As to the "enthusiasm gap" argument - it would be more convincing if it showed the enthusiasm gap in places where Democrats actually lost. The fact that New England liberals lost enthusiasm does not go very far to explain the outcome in western Michigan.
Again, I would like to underscore two points. First, elections are decided by "swing voters" not by core supporters. The core supporters are not going to switch sides if they are unhappy with their own party performance.
Second, most of those "swing voters" do not have a coherent political philosophy or even clear understanding of connections between government policies and their own interests. Their voting behavior falls pretty much into the mold described by Malinowski - when they face adverse conditions whose causes they do not understand, they engage in "magic rationality" to change their bad luck. Sometimes it is a prayer, sometimes it is sacrificing a chicken or a goat, and sometimes it is punishing people thought to bring bad luck - be it witches or politicians currently in power.
This explains why rational policy considerations seem to have so little impact on elections outcomes. Rational policy considerations appeal only to a certain portion of the electorate. For others - they have little traction, as these folks tend to think in terms of "magic rationality" - i.e. performing rituals to change conditions whose causes they do not understand. The latter do not have to form a majority to tip the balance in the first-past-the-post electoral system.
One final observations. Just as conservatives have unshaken faith in free markets, many liberals have unshaken faith in the will of "the people." If things do not go to their liking, i.e. free markets tank or "the people" make irrational choices on the election day, both groups tend to blame institutions, especially the government and political parties, as the markets or the people can do no wrong. I do not buy this. I think that the election results reflect the collective consciousness of the majority of the electorate, which has visceral hatred of institutions, especially the government, and any policy that even remotely smacks of "socialism."
Therefore, I do not blame Mr. Obama or even his party - I think they accomplished quite a bit during the past two years, given the circumstances.
I blame the electorate - or at least that portion of it that engages in magical rituals like voting those who "brought bad times" out.
Wojtek
On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 6:29 PM, Marv Gandall <marvgand at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2010-11-06, at 1:21 PM, Wojtek S wrote:
>
> > As far as I can tell, there was enough minority participation to secure
> > Democratic victories in places like DC, Baltimore, or Detroit. If you
> look
> > at the electoral map http://www.politico.com/2010/maps/ at sub-state
> level,
> > you will see that places with heavy minority concentration went heavily
> > democratic. It is the ex-urban or rural areas that went republican.
> >
> > So from that point of view, I do not see much evidence of the supposed
> > dissatisfaction of liberals who voted for Obama. Some were dissatisfied,
> to
> > be sure, but I do not think it made enough difference on the national
> level
> > to sway the election results.
>
> It made a big difference in the swing states, and narrowed the Democratic
> margin of victory in their traditional strongholds. Nate Silver below
> attributes the dropoff in Democratic support to the absence of the party's
> "terrific turnout operation" from 2008, without apparently comprehending the
> underlying political reasons for it - that the activists responsible for
> pulling out the vote, along with the liberal intellectuals, are the most
> disaffected Democrats. I've included a link below Silver's analysis to
> another column by Glenn Greenwald from last month which provides further
> anecdotal evidence of rank and file dissatisfaction with the party's
> direction.
>
> * * *
>
> ‘Enthusiasm Gap’ Was Largest in Presidential Swing States
> By NATE SILVER
> New York Times
> November 4 2010
>
>
> http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/enthusiasm-gap-was-largest-in-presidential-swing-states/
>
> There are various ways to measure the “enthusiasm gap” that was manifest on
> Tuesday night. For example, exit polls suggested that an equal number people
> identifying as Democrats and Republicans turned out on Tuesday night. By
> contrast, Democrats led by 7 points on this measure in 2008.
>
> Polls of registered voters, meanwhile — although there are differences from
> firm to firm — had generally given Democrats about a 5-point edge in party
> identification over the past several months, rather than showing the
> electorate evenly divided, as it was among actual voters.
