By Peter Oliver
Republicans have been all grins and giggles for the last month after what has been variously described as a "landslide," "overwhelming victory" and "decisive thrashing" in the midterm elections. They are especially pleased about wresting control of the Senate from the Democrats, and have been declaring that victory as a mandate for the enactment of conservative policies.
Fine and dandy, and Republicans have certainly been empowered to move the federal government toward the right. But let's do a little Harwood math to determine just how successful the Republican electoral success really was. Follow along, students:
The national turnout was just over 36 percent, the lowest since 1942, when many eligible voters were off fighting a war. (In 2010, the last midterm election, the turnout was reportedly about 42 percent.) As far as the Senate goes, just 33 seats were in play, representing the roughly one-third of the 100 seats up for grabs every two years.
In most of the Senate races, the vote was relatively close; if you won with 55 percent of the vote, you did pretty darned well. So 55 percent of 36 percent is about 20 percent. And that is 20 percent of those voting in one-third of the states, amounting to less than 7 percent of the national vote. So, less than 7 percent of the national vote determined the shift to a Republican majority in the Senate.
Call it a mandate if you want, but if 93 percent of all eligible voters in the U.S. did not electorally endorse the changing of the Senate guard, the Republican hegemony hardly seems an unequivocal certainty. In fact, the winner (if it can be called that) of the 2014 election was apathy.
Some in the 64 percent of the voting public that did not go to the polls last month might have had legitimate reasons – illness, work obligations, bad weather, out of the country, lack of transportation, etc. But it should be noted that more than 58 percent of eligible voters made an effort to cast ballots in 2012. Presidential elections always produce higher turnouts than midterms do, but the implication is that at least 22 percent of those who could have voted on November 4 didn't.
It is not incidental, by the way, that Republicans tend to fare better than Democrats when turnouts are small and Republican candidates at times have declared publically a hope for a low turnout. Voter ID laws have been depicted, disingenuously, by many conservatives as a means of ensuring electoral integrity. I'd like to take them on their word, but they also know (while denying it vehemently) that voter ID laws are part of a strategy to keep voters away from the polls and improve their chances.
Vermont Speaker of the House Shap Smith recently suggested that voting be a mandatory requirement of citizenship. Several democracies of the world do in fact make voting compulsory; in Australia, for example, you can be fined for failing to go to the polls. Yet it is unlikely that a move toward mandatory voting would ever get far in the U.S., and if it did, it would probably fail to pass Constitutional muster.
So Republicans need to tread carefully. Despite the 2014 election results, the vast majority of Americans have not given the newly Republican Senate an unambiguous stamp of approval. The election wasn't about a Republican landslide; it was mainly, and sadly, about the huge number of American voters who simply didn't bother or care.
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