What does electoral emergence look like?
Consider: We just re-elected a Democrat President who will need to work with a Republican House and Democrat Senate. Or viewed differently: the people have said that they want a divided government (as Speaker Boehner suggested), not an unimpeded move towards a more progressive agenda.
Or did they?
The Presidency is the only national office that we vote for. Even so, it’s hard to imagine that the popular vote would have been same if, say, states like Vermont (67 percent Obama) or Utah (73% Romney) got the same attention as Ohio.
The House results were even more affected by artifacts of our electoral system. With all 435 House seats contested, Democrats received almost half a million more votes, but the Republicans won a majority of the seats. Why? Because of the way congressional districts are drawn, which itself is strongly influenced by which party is in power in the states. As the Washington Post pointed out, in states where Republicans controlled redistricting, Democrats almost uniformly performed far worse in elections for the House than for the Presidency. Examples: in Ohio, Obama won 51% of the vote, but Democrats won only 25% of House seats; or South Carolina, where Obama won 45% of the vote, but Democrats won 14% of house seats.
In the Senate this year, 23 of the 33 seats being contested were held by Democrats, making it difficult for Democrats to hold on to their 53-47 (those numbers again!) margin, if the nation were voting in a party-neutral, 50-50 ways. Yet, rather than losing 6.5 seats net and losing Control of the Senate, as statistics would suggest, Democrats gained two seats, by winning 25 of the 33 contests, while winning the popular vote across these Senate races by nearly 13 million votes.
The divided political situation we now face results from an electoral chemistry that combines any number of influences, from Article II of the Constitution, which created the Electoral College (originally conceived to produce results in elections dictated neither by political parties nor by national campaigning); to the most recent census and its influence on congressional re-districting; to someone with a cell phone recording Mitt Romney’s “private” thoughts; among many, many others.
Together, these influences produce an “emergent” picture of a national electorate. Emergence is a characteristic of a system where what is apparent outwardly arises from any number of smaller features that may be hard to detect and whose interaction looks little like these features in isolation.
So, is John Boehner right in saying that there “is a mandate for both parties to find common ground and take steps together to help our economy grow and create jobs, which is critical to solving our debt”?
My position is that to figure out what is on the nation’s mind, it is best to look at outcomes most reflective of overall, versus local, views. Or: look at the popular vote for President, the House, and the Senate. Democrats won each of these races, by margins of 3 million, half a million, and 13 million votes respectively. To paraphrase the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter: Although a green fence is made up of atoms and atomic particles, none of them is green. To see the color of the fence, just open your eyes.
The popular vote for the Presidency, the House, or the Senate are not perfect indicators of our national desires. But they suggest that the people want the country to go in a direction Democrats have suggested: investmenting in education, health, infrastructure, a greener planet.
And greater inclusivity.