Below the Radar?

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Jonathan forwarded me this article which shows that the Democrats held their own in state legislative races yesterday. This is not too surprising.

For one thing, the total number of self-identified Democrats is still bigger than self-identified Republicans, last I heard about it. (Anybody know if I’m wrong about this?)

Moreover, the lower down the pyramid you go, the more local the D politicians get, the more rational they necessarily become. Local politics permits few flights of ideological fancy.

For that matter, a random pair of Democrat state reps from anywhere would probably have been a better pair to run the country than Kerry and Edwards would have been. And probably run a better campaign, too.

We see Democrats shedding their centrist views as they get the presidential bug. Gephardt was a pro-Lifer until he got the bug. Hell, Jesse Jackson was.

There will always be two parties near the center. The national Donk party is in some disarray these days, true. But the lower level of the party is competitive most places.

A moment of hubris, a moment of smugness, and the GOP can lose the whole shooting match.

3 thoughts on “Below the Radar?”

  1. There’s a lot of legacy, too. When I voted in Texas, in a fairly rural precinct, just about all the candidates below the national line were Democrats, many unopposed. That’s the result of a century and a half of yellow dogs, not any kind of ideological commitment.

    If I were going to offer advice to Libertarians, it would be to start fielding candidates for county commissioner, justice of the peace, and the like. Just to, you know, get to learn what the political process is all about, and it’d be useful to see some non-uniformity “below the line.”

    And yes, my sheriff and the commissioner of the next precinct over would have done better once they got used to the scale. Not my own commissioner, sad to say… And that isn’t new. I voted for Clinton the first time, and the saddest thing about his time in office is that you could have gone to any county courthouse in the country, rounded up the time-servers and hangers-on, and gotten a better and more competent set of staffers than BC could come up with. By the look of Kerry’s proposed staffing the situation on the D side hasn’t improved much.

    Regards,
    Ric Locke


  2. Jim Miller     thought the balance was pretty even back on 02 March:

    Second, the partisan balance. To have lived in the United States when the Republican party was the majority party, you would have to have been collecting social security for several years. In 1932, Roosevelt swept into office; by 1934 or 1936 at the latest, enough voters had switched to the Democrats to give them a majority that lasted until the present. During most of those seven decades, the margin was more than a few percentage points. In 1972, with the McGovern takeover of the Democratic party, that began to change. By now, the two parties have roughly equal numbers of identifiers. (That may not show up in current polls, which have been affected by the constant stream of Democratic arguments in the nomination contests.) The number of independents has also grown, so that each group now has about one third of the electorate.

    I suspect Acorn and friends have pushed the balance slightly Democrat, but it’s a big country so probably not by much.

    Matya no baka

  3. Here in Ohio, the Republicans control all of the statewide offices. Yesterday, they won the Presidential race. I told you it would happen. They also picked up 2 supreme Court seats to give them 6 of 7 and 5 conservatives. At the same time, they lost control of the Franklin County (Columbus) board of Commissioners. So there. Ideology. No. Financial scams. They did keep most of their Judgeships.

    There will continue to be two parties and they will be the Republicans and the Democrats because they have tremendous legal advantages in the current stucture. But, until the Democrats ditch New Left Anti-American Foreign policy and quasi-socialist soak the rich economics, they have not got a prayer on a national level.

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