Category Archives: Election ’14

Gun Control and Electoral Math – The Scoreboard

Two years ago, I wrote a piece about electoral math and gun control, and how it was unlikely that we would have any serious national level gun control… and we have not (state level is another story unfortunately).

In that, I included a list of democratic senators who were up for re-election this year, their position on gun control, and how “at risk” their seat was:

Stupidity, Politics, and Electoral Math

So, now that we have the results of all of their elections, let’s see what the last two years hath wrought among them:

XX = Unelected (or resigned and replaced by Republican)

  1. XX – Alaska – Mark Begich – Very Pro Gun – very unsafe seat
  2. XX – Arkansas – Mark Pryor – neutral – very unsafe seat
  3. XX – Colorado – Mark Udall – neutral – not a safe seat
  4. Delaware – Chris Coons – Very anti-gun – safe seat
  5. Hawaii – UNKNOWN (special election to replace Daniel Inouye) – safe seat
  6. Illinois – Dick Durbin – Very anti-gun – safe seat
  7. XX – Iowa – Tom Harkin – Very anti-gun – iffy, can’t afford to screw up
  8. XX – Louisiana – Mary Landrieu – neutral – very unsafe seat
  9. Massachusetts – UNKNOWN (special election to replace John Kerry) – safe seat
  10. Michigan – Carl Levin – very anti-gun – safe seat
  11. Minnesota – Al Franken – very anti-gun – not a safe seat
  12. XX – Montana – Max Baucus – very pro-gun – iffy, can’t afford to screw up
  13. New Hampshire – Jeanne Shaheen – very anti-gun – not a safe seat
  14. New Jersey – Frank Lautenberg – very anti-gun – safe seat
  15. New Mexico – Tom Udall – slightly anti-gun – safe seat
  16. XX – North Carolina – Kay Hagan – very anti-gun – not a safe seat
  17. Oregon – Jeff Merkley – very anti-gun – safe seat
  18. Rhode Island – Jack Reed – very anti-gun – safe seat
  19. XX – South Dakota – Tim Johnson – very pro-gun – very unsafe seat
  20. Virginia – Mark Warner – very pro-gun – not a safe seat
  21. XX – West Virginia – Jay Rockefeller – moderately anti-gun – very unsafe seat

Lotta XX’s there… 9 actually, out of 21 (10 of those 21 were considered safe seats, barely challenged by Republicans). Pretty much every anti-gun democrat that wasn’t in a safe seat, except Shaheen and Franken (and they’re kinda weird cases).

And THAT folks, is why we will not have any significant gun control on the national level any time soon.

I am a cynically romantic optimistic pessimist. I am neither liberal, nor conservative. I am a (somewhat disgruntled) muscular minarchist… something like a constructive anarchist.

Basically what that means, is that I believe, all things being equal, responsible adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do, so long as nobody’s getting hurt, who isn’t paying extra

The Republican Traveling Interstate Electoral Paradox and Clown Show

While I have no interest in Jeb Bush as president… really I think very few people do… he’s absolutely correct on the ideological problem Republicans face.

From The Hill:

“Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush made the case for a more centrist Republican Party on Monday night, saying a nominee should “lose the primary to win the general without violating your principles.”

Bush’s apparent strategy not to try to appeal to the most conservative elements of the party contrasts to some degree with Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, where some questioned whether he tacked too far to the right in the primary, hurting his ability to get back toward the center for the general election.

Bush laid out policy positions that could be controversial among the conservative base.”

Unfortunately, we have the example of 2012 and Mitt Romney to show us both side of this problem INCREDIBLY clearly.

In order to win in the primaries, you generally have to appeal to strongly motivated partisans, and fundraisers. In order to get their support, you generally have to stake out stronger ideological positions, which appeal to single states or regions, than much of “the center” is comfortable with, on a national basis. The positions that appeal to Floridians, don’t necessarily appeal to Pennsylvanians, or Iowans, or Ohioans.

An aside: Of course, in reality, there is no such thing as a political “center”, or an “independent”. These are polite fictions and rhetorical constructs, adopted by the media, and by people who either don’t understand their own political positions, or are trying to convince people of something (including themselves). 

While both major parties have this problem, and prior to the 90s democrats generally suffered from it worse than Republicans; since Bush the elder, the reverse has generally been true.

I think in part it’s because Democrats got smarter, and more cynical… while at the same time, Republicans seemingly got stupider (politically that is)… and also more cynical but in a less politically useful way.

