither he nor his challenger could be bothered to reach out to me and let me know (a) who is running (in the case of the challenger) or (b) why I should vote for either one. In deference to the larger picture (control of Congress), I will side with Rangel, the Democrat.

New York State Assembly. For the longest time, I was planning to vote for law-school classmate Jonathan Bing. Then I found out that his district ends at 96th Street, and I live north of there. I went to the Assembly web site to find out who my representative is, but was given one of three names (since the search is by ZIP code, but the districts cross ZIP code boundaries. Go figure). I guess, since none of my potential Assemblymembers (Pete Grannis, Adam Clayton Powell IV or Jon Ravitz) have seen fit to find me, I will vote for whichever one's name is on the ballot at my polling place and is the Democratic candidate. Actually, I'm curious whether there is even a Republican candidate...

New York State Senate. I think I'm represented by Olga Mendez, a Democrat (although again, the Senate website returned two possible senators). Her opposition, if there is any, is probably too fringe to have reached out to me. And, if the 2000 election is any indication, it won't matter which party lever I pull -- Mendez was the candidate for the Democrats, the Republicans, the Independence Party and the Liberal Party. The only parties she didn't represent were the Greens and the Right-to-Life Party. What's more, she got more votes as a Republican (4,701) than her two competitors got combined.

Charter Revision: Yes. Mayoral succession should be a matter for voters as soon as possible after a mayor is unable to serve. Allowing the Public Advocate to become mayor for as long as 18 months is too much. To critics who say that the system could result in four mayors in one year, I say, first, that's unlikely (it would require a sort-of perfect storm of the elected mayor becoming incapable of serving in an election year, followed by appointment of someone uninterested in running in, or incapable of winning, a special election, and then the emergence of a different winner in the special election, and finally, a defeat of the new incumbent in the general election in November [unassisted triple plays are more common]), and second, if that's the best argument you can muster, did you really need to waste my time on that?

[For the non-baseball savvy, an unassisted triple play is possible when there are runners on first and second, with no one out, and the manager calls for a hit-and-run play (where the runners begin running when the pitch is released, and it's up to the batter to make contact and put the ball in play). If the batter hits a line drive directly at the second baseman, the second baseman can catch the fly ball (one out), tag the runner who is already running from first to second (two outs) and step on second base, forcing out the runner who was running from second to third (three outs).]