Posts Tagged ‘2014 Elections
A Different Take On The Election
A different take on the election
by @zizii2
Much handwringing over the Democratic party’s electoral fortunes has taken place this past week. Teabaggers are ecstatic. The most loathesome wingnuts are going to make our lives even more miserable than we have already endured. Some young people justify young voter apathy by saying Democrats did not give them what they wanted, as shown below in the Carl Gibson piece titled:
Open Letter to Democrats From a Disillusioned Young Voter
And Democratic Party leaders will probably learn the wrong lessons and move further repub-lite.
I think differently about what happened. I believe what we are seeing is the brick wall that Coalition Politics slams into when the regular institutions of Democracy have been irreparably subverted and perverted by oligarchs and their political minions who have convinced many Americans that nihilism is their birthright. What do I mean?
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Normally, in a democracy, aspiring politicians and party platforms woo voters with promises of what they will DO for said voters, and the campaigns go full steam ahead in competition. And whoever wins tries to maintain voter approval and possible reelection based on their ability to account to the voter. Otherwise how do you win power again, right?
Wrong. Voters? What voters? GOP-Oligarchs’ answer to electoral imperatives and demographic change, is to shrink the electorate till they could “drown it in a bathtub”!
Another Tweet Or Two
https://twitter.com/TheBaxterBean/status/531350886627684352
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https://twitter.com/TriniTrent/status/529683237996863489
https://twitter.com/youngblackbitch/status/529780946464030720
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https://twitter.com/thisladyHeather/status/529819231475752960
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https://twitter.com/leclemot/status/531501022670098432
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https://twitter.com/GuyEndoreKaiser/status/529719280561303552
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https://twitter.com/TheObamaDiary/status/531621524718235648
https://twitter.com/TheObamaDiary/status/531621074610712576
The results of Tuesday’s “earth shattering” election are quite revelatory, but not for the reasons bruited about by your average MSNBC/Fox/CNN vacuous pundit.
Although President Obama won’t use the word—and bless him for it—it was a “shellacking” which the voters meted out to the Democratic Party. But let’s examine this “mandate” a bit further.
The turnout for the midterm election stands at 36%, a low not seen since the 1940s. That’s 36% of registered voters. Voter registration in its turn doesn’t encompass all eligible voters. This Al Jazeera article has this telling paragraph:
Election turnout is often cited as an indicator of the strength of the mandate of winning candidates, but it can be a misleading statistic: Turnout is usually measured as a proportion of registered voters rather than of those eligible to vote — and census numbers show that more than 70 million U.S. citizens of voting age are not registered voters.
Get that? 70 million Americans who are eligible to vote aren’t even registered. What does this mean? That the number of registered voters is at best a bare majority of eligible voters. And then that the voters who turned out were a minority of that number. And then that the GOP “landslide” depended on a further minority of registered voters, which in turn doesn’t account for all eligible voters.
This opens up a veritable cornucopia of delicious dysfunction.
Hard Truths
There is work to be done. We must keep fighting
https://twitter.com/TheObamaDiary/status/529858087210196992
https://twitter.com/NerdyWonka/status/530000901164244993
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https://twitter.com/scATX/status/529984445059956736
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https://twitter.com/owillis/status/530005285742866433
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https://twitter.com/drgrist/status/529847000569638912
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https://twitter.com/TheObamaDiary/status/529994359719337984
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https://twitter.com/theonlyadult/status/529974248404955136
https://twitter.com/TheObamaDiary/status/529990084079386624
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