Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Party ID ... leave it at the exit poll
The 2008 congressional election was candidate centric not party centric because of low congressional approval during the voting week. you ccan find this info here and here. the week of the vote, congressional approval was between 17 and 21 % yet members were elected by large margins. if we look at our own data, from wisconsin it might help narrow things down a bit. I can't find any data regarding congressional approval from WI, but i can look at the voting data for our congresspeople. remember the national approval of congress is pretty stinkin low. the winning percentages however are pretty high the lowest win percentage is 54% - you can see the representatives vote percentages here. Why is this? why are the approval ratings ranging from the mid 50 to the high 70's if the congressional approval is low? in 7 of the 8 districts that we have here, the incumbents won. the 8th district had no incumbent. this bucks the trend that was displayed by a democratic takeover of congress, because the seats didnt change, even though we all thought congress was doing a pretty craptacular job! how can this be? I think that we have to separate the congressional races from congress as a whole. when people vote in congressional races, the focus is on the candidates, not the entire body. gerrymandering aside, if the district voters vote sincerely, and they feel their particular congressperson is doing a good job, then there would be little cause to change the rep. hence the incumbency advantage. but if this is the case, and people do get frustrated with congress as a whole, why do we see national shifts in party majorities? are some voters different than others? do some take their frustration with the majority party out on their congressional rep? that's not very nice. how can we explain this duality? i find this interesting, however unsolved by my data. I will muse on this more and update this.
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The 8th district did have an incumbent in 2008! Steve Kagan was elected in 2006, and ran for reelection. How does this relate to the gapology discussion from this weeks readings?
ReplyDeletejust as a simple observation, there hasnt been much of a national shift in party majority when you exclude the past decade or so. obviously, there were swings in 2002 and 2006. before that, the republican takeover in 1994. but prior to that, the last time the republicans held a majority in the house was in the 1940's.
ReplyDeletethis is mainly due to the incumbency advantage, but also changing political ideologies on a national level.
people voting on a candidate basis is also rather common in the senate. although they face tougher opponents when running for reelection, the voter seldom associates the incumbent senator with the senate as a whole. i feel (again) russ feingold is a prime example. while approval for congress as a whole was very low, he won reelection in 2004 as a candidate who is seen as very liberal, but still maintained the ability to appeal to the broad constituency of residents outside of the liberal-dominant urban areas.