United Liberty
The Illogical House Election Results
Fri, 11/28/2008 - 12:49pm | posted by Matt Wittlief
The election was over three weeks ago, and most of our focus was on Barack Obama and John McCain. But, I thought it would be good to take a look at the results for the House of Representatives. It was widely publicized that Congress had very low approval ratings coming into the election. According to these polls, it has been hovering between 15% and 20%.
So, with these low approval ratings, how did they fare? Out of the 435 House seats, thirty-one incumbents retired and another four were defeated in the primaries. That left an even 400 up for re-election on the 4th. Eighteen incumbents were defeated. With collective job approval ratings of no more than 20%, 95.5% of the House was re-elected. (Note: not all results are final yet.)
The only (il)logical explanation for this is that everyone must think that their congressman is ok - it’s all the rest of them that are problems. Unfortunately, most Republicans vote the same as other Republicans, and most Democrats vote the same as other Democrats. If you like your representative, that should imply that you like the rest of the representatives of the same party. With 20% approval ratings, this leads to a logical inconsistency.
Voters need to wake up. If they are not happy, they need to do something about it. We need to either vote them out, or work to get better candidates on the ballot.
I agree with you. However, I found myself again voting for the re-election of Jim McDermott, the Seattle area congressman, despite my anger over his “yes” vote for the bailout. The only other choice was a candidate that I had trouble taking seriously.
The situation is likewise here in the Bay Area. In San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi’s seat is being challenged by the infamous Cindy Sheehan. If I were registered to vote there, would I really want to help vote a shameless media chaser like Sheehan into office, despite the reservations I may have with Pelosi?
“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.” - Thomas Jefferson
This isn’t a new phenomenon. Election rates for house incumbents are historically 90%+ typically due to lack of campaign funding. This is even more-so exaggerated in a presidential election year where most of the media buys are for presidential and senatorial races that have a much higher impact due to larger constituencies. Don’t confuse ignorance with apathy, and don’t claim apathy is unacceptable, the voter registration drives and programs like rock the vote don’t promote informed voting, they simply say vote without reason. maybe the problem isn’t really the voters, but rather expectations put on the voters. At least we’re not legally required to vote and fined if we don’t like the Aussies…
I’ve heard people touting that idea. It doesn’t fly. If there’s anything Americans don’t like, it’s being forced to do things against their will. Our country was founded on that principle, and so was this website. ; )
I imagine that’s not a debate we’ll be having too much though. Wasn’t turnout pretty decent this year?
The average person doesn’t think about who’s running for House. Congress and State Senate seats don’t usually create a lot of publicity unless there’s an open seat. There’d be alot more open seats and maybe even more voters if we had term limits for congressmen.
“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.” - Thomas Jefferson
Both ignorance and apathy are dangerous in a democratic system.
My congressman lost his seat!! And he voted for the bailout!!
“In this free nation we do not choose to be ruled, we elect to be governed.”
— Barry Goldwater
Who was it? Was that a campaign issue?
“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.” - Thomas Jefferson
By the way, for full disclosure, I voted for my incumbent (Dan Burton) as much as it pained me to do so. He was the better candidate. However, this pain has energized me to fight for either a better major party candidate or a third party option.
The only thing illogical here is expecting polls on an entire body to apply to the individual members.
Basically, the problem is thinking that properties belonging to the whole must apply to the constituent parts.
For instance, it would be like saying no one on the Detroit Lions could be in the Pro Bowl because the Lions… well, they suck. While Detroit is stinking it up this year, only slightly worse than Cincinnati, KC, and Seattle, that does not mean any of these teams cannot have a stand out player in a position.
Focus on local data. A lot of voters may not blame their Representative for the overall performance of The House (or the particular party), they might not have a viable alternative for various reasons, or (insert reason here).
You would have thought that we would have been yelling at the Main Stream Media and cable about this, when they kept posting stories comparing Obama and McCain in national polls - “OMG, McCain within two points, overtakes Obama by two points, or some other headline about a national poll.”
The smart ones kept saying, “We don’t elect the President by popular vote. How is it going in the states?”
Representatives are elected by popular vote, but not by a national one. They’re elected locally to work on national legislation.
I understand these concepts, but it may not apply here as much as one might think. My research of voting records show that, by in large, members of the House vote with their party at least 85-90% of the time (there are, of course, exceptions). If the nation has an approval rating of <20% for Congress, then this clearly must transcend party lines. With disapproval crossing party lines and voting records following party lines, it is then logically inconsistent to approve of individual representatives at such a high rate as evidenced by election results.
Your point that there may not be viable alternatives is the key point here in my opinion. We do not place enough emphasis on our representatives as our focus has been drawn to the President.
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