Relax, Democrats

By RUY TEIXEIRA
NYT

TO hear Republicans tell it, Tuesday’s elections, in which their candidates captured the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, were a repudiation of President Obama and indicated a voter shift toward their party. They should calm themselves down. The results don’t show this and, in fact, suggest some rather daunting challenges for the Republicans.

Start with the predictive value of the Virginia and New Jersey victories: there is none. Sometimes the party that wins both those governorships gains seats in the next Congressional election; sometimes that party loses seats. Far more consequential is the historical pattern that the new president’s party tends to lose seats in the first midterm election. Once that is taken into account, as the political scientist Alan Abramowitz of Emory University has shown, victories in Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races tell you nothing about who will gain seats in 2010 or how large that gain will be.

But perhaps voters were repudiating the president and his policies? In New Jersey, this analysis makes no sense. While an approval rating isn’t the same thing as the percentage of votes received, both figures are good measures of a politician’s overall standing. So it’s significant that Mr. Obama’s approval rating among 2009 voters (57 percent) was identical to the percent of the vote he received there in 2008. In Virginia, while the president’s 2009 approval rating was 5 points less than his 2008 voting result, the 2009 electorate was also far more conservative than last year’s. Besides being far older and whiter than in 2008, the voters in Virginia on Tuesday said they had supported John McCain last November by 8 points, meaning they were not favorably inclined toward President Obama to begin with. In fact, given that only 43 percent of these voters said they supported Mr. Obama last November, his 48 percent approval rating among them does not indicate a shift away from him but rather toward him.

If any repudiation is going on, perhaps it is of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Democrats captured New York’s 23rd Congressional District for the first time since 1872, as Bill Owens defeated Doug Hoffman, the hard-line conservative who forced a moderate Republican out of the race. Mr. Hoffman’s narrow defeat is now likely to embolden conservatives — who far outnumber moderates in the party — to challenge Republican incumbents they find ideologically impure.

(More here.)

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