VOTING YOUR CONSCIENCE IN 2006:
House of Representatives
House of Representatives
Introduction
I have long adovcated that American voters should figure out which party they agree with and then vote straight down that party’s line on Election Day. Splitting your ticket makes little sense. It places too much faith in an individual politician’s ability to overcome the system, and it consigns your country, your state, and your community to endless gridlock. Political parties might not be good, but they are here, always have been here, and will be here unto the ending of our empire (I think that’s a good thing, but that’s a question of taste). A “good man” who is also a member of a political party will still vote with and in the interests of that political party the vast majority of the time. Sure, John McCain might be a “straight talking” maverick in the Republican ranks, but rest assured he will suck Pat Robertson’s Teletubby when it comes time to win. Like everybody else, he only bucks the party line when he thinks he can get away with it. When “voting his conscience” involves “infuriating his base,” well, he’d rather live with a tortured conscience than run against Torture.
Not that you can single him out. All politicians are like that. Republicans are going to vote like Republicans; Democrats are going to vote like Democrats. This is how political parties are supposed to work: They are supposed to simplify things for the average citizen who has more important things to do with her time. They are supposed to make it so that a citizen does not have to become an expert in how one candidate’s view of the structure of a progressive tax scale impacts the government’s ability to guarantee basic health coverage to all citizens while still providing economic incentives to spur medicinal innovation given the modern globalization of market economies …. or not. Instead of making ourselves experts in multiple fields, when parties are working properly we should be able to say, “All the candidates listed here in Blue believe in some form of Universal Health Care. All the candidates in Red do not,” and then make our decisions accordingly. Most people agree with some Democratic ideas and some Republican ideas. They think the question is finding a candidate that matches their own random amalgam of beliefs. It is not. The task is to find which party you agree with more, which prioritization of issues you agree with more, and then vote accordingly. That is what the candidates themselves do when they choose to sign up with a party in the first place.
Liberal, conservative, and independent intellectuals find it hard to accept the fact that a Congressperson will almost always vote with their party, but that is just the way it works. You’ll see the occasionally Representative break ranks on the occasional issue, but at least 2/3rds of the time (and often much more often than that) a Representative is going to vote with the party. Maybe it shouldn’t work that way, but that is the way our system is set up and we shouldn’t just pretend that it works differently because we’d like it to. An elected official who doesn’t consistently vote with her party will not find herself elected for very long. The party’s base will withhold money and support for that “maverick,” and she will eventually succumb, if not in a primary, than in the general election against a candidate who does have the unquestioned support of their base and can therefore pretend to be a “centrist” when the time is right (e.g., George W. Bush: Compassionate Conservative 2000). The only politicians that can afford to really be independently minded, to vote their conscience on each issue regardless of party, are a few politicians who have been around forever. And if you look at these few, these happy few, who are they? Who are the ones that really have the power to do whatever they want? They are the Ted Kennedys and Charlie Rangels and Robert Byrds and Henry Hydes. They are the ones who could credibly vote however they wanted on anything and get away with it. They are also the ones who represent the most extreme ends of their party’s platforms, not the most moderate or independent. The lesson for political aspirants is clear: Vote your party or you won’t be voting for very long. We the people should recognize that at least.
Alas, I have made the preceding points in many ways over the years and still many people respectfully disagree. So instead of attacking this issue at the macro level, I will go micro. I’ll do this from the liberal perspective, because that is what I personally believe in. I lay that bias out in the open. The Democrats need to gain 15 seats in the House of Representatives to take control of that body of government. It seems fair to me to look at 15 contested seats that the Republicans currently hold—15 close elections where a reasonable person could argue for either candidate, 15 seats that could and should swing the balance of power in this country. The tightness of these races is very important to me. By just focusing on the tight races, I’ll not just be taking potshots at the extremist wing of the political spectrum. All 30 candidates in these races are ostensibly on their best behavior. They are trying to capture the hearts and minds not of the fringe activist but the moderate swing voters that will decide their electoral fate. They are trying to be reasonable.
