So what really happened yesterday? The simple and most telling answer is that not enough happened.
National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" news program today shared some preliminary statistics about Tuesday's midterm elections and the numbers are so startling it's a wonder this isn't front-page news everywhere. Check this out:
In the last presidential election two years ago, 130 million Americans voted. The total population of the country then, including children and everyone else, was around 316 million.
In the last midterm elections four years ago, 91 million voted -- about 42 percent of all eligible voters.
Tuesday's numbers are not complete or official yet, but most of them are in and, according to Associated Press statistics, the preliminary numbers suggest that only 83 million Americans voted yesterday. Some states had higher turnout, some lower. Overall, however, that preliminary total amounts to just 36.6 percent of the electorate.
Yes, that's right. Nearly two-thirds of American voters yesterday stayed home by choice or necessity, or tried to vote and couldn't, perhaps thanks to shorter early voting hours, overly complex Voter ID laws, or because their names were unfairly tossed off the voter rolls by zealous, self-serving Republican officeholders in charge of state elections.
And remember: The population of the US grew over the past four years, so this low, low turn-out is even worse than it looks.
It's simply scandalous.
As if that weren't bad enough, NPR passed along a disturbing coda:
If the final tally doesn't raise the turnout to 38.1 percent, this year's mid-term national elections would become a record disaster in terms of participation. Because that figure is the percentage of voters who turned out in the 1942 midterms, a modern historical low. And 1942 was the middle of World War II, when many Americans were fighting overseas and absentee balloting for many of those public servants simply wasn't feasible.
So when Republicans tell you that yesterday they won a wave election and a sweeping mandate, feel free to roll your eyes, because the answer is that the election itself was inundated by a wave of voter apathy and frustration. Many among us stayed home in droves. The election process itself was, in Sarah Palin's malapropistic tongue, refudiated, by force or by choice.
It's pathetic. But it's probably mainly a sign that an increasing number of economically stressed Americans have lost faith in our democratic processes, elections in particular. And they're voting with their feet instead of their hands. Call it enlightened apathy.
All this hand-sitting might benefit Republicans in the short run, but it distorts politics and wrecks the country in the process, unless you think autocracy and oligarchy are good things, like many Republicans seem to think. And the GOP once again has been rewarded by a mass disinclination among Americans to even bother participating.
None of us -- not even Republicans -- should be proud or happy about this, nor should we believe the system worked yesterday, even discounting any willful hacking of the vote count. It certainly didn't result in elections that matched up with policies that voters often said in polls they favored. Worse, this result was in no way an endorsement of how America works, or political faithfulness to the vision of the founding fathers. What's next? Government by unelected committee, say a panel of CEOs?
Meanwhile, some current Republicans are clearly interested in following the shameless but candid example of the late conservative activist Paul Weyrich, who in 1980 said:
"I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our [GOP] leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
Weyrich's modern successors in the conservative movement have in some cases gone so far as to suggest voting should be made even harder still, perhaps by requiring new "voter qualification tests" or other variants on previously banned barriers. Hi, there, Jim Crow, we hardly missed ya.
It's true: America seems to be heading down a path to where a handful of elites do most of the voting, thanks to campaign folderol, hate speech and political games of chicken that turn off more and more voters. And it's all pretty much courtesy of Republicans, who have increasingly relied upon those and other tactics to remain relevant and retain power. They have deliberately thwarted and cheapened democracy for the profit of their own party and their well-heeled backers. Result: Americans increasingly are leaving the card table. Why participate in a rigged game where you're likely to lose a lot more often than you win?
No wonder politicians increasingly disdain the views of the great mass of their constituents and even wholly ignore them while heading farther in the direction of serving small cartels. In this election, voters considered a number of red state referendums, joined by dozens of voters in localities weighing in on similar measures, and they generally came down strongly in favor of sizable minimum wage hikes and Medicaid expansion -- both anathema to the party now running Congress.
Go figure. Some democracy! Welcome to the new America, where you will be guaranteed the right to work for less and the enforced option of voting less often, if you even at this point care to vote at all.
The authoritarians and dystopians have won another round. The only questions you should ask about the meaning of that outcome are: Did you vote against them, or did you even vote at all?