In the wake of the Republican victory in the election for Senator in Massachusetts, many puzzling things have been observed. A Washington Post poll showed stunning results, such as that 13% of them support the current health care reform bill, that 33% approve of President Obama's job performance, and that one in four Brown voters are enthusiastic about or support the current policies of the Federal government. 37% of Brown voters are dissatisfied with or angry with Republican Congressional policies!
This information has been (rightly) used to repudiate the lazy media narrative of Brown's election being a national referendum where health care reform specifically and the agenda of the Obama administration generally were rejected by the electorate. But what does this information really tell us?
It is first useful to put this information in context with the broader data we have about the political awareness of the American people. For example, about half of Americans don't know that each state has two Senators. Over half cannot name their Congressperson, and 40% don't know the name of either of their Senators. 70% of Americans at least can name the party that controls the House of Representatives; only 60% can name the party that controls the Senate. Slightly fewer can correctly name the party affiliation of their Senators.
Under the circumstances, it wouldn't be surprising if a significant number of Massachusetts voters thought they were voting for the Democrat when electing Scott Brown. But these numbers don't matter much. We don't have the poll data because no one cared to ask, but I'd posit we'd see significantly similar percentages of Coakley voters who thought they were opposing President Obama and his policies. Errors of ignorance tend to be offsetting; there is no good reason to believe that the uninformed voted for Brown in greater numbers than they did for Coakley based on randomness alone.
That the errors of the uninformed offset and don't influence the overall result is accepted social science, and is part of the miracle of aggregation. The miracle in question is that ignorance is distributed randomly along the ideological spectrum, and therefore offsets, while movements among the informed end up determining the results of elections. That a large number of Brown voters (and Coakley voters) should be uninformed and casting votes in near contradiction to the facts is, by social science, anticipated.
This leads to several problems, however, for us as activists. For example, the common narrative is that President Obama is having a difficult time getting what he wants from Congress. This is reflected in the far greater popularity that the President has compared to Congress. But it is not the reality: President Obama has enjoyed unprecedented success with Congress, winning 96.7% of votes where the White House has indicated a preference, a rate far exceeding that of Lyndon Johnson or Franklin Roosevelt. To put that into more recent perspective, in 2002, immediately following 9/11 when the Democrats supposedly gave Bush everything he wanted, Bush's success rate never went above 89%.
The argument can be made, perhaps rightly, that this is not a good indicator because it only counts issues that come to a vote, or that what the White House and Congressional Democrats want is far from what the Democratic base wants. But even so, that does not explain the gulf between the public and media perception of the first year of the Obama presidency and Democratic supermajority, and the reality of two branches of government working together on common goals with an unprecedented rate of legislative success.
Unfortunately, the second mistaken belief helps promote the first.
Conflict is much more interesting and easier to sell than unity and progress. It is much easier to highlight the aspects of disunity among the Democratic caucus than it is to notice the spectacular results the caucus has had in holding together, and the success of the White House in getting Congress to enact its agenda. It is much easier to deride the overpublicized failures of Reid and Pelosi, and to highlight the errors of President Obama (who does us all the favor of repeatedly admitting error to highlight his difference from President Bush) without noticing how he has avoided the sort of legislative failures that even the most successful predecessors of his office have endured.
Yet, in a world where even the average voter lacks much essential informed knowledge about our government and its policies, the overwhelming attention given to conflict and focus on the negative directly contributes to greater disunity and inaction. Whether or not Brown's election is the end of healthcare reform, it probably does spell an end to the success rate of 96.7% of our Congress and White House working together on legislation.
We are in a time of national crisis. Our government being able to act in a unified and purposeful manner to respond to our crises is a crucial national goal, and one which President Obama's government did an exceptional job of in its first year. They did not do nearly all that I wished they would do or that I reasonably hoped they would do. I want and expect more from them in the future.
But I am proud of the job they have done, with all its warts. And I do not feel abashed in offering them my support now or in the foreseeable future.