A Republican Win Validates Conservatism. A Democratic Win Validates...Conservatism.

So, yeah, I'm pretty pleased about how things went last Tuesday. Certainly, compared to where we were at about 7:00 PM PST, things improved significantly. It wasn't really looking like the Democrats would take the Senate and their lead in the House was much slimmer.

Given all that, you'd think maybe I could find something positive to say this week? Hmmm, well let's start in that vein. I think, of the many odious individuals who lost re-election, I'm particularly glad to see that Richard Pombo of California will have to find a new job. I suspect that most people who become politically engaged have an issue or two which are trump cards for them. For me, for a long time, it was the environment and little else that garnered my vote. While I was vaguely aware of other issues, I cared about the environment at a visceral level. Fortunately for me, the obvious choice on environmental issues, the Democrats, were in line with my other less strongly held beliefs. I now have other concerns that are just as significant (foreign policy, fiscal issues), but our air, water and earth will always hold a special place in my heart.

Pombo was particularly dreadful about the environment. He wanted to sell off national parks to help close budget gaps, he has been a huge proponent of drastically reducing royalties that energy companies have to pay to the US Gov't. to drill on US land, and he was 13th on the list of most corrupt Congressman on a Washington watchdog group. He was defeated on Tuesday and that's a good thing.

Such happy events aside, and as nice as it feels to be on the winning side, electorally, for once, the reality is that there are still huge structural problems for Democrats to overcome.

Exhibit A is the emerging spin that Democrats only won because they ran conservative Democrats and thus the election was not a rejection of Conservatism, but a validation of it. This plays into a broader concept generally, which is that most any given thing will benefit the Republicans and harm the Democrats. Some of this is due to active spinning on the part of the GOP, and at some level that's to be understood as simply good tactics on their part. Always present things in the best light possible. In the months before the election the Republicans were virtually taunting the Democrats to bring the war up. The conventional wisdom, as conveyed by the major newspapers and networks, was that this would harm the Democrats. The Republicans, taking advantage of the cultural bias towards them on National Security, would be able to hammer the Democrats mercilessly if they tried to engage on the Iraq war. It didn't turn out that way. Sometimes the GOP believes this, as I think was the case on the Iraq war, and some times they are trying to call the bluff of the Democrats. An example of the later was on the NSA wiretapping scandal, in which they publicly goaded the Democrats on, encouraging them to bring it up in the media and push for investigations. 'Go ahead, make my day' comes to mind. Privately though they were working furiously to crush any sort of real investigation.

This bias works to the GOP's advantage though because the media has internalized it so deeply. The Republicans hardly have to work at it; often the media will take up the theme on their own or with only the slightest prompting. Essentially the image is of the Democrats as incompetent extremists, one that is extended to all realms. Sometimes the incompetence is played up, other times the extremism. For the later witness the President, in the waning days of the campaign, claiming that a Democratic victory at the polls would be a victory for the terrorists. I have to say, I find it infuriating to be conflated with terrorists.

In any event, if you scan the newspapers or news outlet websites, all the discussion is about how this wasn't so much a win for Democrats as people voting against Republicans. Particularly, Democrats only won because they ran conservative candidates. Now, there is a kernel of truth to this. Democrats DID run some conservative candidates, and certainly the electorate was deeply dissatisfied with their Republican congressional reps. But the media is taking a pretty superficial look at the polling results and the candidates, through the lens I mentioned above, and constructing an analysis almost completely from whole cloth.

If Conservative Democrats are going to beat Insufficiently Conservative Republicans, then it stands to reason that, one, we are unlikely to defeat any supremely conservative Republicans. Richard Pombo should not have been defeated by that logic. Corruption may have been an issue in his case, but he is not alone in being an arch-conservative defeated. Well, you say, corruption was a problem for many Republicans. Perhaps that's the case, but if you have to invoke it as a caveat to your main thesis frequently, then maybe the thesis is wrong, and the caveat is more central, hmmm?

Similarly, it would stand to reason that we could defeat moderate Republicans by running conservative Democrats. I'll let Tom Schaller lay out for you what happened on that front:

As for the goofy talk about the election actually being a victory for conservatism, the fact remains that it was disproportionately GOP moderates (particularly from the Northeast and Midwest) who lost Tuesday, and to progressives who ran to their left. Using the most recent National Journal data, 224 House Republicans can be ranked from most liberal (#1) to most conservative (#224).

What do we find from Tuesday?

• The most liberal Republican to lose was ranked #1 -- Jim Leach of Iowa; the most conservative was Texan Tom DeLay, ranked #213.
• Overall, of the 28 flipped GOPers, more than half -- 16 -- were from the most liberal third of the caucus (1-75); 7 were from that middle third (76-150); and just 5 were from the most conservative third (151-224).
• Most striking is the fact that 10 of the 28 most liberal Republicans in the GOP House caucus lost, including five of the dozen most liberal Republicans: #1 Leach; #3 Nancy Johnson; #6 NY’s Sherwood Boehlert’s vacated seat; #7 CT’s Rob Simmons ; and #12 NH’s Charlie Bass.

In short, the liberal wing of the GOP suffered a disproportionate share of losses compared to the moderate and/or conservative wings. Since the Democrats who beat them ran uniformly to the left of their opponents, the notion that conservative Democrats knocked off a set of mostly liberal Republicans defies simple logic. It’s not that there aren’t exceptions like Pombo and Chocola and Ryun who also lost -- it’s that they are the exceptions. Put another way, for every Chris Chocola there were two Charlie Basses.