Bush the Elder failed to win reelection, because 40% of the country thought he was too conservative, and 40% of the country thought he was too liberal. When presented with an “alternative” in Ross Perot, whom both liberals and conservatives, and “independents”, were able to project their aspirations on; Bush lost just enough more support than Clinton, that Clinton was able to squeak a plurality victory in.

We repeated the same charade with Romney and Obama in 2012 (and in fact McCain and Obama in 2008).

Obama didn’t win re-election because of increasing or even maintaining democrat and “centrist” support (he actually lost some)… He won reelection because a very large portion of the right decided to stay home rather than vote for Romney, whom they considered a closet liberal.

In 2012, there were honestly millions of people in this country, who opposed Obama and everything he stood for, but somehow convinced themselves that:

“it’s better if Obama stays in power and we fight against him, and the country gets even worse so that everyone will know how bad liberals are, and next time we can get a “REAL CONSERVATIVE”; because if we elect Romney, he’ll be just as bad as Obama, and harder to fight against”.

If you don’t believe that people could be that silly… just ask a hard right “conservative”, or a “tea party” supporter (or for that matter, a liberal who voted for the “green” party, because Obama wasn’t liberal enough).

Meanwhile, the media and the left very effectively painted Romney as a radical right wing nut job… so successfully, that they seemingly actually believed their own BS…

I’m not sure if they just completely ignored the facts that Romney had almost no actual conservative support prior to the general, that his actual stated positions were relatively “moderate”, and that there were YEARS worth of articles, editorials, fox news opinion pieces, and general conservative HATE of Romney…

…Or if somehow they convinced themselves that all that was a psyop against them, to slip manchurian ultraconservative Romney in under their noses?

…’cuz seriously… the Republican party, and conservative media, are not that smart, that competent, or anywhere NEAR that unified and coordinated.

…If they were, they could actually have elected a president.

The Republican primary process has been an absurd clown show the last two electoral cycles.

On what planet, would Michele Bachmann ever be taken seriously as a national candidate? Because it certainly isn’t this one.

How about Mike Huckabee?

Or Rick Santorum?

… And yet, these clowns were able to make a decent enough showing in the primaries to be taken seriously, because they had small but passionate single issue followings, who donated sufficient money to keep their nutjob single issue panderers on the campaign trail.

After 8 years of Obama and the Dems in congress finding new and interesting ways of getting the country to hate them, one would generally assume a Republican presidential LOCK for 2016.

The only way it won’t be, is if they screw up really badly in congress in the next two years (a significant possibility)…

… Or if they end up with another clown show primary process, from which they attempt to pick the least offensive clown as their candidate.

I am a cynically romantic optimistic pessimist. I am neither liberal, nor conservative. I am a (somewhat disgruntled) muscular minarchist… something like a constructive anarchist.

Basically what that means, is that I believe, all things being equal, responsible adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do, so long as nobody’s getting hurt, who isn’t paying extra

What Republicans Should Do With Their Victory

Veronique de Rugy, writing for the National Review Online, nailed it in her piece entitled “What the New Republican Congress Should and Shouldn’t Do.” Recognizing the GOP victory reflects frustration with the current administration, rather than endorsement of any GOP mandate, she lists suggestions for what Republicans should and should not attempt in the next few years. I agreed with every item on her list and urge everyone to read it in its entirety.

On her list of Do’s: continuing to work toward repeal of Obamacare and passing as many piecemeal anti-Obamacare bills as possible via budget rules; radically reforming the FDA using the opportunity of its reauthorization in 2015; reforming the corporate income tax (de Rugy proposes doing away with it, but she would settle for lowering it below the rate in other countries); and ending the War on Drugs.

Her list of Do Not’s include: warmongering and nation-building; a federal minimum wage increase; reauthorizing the Ex-Im Bank charter; enacting an internet sales tax; creating any new entitlement program; cutting taxes without paying for it with spending cuts; or increasing spending.

I thought her list was pretty comprehensive, but I have seen good additions from my fellow contributors at the Liberty Papers over the last few days. In a post on his Facebook page, Kevin Boyd added education reform and immigration reform as “Do’s.” In a post-election essay here at The Liberty Papers, he added:

Here’s what the GOP needs to do, they need start giving the American people reasons to vote for them in 2016. Start passing and forcing Obama to veto no-brainer bills on tax reform, spending cuts, healthcare reform, crony capitalism repeal, ending Common Core, etc. Also, the GOP must restrain the Ted Cruz types from picking unnecessary fights for publicity. They cannot let the Tea Party dominate messaging. Finally, Republicans must step up outreach towards minorities and young people, starting now.

