112th congress – Moe Lane

Looking at the recent House special election record.

Now that we’ve had some time to digest last week’s special election results – or, in the Democrats’ case, have the equivalent of a gallstone attack over them – I think that it’s a time that we look at some of the House’s special election results over the last two election cycles generally. Partially because we’re starting to get enough samples to do a laughingly pseudo-scientific analysis of them; and partially because doing so will allow us to destroy the Other Side’s laughingly pseudo-scientific analysis. Less cynically, there are general trends that might be discernible, down there in the muck.

Below the fold is a look at every special election to date in the 111th and 112th Congress. I chose not to look at the 110th Congress because I’ll readily enough concede that the net +3 Democratic gain was part of that party’s generally successful 2008 election strategy – although I note with some amusement that the three seats (IL-14, LA-06, & MS-01) all flipped back in the 2010 election, which means that it was a wash overall anyway. I also didn’t include LA-01’s flip (and flip-back), mostly because while Cao’s win looked like a special election it really wasn’t. Likewise, it was also a wash.

Continue reading Looking at the recent House special election record.

Quote (and Thought) of the Day, WSJ edition.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page despises the current leadership of the Democratic party as only a group of people with an iconic link to free-market capitalism can be, and said despising shines through every word of this piece sneering at the ‘accomplishments’ of the 111th Congress. Scare quotes deliberate: the WSJ opines (and I agree) that the Democrats are guessing and gambling that they can get their hideously unpopular agenda functional for long enough that people will simply start treating it as part of the landscape. I think that that is wishful thinking on the Democrats’ part, and so does the WSJ:

The difference between the work of the 111th Congress and that of either the Great Society or New Deal is that the latter were bipartisan and in the main popular. This Congress’s handiwork is profoundly unpopular and should become more so as its effects become manifest. In 2010, Americans saw liberalism in the raw and rejected it. The challenge for Republicans is to repair the damage before it becomes permanent.

So get your game faces on. 2011 is going to make 2009 look like the first Woodstock.

Moe Lane (crosspost) Continue reading Quote (and Thought) of the Day, WSJ edition.

Democrats still not adjusting to DOOM.

Read some of the papers these days and it’s like nobody’s ever – in the history of the world – had a legislature change hands from one political party to the other. Because the Democrats are certainly not acting like they get the magnitude of what happened to them:

You’ve got the New York Times commiserating with Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. The poor woman has to scramble to keep her lucrative Appropriations gig! The nerve of those awful Republicans.
It’s been mentioned before (mostly in passing, to be sure) that it’s apparently noteworthy that Republicans are stopping by various offices in order to measure for drapes, but still.
Roll Call mentions rumblings of alarm among rank-and-file House Democrats as they realize that committee heads are following Nancy Pelosi’s lead and not stepping down – and certainly not allowing themselves to be downsized.
And over at the Rothenburg Political Report Stu Rothenburg asks the largely rhetorical question “Have Democrats forgotten the election already?” Answer: how do you know that they ever understood the results in the first place?

And, of course, there’s the entire largely ceremonial Democratic angst and anger over Obama’s tax deal. Continue reading Democrats still not adjusting to DOOM.