2014 US Election Recap

So the results of the US election are in (except for a few close races that are still being contested, and the Senate race in Louisiana, which will decided by a run-off), and for the most part the Republicans came out on top. They won a majority in the US Senate, improved their hold on the US House of Representatives, and gained a number of state governorships. So how did the Republicans win, and what does their victory mean? Can this election be seen as a vindication of the Republicans' policies? What roles did massive amounts of anonymous campaign spending and voter suppression play?

In my opinion, the Republicans' success was due to a combination of factors, not any single thing. An important point to remember is that turnout was very low – at 36%, it was the lowest it has been since the mid-term elections in 1942, in the middle of World War II (when many eligible voters were fighting overseas and unable to vote). Aside from being appalling evidence of voter apathy, this means that even though the Republicans got the majority of votes cast, that only means they got the support of about 20% of the electorate, hardly a mandate for their policies. It remains an unfortunate fact that, as is usually the case, older white voters had the highest turnout, and this is the demographic that most favors the Republicans. This election certainly doesn't show that the Republicans have the support of most Americans, just of a small (and shrinking) but politically active block of voters. But the low turnout, and particularly the low turnout among minorities, can't be put down to apathy alone. Republicans throughout the country made obvious efforts to suppress turnout in general, and minority turnout in particular. In numerous states, they used the excuse of voter fraud, which is almost non-existent with possible cases over the last decade at most in double digit, to institute voter ID laws that prevented many thousands of people from voting. They reduced the time periods for early voting. Most blatantly, they closed down polling places in minority areas, so that not only did people have to travel farther to vote (often having to rely on public transportation due to a lack of their own vehicles), but lines were much longer at the polling places that were left, meaning that many with limited time had to give up without getting to vote. Then of course there was the failure of some Republican Secretaries of State to process many voter registration forms, Georgia being the most widely reported case. Of course these efforts to suppress the vote were hardly the sole reason for the low turnout, but in some races they may have done enough damage to change the results.

An additional reason for the Republicans’ success was the enormous amount of money that was spent by right-wing billionaires such as the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson and corporate interest groups like the US Chamber of Commerce to support the Republicans – or, more commonly, to attack the Democrats. Recent dubiously reasoned Supreme Court decisions have unleashed an avalanche of spending, much of it anonymous (so-called “dark money”), and much of it going to attack ads containing so many misleading statements, factual inaccuracies and outright lies that if they were held to the same standards that we generally expect of product advertising, they would be immediately pulled off the air. You even had ads prominently featuring ISIL and Ebola (sometimes conflating them not with each other but the similarly unrelated issue of “border security”) and insinuating that President Barack Obama and by extension the Democrats running in the election were responsible, even though, first of all, claims that Obama is to blame are dubious in the case of ISIL and absurd in the case of Ebola; secondly, even if Obama were to blame that would not mean the Democrats in Congress, who have no control over the administration’s actions in these areas, were also to blame; and thirdly, ISIL and Ebola currently present negligible threats to the US itself. But these ads and others like them no doubt had an effect on low information voters, who unfortunately make up much of the electorate.

Some also have argued that the way the Democrats themselves campaigned was in part to blame for their defeat. Certainly candidates like Alison Grimes in Kentucky at times seemed intent on painting themselves as being closer to the Republicans than to Obama, just less extreme than the former. Few of them actively promoted progressive ideas, and those that did, like Jeff Merkley in Oregon (admittedly a heavily Democratic state to begin with), often won. I’m not certain that a more aggressively progressive campaign strategy would have gotten better results, especially in conservative states, but if nothing else it might have helped educate some voters and lay the groundwork for the future. In any event, running to the right didn’t pay off for the Democrats who tried it. Unfortunately, some don’t seem to have learned that lesson: while I wasn’t terribly inclined to go out of my way to support Mary Landrieu, the conservative-leaning Democratic Senator from Louisiana, in her run-off election against the (of course) even more conservative Republican Bill Cassidy, she recently destroyed any chance getting my support by introducing a bill in the Senate to approve the Keystone XL pipeline at the same Cassidy introduced a similar bill in the House. It is if the two are competing to show who is most beholden to oil and gas interests, hardly a strategy that’s going to appeal to anyone who cares about the environment or indeed the future of human civilization.

Another interesting point about this election, one that has been noted by a number of observers but largely ignored by Republicans and the right wing, is that even this small, relatively conservative group of voters passed a number of progressive ballot measures, even states where Republicans won Senate and gubernatorial races. Marijuana legalization referendums passed in several states, and a liberal medical marijuana measure got 57% of the vote in Florida, only failing because Florida requires a supermajority of 60% for passage. Personhood measures put forward by anti-abortion activists failed in conservative states like Colorado. In several states, including conservative ones like Arkansas, voters passed increases in the minimum wage. In Washington, a gun control measure was passed (while Washington leans Democratic, it is still significant that that the measure passed easily, in the face of the usual NRA scaremongering, and a pro-gun measure to hobble it failed by a substantial margin). So voters in many states approved progressive ballot measures and voted down right-wing ones, even while in some cases electing Republicans who took opposite positions on those issues.

While these indications that many progressive policies are popular – even among a narrow and more conservative electorate – are certainly heartening, the contradictory votes are also evidence of another reason for the Republican victories, one that was mentioned above: there are still far too many people in the US who are poorly informed, easily manipulated, full of biases and mistaken notions, or almost sociopathic in their lack of concern for the well-being of anyone other than themselves. No one who was well-informed, rational, reasonably objective and had any concern about the future could vote for a climate change denier, nor could anyone concerned about the long-term well-being of society vote for people who refuse to recognize income equality as a problem. Legalizing marijuana, treating undocumented people like human beings, making birth control easily accessible and making same sex marriage legal are all likewise easy calls. And yet people in many states elected people who not only oppose such things, but practically froth at the mouth in their opposition to them. Of course the US is hardly the only democracy where it is a mystery to many observers how some of the country’s politicians get elected: I still have difficulty comprehending how Israelis could elect not only Benjamin Netanyahu but the even more extreme politicians to his right, or how Australians could elect an anti-environmentalist like Tony Abbott, or the Canadians vote in the similarly fossil fuel-loving Stephen Harper, or the Indians vote in someone like Narendra Modi with so much blood on his hands (though I can understand their disgust with the Congress party). Humanity in general evidently has a long way to go on a lot of fronts.

But whatever the reasons, for the next two year, the US will be stuck with a Congress run by people like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, and with even more crazy people like Ted Cruz and James Inhofe exercising far too much of a sway. It would be nice to simply dismiss it as a problem for the Americans who allowed these people to get into office (whether by voting for them or just failing to get to the polls and vote against them), but unfortunately the US has far too much of an impact on the rest of the world to do that. For instance, even two years of letting the fossil fuel industry run rampant could do a lot of harm, possibly even making it impossible (or at least very difficult) to avert the worst case climate change scenarios. So we’ll just have to hope that Obama stands firm and makes as much use as he can of his Presidential powers to keep things from getting too bad, and when necessary and possible, give him what support we can for doing so.