I also agreed with Tom Knighton’s conclusion that the GOP should not assume it has been given a mandate for social conservatism on the national level:

[A]lso in Tuesday’s results were…new locations approving marijuana use on some level… Polls show support for marijuana (at least for medical use) and support for gay marriage. Translation: There’s zero reason to believe that the American people actually support social conservatism.

… You see, the American people don’t want that. The[y] like the idea of freedom, more or less.

What about you? Can you think of any other important Do’s or Do Not’s for the new Republican Congress? If so, share them in the comments.

 

Sarah Baker is a libertarian, attorney and writer. She lives in Montana with her daughter and a house full of pets.

Which Party Are Libertarian Party Candidates Drawing From? You’ll Be Surprised To Know Which One It Is

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Conventional wisdom holds that Libertarian Party candidates draw votes away from Republican candidates. However, some exit polling from Tuesday’s midterms shows that wisdom may not be true.

Reason‘s Brian Doherty looked at the exit polling in North Carolina and Virginia and found that it’s not necessarily true.

It isn’t common for Democrats to accuse Libertarians of “spoiling” elections for them, but a look at NBC News exit polls show that Haugh voters indeed came more from people who consider themselves “moderate” (5 percent of self-identified moderates went Haugh) and even “liberal” (4 percent of liberals voted for Haugh) than from conservatives (only 2 percent of whom voted for Haugh). Those were the only three choices for self-identification.

Only 1 percent each of self-identified Democrats or Republicans voted Haugh, while 9 percent of Independents did. (Those again were the only choices.) (Independents otherwise went 49-42 for Tillis over Hagan.)

In other exit poll results, Haugh’s portion of the vote fell pretty steadily as age groups got older—he got 9 percent of the 18-24 vote, and only 2 percent of the 50-and-over crowd.

Haugh did strongest among white women in race/gender breakdowns, with 5 percent of that crowd, and only 1 percent of black men or black woman—and no polled number of Latino men or women.

Other interesting Haugh exit poll results: His overall man/woman breakdown was the same, 4 percent of each in the exit poll. Haugh’s numbers got progressively smaller as voter income got bigger—he earned 6 percent of the under-$30K vote but only 1 percent of the over-$200K vote. Libertarians aren’t just for plutocrats.

As Doherty points out in an earlier piece, Sean Haugh, the Libertarian candidate in North Carolina, ran as a left-libertarian who was generally opposed to cutting social services. As for Robert Sarvis, the Libertarian candidate in Virginia, Doherty believes that Sarvis may have cost Ed Gillespie the Senate race. However, Sarvis e-mailed Doherty and says otherwise:

One can’t assume the 3 percent Rs would be voting [Gillespie] in my absence—it’s quite likely these R voters would have joined the 7 percent of Rs voting for Warner. Polls throughout the race showed Warner enjoying double-digit support among Rs, and a fair number of Rs told us they can’t stomach voting for [Gillespie]. A lot of business-type Republicans consider Warner acceptable, so probably many Rs who really disliked [Gillespie] voted for me because I was preferable to Warner, but would otherwise have voted Warner not Gillespie. So those R Sarvis voters were “taken” from Warner not Gillespie.

Similar thing happened last year, with pretty high certainty. A poll in September showed that *among Sarvis supporters*, 60+ percent had a favorable opinion of Gov. McDonnell, but 70+ percent had an UN-favorable view of Cuccinelli. So I was a vessel for moderate, R-leaning, anti-Cuccinelli voters who preferred voting for me to voting for MacAuliffe, i.e., I “took” moderate R votes from MacAuliffe.

Moreover, my share of the Independent vote clearly skewed younger, so from voters not inclined to vote D than R.

I agree with Sarvis’s analysis of his own voters, that they’re moderate and left-leaning. Sean Davis at The Federalist analyzed the 2013 Virginia Governor’s race that Sarvis brought up in his e-mail to Doherty and found that Sarvis may have actually helped Democrats in that race. As Ben Dominich, also at The Federalist points out, Sarvis ran on some progressive-leaning positions on economics in the 2013 race. I’m sure Sarvis simply held on to some of these 2013 voters.