The last three he mentions, Pombo, Chocola and Ryun, were quite conservative. The Senate side is a little less clear, simply because the numbers are far fewer. Lincoln Chaffee, a moderate Republican who arguably would have been very much at home in the Democratic party, and was well liked by his constituency, was voted out. I have seen an article to the effect that, despite being highly regarded, he was voted out as a protest against Republican domination. This happened up and down the ticket.

Looking at some of the other Senate candidates, particularly Tester and Webb, the CW is that they are conservatives. If you look at their own statements though, that doesn't necessarily bear out. Tester is against gun control, but he's an organic farmer who wants to repeal (not modify) the Patriot Act, is pro-choice and pro-environment, wants to increase the minimum wage, and push for alternative energies. You can view his positions here, but I think it's pretty clear that while he's no flaming liberal, he's also not conservative. Seems moderate to left to me. As for Webb, here's an NPR interview with him (I'm sorry, I can't get the transcript). In case you can't listen to it, he talks a great deal about Iraq and national security, and this is largely due to the pointed interest of the interviewer. But Webb is at pains to make it clear that he had large concerns about other issues, particularly ones of economic equality. He voices support for a minimum wage hike and discusses the parallels with the disparity in wealth distribution we saw in the 1880's. You can see Webb's positions here. On balance he sounds like a populist, and not of the reactionary, nationalistic kind. I don't think I'm going to see eye-to-eye with him on everything, but he's hardly a died-in-the-wool conservative. To represent the choice as being between Liberal Dem or Conservative Dem is a false dichotomy. There are moderates.

Which isn't to say the Democrats didn't elect some progressives. Chris Bowers at MyDD breaks down the likely distribution of new House members:

Looking only at Democrats who took over Republican-held seats, here is a list of incoming Democratic freshmen in the House who are probably going to join the Progressive caucus:

* AZ-08: Gabrielle Giffords
* CA-11: Jerry McNerney
* IA-01: Bruce Braley
* NH-19: John Hall

In addition to the already listed McNerney, here are the incoming netroots candidates (we only endorsed challengers in 2006):

* MN-01: Tim Walz
* NH-02: Paul Hodes
* NC-08: Larry Kissell (maybe)
* PA-07: Joe Sestak
* PA-08: Patrick Murphy
* WA-08: Darcy Burner (probably)

In addition to the already listed Braley, Hodes, Sestak, Murphy and McNerney, here are the incoming Democrats from blue districts who took over Republican-held seats:

* CT-02: Joe Courtney
* IA-02: Dave Loebsack
* CT-05: Chris Murphy
* FL-22: Ron Klein
* CO-07: Ed Perlmutter
* KY-03: John Yarmuth
* NH-01: Carol Shea-Porter
* NY-24: Michael Arcuri

So, it looks like about 60%-70% of the incoming Democratic freshmen who took over Republican-held seats meet one of the three following criteria:

* Joining the progressive caucus
* From a blue district
* Netroots candidate

Netroots is a term for internet based grassroots organizations. The netroots largely endorses moderate or progressive Dems.

So, all this doesn't bear a lot of relation to the analysis being done by the major media outlets. It's not the only thing that seems to be misrepresented. There's been much discussion about the impact of 'values' voters, that may not bear up under scrutiny:

The Post's Alan Cooperman, writing on the front page of Saturday's paper, is a particularly egregious offender, citing numbers that don't really prove his thesis that "faith" voters were key to the Democrats' win. Cooperman writes that Democrats "sliced the GOP's advantage among weekly churchgoers to 12 percentage points, down from 18 points in 2004 congressional races" and that while "in 2004, 74 percent of white evangelicals voted for Republicans and 25 percent for Democrats, a 49-point spread ... This year, Republicans received 70 percent of the white evangelical vote and Democrats got 28 percent, a 42-point spread."

Both of these sets of figures sound really impressive -- until you look deeper at their actual meaning. When comparing results between elections, it is not only important to look at absolute numbers but also relative numbers: How a specific subset of the electorate moves from one election to another relative to the change in the electorate as a whole. Although vote totals in districts have not yet been finalized, making it difficult to tabulate the exact national popular vote for the House, it appears that the nation voted a net 10 points more Democratic in 2006 House elections than it did in 2004 (a move from a Republican advantage of about 49 - 46 to a Democratic advantage in the ballpark of 53 - 46). So for a group to have disproportionately helped the Democrats take the House this year, it would have to have increased its net support for the Democrats by more than 10 points -- which none of the groups cited by Cooperman actually did.

I realize that this is a lot of inside baseball, and probably dreadfully boring, so just take a look at the parts I bolded. The diary goes on to show groups that DID swing heavily for Democrats. They aren't what's being mentioned in the media.

My point in all this is that due to certain institutionalized biases and myopia in the media, the average person doesn't get an accurate sense of what's going on. How many of you knew that the Democrats have an agenda for the first 100 hours of the next session in the House? It's been around for some time now, but you probably only heard about it since the election. That's the sort of information that would have helped people before the election to make an informed decision.

So, until such biases are rectified, I'm going to be cautiously optimistic about how the Democrats will fare for the forseeable future.