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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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9 November 2006 - 12:35 pm
The Democrats found success in the last election by moving to the center. This shouldn't be news. In the pre-Rove, pre-polarization days, the conventional wisdom was that elections were decided by the undecided centrists. But in recent elections voters have punished the Democrats for their centrist policies by voting for Green Party candidates -- notably Ralph Nader.* But the left didn't decided this election. Instead, right-wing voters, perhaps dismayed by the GOP's profligate spending, gave this election to the Democrats by voting Libertarian in key races.
Here are two key examples of this. First, in Montana, where the Democratic candidate has a 2,847 vote lead over the Republican incumbent, the Libertarian candidate, picked up 10,324 votes. By carrying 3% of the votes, Stan Jones, the Libertarian candidate, was able to take this election away from Conrad Burns, the Republican incumbent. And in Missouri, where Claire McCaskill has a 41,537 vote lead over Jim Talent, Frank Gilmour, the Libertarian candidate, received 47,007 votes. Again, these votes could have easily tipped things in favor of Talent, the Republican incumbent.
So while the MSM has been chalking this election up to voter's unhappiness with Iraq -- certainly, a very important component of the Democrats' success -- things could have gone very differently if the Republicans had been able to rein in their desire to spend, spend, spend. Democrats need to seize this opportunity by staking out a position as the party of fiscal responsibility. When you have the chance to take a core group of the oppositions voters into the fold, you need to seize that opportunity and run with it. Especially when the policy you'd be enacting is beneficial to the country. In the '90s, eliminating the deficit was a huge coup for the Republicans. Democrats need to emulate that success by reining in domestic spending.
* And they nearly did so again in this election: The Democratic and Republican candidates for Senate in Virgina are separated by only 7,234 votes while Gail Parker, the Green Party's Senate nominee, got 26,106 votes. But the Democrat is holding the vote advantage, so the Greens didn't get to play the role of spoiler this time.
Posted by on 9 November 2006 at 12:34 PM
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