Back to the 2014 race, Davis tweeted this about Sarvis and Virginia:

This is the culmination of a progressive shift within the libertarian movement that is gaining traction, particularly within the Libertarian Party. Many so-called “second wave libertarians” and “millennial libertarians” are trying to merge progressivism and libertarianism to form a left-libertarian fusion of sorts. Also, most conservative-leaning libertarians and “conservatarians” (who are still the vast majority in the liberty movement) have already rejoined or never left the Republican Party.

So the party that needs to worry about the Libertarian Party, most of the time, are the Democrats, especially as the LP continues to shift towards the left.

I’m one of the original co-founders of The Liberty Papers all the way back in 2005. Since then, I wound up doing this blogging thing professionally. Now I’m running the site now. You can find my other work at The Hayride.com and Rare. You can also find me over at the R Street Institute.

Can We End the Insulting “War on Women” Meme Now?

Lady Parts

Colorado Senator Mark Udall has a strong record of fighting back against surveillance state abuses. If I lived in Colorado, I would have considered voting for him, as the lesser of two evils, on that basis alone. Instead “Senator Uterus” squandered that advantage by running on the phony and demeaning “war on women.” Let us hope his defeat, along with that of Wendy Davis, sends this insulting meme to the quick death and deep burial it deserves.

Even the use of the word “war” is offensive.

War is the Rape of Nanking. It is the Sebrenica Massacre. War is the Rwandan Genocide. It is 45 million people dead in four years under Mao Ze-Dong and twenty million murdered or starved under Stalin.

War is the freakin’ Holocaust.

Acid attacks, honor killings, forced marriages, slavery, and stoning. Those things might rise to the level of a “war on women.”

Having to pay for your own birth control does not. Neither does a deadline of twenty weeks to terminate a pregnancy. If the wage gap was real (it is not), even that does not constitute “war.”

Using that word to describe anything experienced by women in the 21st century in the United States is an insult to my fortitude and intelligence, and to the victims of real wars all over the world.

But the meme does not stop there. It doubles down on this heaping pile of insult by treating certain issues as inherently interesting to women.

I am more than the sum of my “lady parts[1] and the issues inevitably lumped together under the rubric “women’s issues” hold little interest for me.

Abortion has been protected since 1973. Only 28% of women believe it should be legal in all circumstances. Like 72% of all women, I am not one of them. The wage gap has been massively and repeatedly debunked.[2] The right to purchase and use birth control has been protected since 1965, and I have been able to afford it since I took my first job as a teenager. To the extent I have political concerns about birth control, it is to support over-the-counter availability, as proposed by Udall’s Republican challenger, or to wonder: If birth control is so unaffordable, how are women to pay for the health insurance policies covering birth control as just one of many expensive mandates?

Here are my issues: I think the growth of the surveillance state is an unacceptable trade-off in the fight against terrorism. I worry that the U.S. is crossing moral lines in its reliance on drone warfare, and that we are getting bogged down in never-ending conflicts in the Middle East. I fear our overseas interventions constitute sprinkling water on little terrorist Mogwai. I want non-violent drug offenders released from prison and reunited with their families. I worry about inflation in consumer prices outpacing real increases to income. I believe free markets produce the most beneficial results and that minimum wage laws destroy jobs and harm low-income workers. I think government debt and deficits are immoral and untenable burdens to pass on to our children. I am opposed to restrictions on political speech.

I care passionately about each one of those things.

When politicians suggest I should instead be focused on free birth control or manufactured outrage over phantom discrimination, it is like they are saying, “Oh, don’t worry your little head about those other issues. Those are for the menfolk to work out.”

It is like I am being patted on the head and told, “You’re pretty smart…for a girl.”

To those on the left who want to keep this meme alive, please watch this video of a woman fall down, get back up and start running again. Then consider whether you really want to tell us you think buying our own birth control is too hard.

[1] Unlike man parts, lady parts are protected by U.S. law, both figuratively—as set forth in this post—and literally.

[2] When economists control for educations, occupations, positions, length of time in the workplace, hours worked per week, and other similar variables, the gap narrows to pennies on the dollar. It may not exist at all, since even the remaining gap may be explained by “legitimate wage differences masked by over-broad occupational categories,” lumping together such disparate professions as sociologists and economists or librarians, lawyers and professional athletes.

Sarah Baker is a libertarian, attorney and writer. She lives in Montana with her daughter and a house full of pets.
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