●How to Understand Obama’s Chances in 2012 The American Mag(2)_自考专本|专升本|高升专|高升本|在职研究生-学历教育网

Table 3

The 1998 and 2002 off-year House popular vote, expressed in electoral vote terms, turned out to be very predictive of the actual electoral vote in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The 2006 off-year House popular vote, expressed in electoral vote terms, turned out to be somewhat less predictive, although it is interesting that Senator John McCain won a number of electoral votes almost exactly equal to the average that Republicans won of the 2006 and 2008 House popular vote, expressed in electoral vote terms. The big difference between the putative electoral vote in those two elections can be accounted for by Democratic margins in 2008 in states with considerable numbers of electoral votes that had Republican margins in 2006: Arizona (10), Georgia (15), Indiana (11), Missouri (11), Virginia (13), and Wisconsin (10).

The personal popularity of some members enables them to run significantly ahead of their party and that effect is especially visible in small states.

There are limits to the usefulness of the House popular vote as an indicator of the likely presidential vote, however. The personal popularity of some members enables them to run significantly ahead of their party and that effect is especially visible in small states. A prime example is North Dakota, which elected Democratic congressmen in its single at-large seat in every election from 1980 to 2008, although it did not vote Democratic for president in any election in that period. In addition, incumbents who are beaten when their party is in bad odor with the voters tend to get significantly higher percentages than the candidate of their party in the election two years later, even when the balance of opinion hasn’t changed significantly. This helps to account for the fact that Republican House candidates carried the states listed in the last paragraph in 2006 but did not in 2008.

We see the same effect in the 2010 results. One of the striking things here is that Democrats carried the House vote in only three states between the Northeast (where they carried all New England states except New Hampshire, New York, Maryland, and Delaware) and the Pacific Coast (where they carried California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii). Those three interior states were Illinois and Minnesota, normally more Democratic than the nation as a whole, and New Mexico, where going into the 2010 election all three incumbents were Democrats. Had there been three open seat contests in New Mexico, it seems likely that Republicans would have carried the popular vote there—though that is necessarily a guess.

In any case, to get a sense of regional response it makes sense to clump states together rather than to try to look at each individual state. The following table shows the Republican percentage in House elections in five Northern regions and two Southern Regions in every election from 2000 to 2010.

Table 4

In general, the 2010 numbers look quite a lot like those from 2002 and 2004, while the 2006 and 2008 numbers are significantly different, and this is true in four of our seven regions. The Jacksonian region is significantly more Republican in 2010 than in 2002-2004; this is in part a result of the 2003 Texas redistricting plan, which resulted in the retirement or defeat of several white Democratic House members, but it is also a reflection of the considerable unpopularity of the dovish Obama in this hawkish region, which was apparent in 2008 in both the Democratic primaries and the general election (in which Obama did not come close to carrying any of these nine states, five of which voted for Bill Clinton in 1992). Note that the Republican percentage increased 11% in Jacksonian America between 2008 and 2010, the biggest such increase in the nation, and that this region in 2010 was distinctly the most Republican, which certainly was not the case in 2000-2004.

Also, Republicans ran slightly better in Germano-Scandinavian America in 2010 than they had in 2002-2004; this has traditionally been the most dovish or isolationist part of the country, and these results may have reflected an aversion to the assertive foreign and military policy of George W. Bush combined with a lack of enthusiasm in response to Obama’s incomplete reversal of those policies.

Which America will we be living in for the 2012 election? Recent precedent suggests it will resemble 2010 and 2002-2004 America more than 2006-2008 America.
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