>
> That would point toward an enthusiasm gap – which compares party
> affiliation to actual turnout – of 5-7 points, which is exactly what the
> consensus of pollsters thought it would be. (The Gallup poll, whose
> traditional likely voter model pointed toward an enthusiasm gap in the
> double digits, indeed proved to be an outlier.)
>
> Another way to measure the enthusiasm gap is to compare the actual
> presidential vote in 2008 to the presidential candidate for whom Tuesday’s
> voters claimed they had voted, according to exit polls. Nationally, for
> instance, Tuesday night’s voters told exit pollsters that they had split
> their vote 45-45 between Barack Obama and John McCain (some said they had
> voted for a third-party candidate or had not voted at all.) Since Mr. Obama
> won the election by about 7 points nationally in 2008, this would again
> point toward an enthusiasm gap in the 5-7 point range that we have been
> describing.
>
> This measure of the enthusiasm gap, however, varied quite significantly
> from state to state. And there is something very interesting about the
> states where it was larger.
>
> Exit polls were conducted in 26 states (mostly, where there were
> competitive Senate contests). The largest enthusiasm gap came in New
> Hampshire. There, Tuesday night’s voters claimed to have voted for John
> McCain by a 4-point margin, when in fact Barack Obama won the state by 10
> points. That’s a 14-point enthusiasm gap.
>
> The next largest enthusiasm gap came in Indiana; the electorate there
> shifted from having favored Mr. Obama by 1 point in 2008 to Mr. McCain by 10
> points: an 11-point gap.
>
> The enthusiasm gap was 10 points in Nevada, and 9 points in Iowa. It was 8
> points in Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri and Illinois.
>
> What do these states have in common? Other than Illinois, which is Mr.
> Obama’s home state, all the others were key presidential swing states in
> 2008. In fact, there is nearly a one-to-one correspondence between 2008
> swing states (which are shaded in the chart below) and those where the
> enthusiasm gap was largest.
>
> Over all, the enthusiasm gap averaged 8 points in presidential swing
> states. But it was virtually nonexistent — favoring Republicans by just 1
> point, on average — in states that weren’t competitive in 2008. It didn’t
> much matter whether the states (like Vermont and Hawaii) went heavily for
> Barack Obama in 2008, or (like Texas and Arkansas) went for John McCain:
> there wasn’t much of an enthusiasm gap in these non-competitive states.
>
> On the surface, this looks like horrible news for Democrats: the enthusiasm
> gap was the largest in precisely those states that a Democrat (or a
> Republican for that matter) needs to win the Presidency.
>
> But there is something else to keep in mind. Mr. Obama’s campaign had a
> terrific turnout operation, and — like any good turnout operation — it was
> concentrated in swing states. Mr. McCain’s campaign, by contrast,
> de-emphasized its “ground game” (a mistake that Karl Rove and George W. Bush
> would never have made), hoping to nationalize the election and win on the
> basis of television commercials.
>
> What we’re probably seeing, then, is the “hangover” from the Mr. Obama’s
> turnout efforts in 2008. In states like Ohio and New Hampshire and Indiana,
> where Democrats registered tons of new voters and made sure that all of them
> got to the polls, a lot of them didn’t participate this time around. In
> other states, the electorate wasn’t much different and the people who were
> voting this year strongly resembled those who voted in 2008 — although
> Republicans still did better because the preferences of independent voters
> shifted toward them.
>
> This sort of phenomenon is actually quite typical. In general, the bigger a
> President’s coattails, the more his party tends to suffer at the next
> midterm.
>
> The key question for 2012 is whether those new voters will re-enter the
> electorate when Mr. Obama is on the ballot again. If so, Democrats should be
> in reasonably good shape — and they’ll also win back quite a few of the
> House seats that they lost in these states.
>
> If not, however — or if Republicans are able to build a get-out-the-vote
> effort that is the equal of Mr. Obama’s — we could be up very late into the
> evening counting votes on Nov. 6, 2012.
>
> * * *
>
> How pervasive is Democratic dissatisfaction?
> BY GLENN GREENWALD
> Salon
> October 5 2010
>
>
> http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/10/05/schmitt/index.html
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