see, back in 1994 when the republicans gained control of the house and the senate i remember being depressed. and i remember thinking to myself ‘are americans really this conservative?’and then i did a little bit of math (keeping in mind that math is not one of my strongpoints…). the percentage of people of voting age who actually vote in a midterm election is oftentimes around 30%.
so you figure there are 200 million people of voting age in the united states. 30% of 200 is 60. so 60 million people voted in the mid-term elections.
and most of the races were quite close, with republicans winning by one or two percentage points (obviously this is not the case in the house, where re-districting has guaranteed huge wins for democrats and republicans alike. but that’s a different, and more corrupt, issue altogether). so if a republican wins by 2 percentage points it doesn’t necessarily mean that the country as a whole has become more conservative. it just means that the small and vocal minority of insane, right-wing conservatives are more likely to vote in mid-term elections than the rest of us. the party-faithful among right-wing republicans live to vote in mid-term elections, cos they know that that’s when their votes will really matter. so you have all of these nutty right-wing special interest groups making sure that all of their acolytes are voting en masse.
so back to math:
60 million people voted.
roughly 30 million people voted for conservative and republican canditates.
30 million is 15% of 200 million. so roughly 15% of the people of voting age in the united states voted for conservative, right-wing canditates.
it’s like the simpsons where bart runs for class president against martin, but only martin and his friend vote, so they win with 2 votes. so maybe america isn’t as right-wing as it would appear to be. it’s just that the right-wing are incredibly well organized and they vote as a pack.
the left-wing is fractured and disorganized and they oftentimes vote for canditates who have no chance of winning. or they don’t vote. it’s easy to find a moderate or a left leaning liberal who didn’t vote. but it’s almost impossible to find a right-wing republican who didn’t vote.
just remember, al gore won the popular vote by 500,000 votes. i’m not dredging up old news, i’m just pointing out that america might (hopefully) not be as conservative as it would appear to be.so maybe the democrats will finally stop being such a bunch of woosies and actually campaign like they mean it next time. how about a tv ad that shows george w with ken lay from enron? and george senior with someone from the bin laden family? and maybe a few statistics about the u.s sending arms to iraq during the reagan administration? and some pictures of famous republicans like richard nixon, newt gingrich, joseph mccarthy?
ah well. now, being a pinko liberal from manhattan, i’m going to amsterdam to walk aroundthe canals.
moby
