I've been collecting and sorting data about Congressional races from the recent election. My goal is to come up with a plan to influence Congress even though we lack majority control.
I'm not really sure if that's feasible, but I plan to do a diary on that in a few days.
In the meantime, I've found some interesting things about the election that might make you feel better. Some of this stuff is really kind of cool and might change your mind about whether we were badly beaten (below the fold).
Everybody's looked at the Presidential election results from the south and the west, and concluded that the Democratic Party is a miserable failure in both places. That's simply wrong - successes in state level races were phenomenal in states like MT, CO and NC among others, but even at the Congressional level, if you look, you'll find a lot of Democratic Members of Congress in the red states. Most of them won with more than a 20% margin (which is typical of all incumbents).
Bush had his greatest margin in UT (71% of the total vote), so surely that's a purely red state now? Wrong - Democratic Rep. Matheson [corrected] won election in UT-02 by 55% to 43%. Virtually every red state that has more than one or two Representatives has at least one Dem Representative, and some red states that have only one Representative (SD and ND) are represented by Dems. SD and ND also have Dem Senators, even after Daschle's loss.
We all know Obama had a phenomenal win in IL, with an almost unbelievable margin of victory of 43%. Wouldn't it be great if all Dems had that margin? Not really - 59 Democrats won election/re-election with a margin of 44% or more (48 in blue states, 11 in red states). Only 23 Republicans managed that kind of victory (just 3 in blue states and 20 in red states).
Those numbers don't count elections where the winner ran unopposed by a candidate from the opposite major party. Some had competition from Libertarians, Greens or other Independents. I remember hand-wringing earlier in the year about the number of seats Dems didn't contest - there were 36 Republicans who didn't have a Dem challenger.
Karl Rove would never let the Rs do that right? I mean they fight for every seat, don't they? Well, all except 27 seats where Dems ran unopposed - some in red states.
The biggest surprise to me is how successful incumbents are. Not only do they rarely fail to win re-election, but their margin almost always exceeds 20% (better than 60-40 in a two-way race). However even that factoid is subject to qualification - 2006 is an off-year election and won't see nearly the turnout the 2004 election had. Think it's worthwhile to keep organizations like ACT (for turnout) and MoveOn (for ads) in operation?
We lost the Presidency. Only by 3% in the popular vote, and really only by 140,000 or so votes in OH. We lost a few Senate races, mostly in states where we didn't expect to win, and most of our losses in the House (which are small) are attributable to DeLay's TX redistricting.
Don't let people tell you we need to radically restructure the party or that the Republicans have a "mandate". If they claim that, ask them for real election data to back that up. People who make that claim need to explain why we have significant Dem wins in very red states, and not just a few.
We obviously need to fix some things to win bigger in 2006 or 2008, but we did a damn fine job in this election.
PS: I've been transcribing the election data by hand, and have found a few errors I made, so some of the above may be off plus or minus 1 or 2, but I've been reviewing and feel it's pretty good data.