The election results aren't what they seem at first blush, reports Michael Cooper in the Times after taking a cool look at numbers and at responses on surveys.
...A majority of voters said they had an unfavorable view of the Republican Party. In fact, there was little difference in how voters viewed the two parties: 53 percent said they had an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party, and 52 percent said they had an unfavorable opinion of the Republican Party.
Weeks before the midterms, the Republicans were in even worse shape. Any examination of the November 2 vote makes any claim of a "mandate" for Republicans look kind of silly, much as winners are given to thinking in those terms. Exit polling and more detailed surveys just don't back up John Boehner's "repudiation" claims about everything from government to health care reform.
American voters rarely speak with an unambiguous voice. Consider the question of so-called Big Government, which, if exit polls are to be believed, voters have contradictory feelings about. A majority agreed that the government was doing too many things that are better left to businesses and individuals. But voters were fairly evenly divided on what many Republicans made Exhibit A in their case that the Obama administration had overreached: the new health care law. The exit polls found that 47 percent of voters said Congress should leave the law as it is or expand it, and that 48 percent said Congress should repeal it. Not exactly a ringing mandate for repeal.
Voters were also divided on questions of taxing and spending. When people were asked what the highest priority of the next Congress should be, 37 percent said “spending to create jobs,” which was only slightly behind the 39 percent who said “reducing the budget deficit.”
Tax cuts -- tax cuts? -- remain popular among those who want to reduce deficits. Uh, doesn't make sense, does it!
Then, too, there's hardly anything to back up the claim that Democrats have lost younger voters. Both parties "lost" younger voters. They always do in midterms.
Young voters are among the most transient and tend to sit out midterm elections. This year was no different.
Young voters did make up a decidedly smaller portion of the electorate this year: 11 percent, down from 18 percent in 2008, when many turned out for the presidential election. But their turnout this year was not much different from their turnout in the last midterm elections, in 2006, when 12 percent of the voters were under 30.
The results of the midterms were something less than a "shellacking" for President Obama.
For one thing, he does not seem to own the economic downturn — yet. When voters were asked who was most to blame for the current economic problems, 35 percent said Wall Street bankers, 29 percent said President George W. Bush and 23 percent said Mr. Obama.
And despite what politicians, political analysts and pundits have been saying for weeks, if not months, most of the voters themselves claimed that the election was not a referendum on the president. A minority of the voters — 37 percent — said that expressing opposition to Mr. Obama was a factor in their vote, but an equal number said that the president was not a factor in their votes at all. Nearly a quarter said they voted the way they did in part to express support for the president.
You can try to make an argument that Democrats are on their way to permanent exile but they aren't. Remember, Cooper writes, only a little more than a year ago Republicans were featured on a Time cover as an endangered species.
