A Lesson From a Past Election
There have been some surprising results in past elections as well as this one, and there are some lessons to apply. I remember back in the November election of 2010, President Obama experienced what he called a "shellacking" in that midterm vote.
Obama appeared contrite. "He suggested that Americans would have been more confident in the administration's actions if the nation's unemployment rate was 5 percent now instead of 9.6 percent."
Which I suppose is true. But why the American electorate believed the economy should have been that good after suffering the greatest economic calamity of the Post War era, and doing this in less than 20 months shows how voters think. When Obama took the oath, the economy was still in a death spiral and the unemployment rate was still accelerating, and hard. The foreclosure rate had yet to peak, reaching it's height in January of 2010. People simply forgot how out of control things were. It was like someone played "52 Pickup" with the entire economy.
GDP went negative, and on a spectacular level. Like no one has ever seen before.
How anyone expected that this shattered economy could be cured in so short a time was being quite unreasonable. But voters don't care about reasons. They don't think about counterfactuals. They think the next guy will bring positive changes. However, by Obama's second term, the economy had mostly healed and was in a good place. But even so, many voters gave him no credit. I remember the headline to this remarkable article by heart:
"Obama Gets Scant Credit in Indiana Region Where Recovery Was Robust"
It seems politics is a pretty lousy job. Even diligence, honesty and success aren't rewarded, and I've seen this in local elections where dedicated public servants were replaced by some pretty sketchy characters. There's nothing new here, as the electorate tends to have a "throw the bums out" attitude with each election. Policy really doesn't move people, even when it's well structured and thoughtful. Even Winston Churchill suffered a similar fate after rescuing his country.
What you're seeing here is people projecting their own frustrations on their government, and the irony is that most of it comes from people who say you shouldn't rely on it. But whatever the environment, it seems neither Party keeps control for more than two election cycles anyway, and no good favor goes unpunished.
November 12, 2024
