Midterms

The midterm election is tomorrow.  I don't recall ever seeing so much attention paid to a midterm.  That's a good thing.  In the past the importance of midterms was often ignored, like in 2010, when few people went to the polls and Congress wound up being filled with freshman Congressmen who used their new offices to codify their personal prejudices.



State elections this year are getting a lot of attention, particularly because one party is trying so hard to cheat through historically effective methods - gerrymandering and voter suppression - while accusing the other party of cheating through voter fraud, a rare and certainly less effective tactic. As Brian Klaas says,

Democrats fear voter suppression. Republicans fear voter fraud. The data show suppression is widespread; voter fraud is not. George W. Bush's DoJ studied voter fraud and found it occurs on 0.00000013% of ballots. A recent study found 31 cases out of a billion ballots from 2000-2014.

The voter fraud/voter suppression debate is one of those frustrating "partisan" issues that we can answer with data. It is not partisan to show that, empirically, voter suppression often influences the outcome of US elections; voter fraud does not. Facts shouldn't be partisan.

Here in Oklahoma, we're electing a new Governor.  Our current Governor and most of our State Legislature believe that tax cuts create growth, and many Oklahomans believe that taxes are an unnecessary burden.  We have a Constitutional Amendment that states that taxes cannot be raised without a 3/4 vote in the Legislature or a vote of the people, which has happened only once since 1992. The predictable result, of course is that hospitals are closing, schools are losing teachers and going to shortened weeks, and the State Government has trouble providing basic services.  Efforts on the part of the majority party in the Legislature to raise revenue has met with opposition from the minority because the proposals generally raise taxers on the poor.

Both primary elections required run offs, and on the Republican side, the two candidates were Mick Cornett, whose economic policies during his time as mayor of Oklahoma City helped turn the city from a ghost town into a thriving community, and Kevin Stitt, whose ads complained that Cornett wasn't Fascist enough. This being Oklahoma, Stitt naturally won. Now in his race against Drew Edmondson, his claim is that he's the better candidate because, unlike his opponent, he has no experience in government. If you want to know what his actual policy ideas are, you have to hunt for them online. Basically, however, they are familiar Republican policies. His ads, however, speak of the "career politicians that got us in this mess," while not mentioning that the career politicians that got us in this mess were all Republicans who legislated familiar Republican policies.

Again, he is heavily favored to win.

I read a book a while back with the rather misleading title of "The Republican Brain," which was actually about studies done on the comparison between the ways conservatives and liberals think. It did not, as I think the title suggests, advocate for one ideology over the other. On the contrary, it says that we need both parties, as one is the mind and the other is the heart of the country. I agree: one party rule is bad regardless of which party it is. The book says that if you want to convince a  liberal of something, you should get out the spreadsheets and show him the data. If you want to convince a conservative of something, you appeal to his values. But I've been on Facebook for the last nine years, and what I've seen is that if you want to convince a conservative of something, you stoke his prejudices by filling him up with bogus information and scare the crap out of him. This is not a good way to govern the nation. This does not make for a good society. It does, however, make an effective way to justify Fascist policies.

Nate Silver's statistics webpage FiveThirtyEight estimates that the Republicans have a five in six chance of keeping the Senate - partially due to voter suppression efforts in North Dakota and elsewhere - and the Democrats have a seven in eight chance of taking the House. However, Democrats have a traditional problem: regardless of what the polls say, voters who lean Democratic often fail to vote. But social injustices inflicted by the current administration and currently serving Republicans have energized voters. Will that translate into actual votes?  We'll find out tomorrow.