Despite each candidate doing their best impersonation of a glass of water, there are real choices for the voters in these districts. There are real differences between the Republicans and Democrats, and those differences will shape the country over the next two years. I will try to illustrate how even the moderate agenda—which the polls tell me is an amalgam of:
- the war is going poorly
- science should be taught in schools
- religious freedoms should be respected
- global warming is an issue
- the deficit is out of control
- democracy is good
- and people should be held accountable for their actions
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| DISTRICTS | DEMOGRAPHICS | ||||||
| RACE | ECONOMICS | ||||||
| Jump to a District: | Wh | His | Bl | As | Per Cap. Inc. | UE Rate | Pov. Rate |
| National Average: | 75.1% | 12.5% | 12.3% | 3.6% | $21,587 | 3.7% | 12.4% |
| Connecticut 4th: | 77.6% | 12.8% | 11.4% | 3.3% | $41,147 | 3.4% | 7.4% |
| New York 29th: | 93.4% | 1.4% | 2.7% | 1.8% | $21,255 | 4% | 9.9% |
| Indiana 2nd: | 86.4% | 5% | 8.2% | 0.8% | $19,231 | 3.3% | 9.5% |
| Ohio 2nd: | 92.3% | 1% | 4.7% | 1.3% | $25,560 | 2.7% | 8.4% |
| Florida 22nd: | 90.3% | 10.7% | 4% | 1.7% | $35,484 | 2.2% | 7.1% |
| Florida 13th: | 90.5% | 7.7% | 4.5% | 0.8% | $25,055 | 2% | 9.4% |
| New York 26th: | 93.3% | 1.9% | 3.2% | 1.5% | $21,731 | 3.7% | 6.9% |
| Ohio 18th: | 96.3% | 0.6% | 1.9% | 0.3% | $16,603 | 3.4% | 12.6% |
| Texas 22nd: | 71.3% | 20.3% | 9.4% | 8% | $25.110 | 3.3% | 7.3% |
| Texas 23rd: | 80.8% | 15.5% | 1.7% | 1.2% | $18,814 | 3.9% | 18.4% |
| Nebraska 3rd: | 94.4% | 6% | 0.3% | 0.5% | $16,962 | 2.2% | 11.1% |
| California 11th: | 72.2% | 19.7% | 3.5% | 8.9% | $28.420 | 3.9% | 8.8% |
| Illinois 6th: | 82.3% | 12.5% | 2.7% | 8.1% | $27,669 | 2.6% | 4.3% |
| Pennsylvania 6th: | 87.9% | 3.7% | 6.8% | 2.1% | $29,460 | 3.4% | 6.1% |
| Indiana 8th: | 94.2% | 0.9% | 3.7% | 0.6% | $18,467 | 3.5% | 10.7% |
| The above figures are from the Washington Post Averages of course don’t mean very much. Still, they are a quick and dirty way to establish a baseline. If a district’s poverty rate and unemployment rate are high, the national averages give us some context as to “how high.” The national average provides a baseline against which we can understand some of the demographic information we see in each specific district. | |||||||
* A Note on Methodology *
Objective truths are hard to come by these days. We get all of our knowledge through some from of media, and the media have their own bias. Moreover even the most objective evidence can be twisted into many meanings—by the candidates, by the media, certainly by me, unquestionably by you. All that twisting and churning gets ratcheted up during campaign season, making objective truth nearly impossible to find.
In respect to the lack of objective truth and the reader, I would like to state clearly that I make no effort to be objective in my analysis of these Congressional races. Even so, I have made every effort to base my analysis on what objective facts, statistics, and data I could find. What I offer below—and more to the point what everybody is offering when they talk about politics—is simply a way to organize, prioritize, and make sense of the evidence available. I offer my subjective truth: the meaning I take from the information I felt was relevant. Your truth will differ.
Therefore I would like to list the sources of data and evidence that underpin my analysis. All of these sources are free and can help you become more informed about the issues I am talking about and relevant issues in your area of the country. Washingtonpost.com has links to every race in the country. It’s a great resource, even if just to find out who is running for what where you live. The Post is also where I got all of the demographic statistics that I list. Most importantly The Washington Post has quick links to every incumbent’s own voting record. I urge every Independent, centrist, or swing voter to actually look at how these people vote. One thing no politician should be able to run away from is his own record. The New York Times has a list of all the races they think are close and short opinion pieces about them. Congressional Quarterly Politics provides a lot of breaking news and analysis from an “inside the beltway” perspective. They also sometimes share their invaluable “party unity” statistic, but the full report is available only to subscribers. Open Secrets and Capital Eye are the two sources I used to get a handle on campaign contributions. There are others—plenty of others—these two sites just organized the information in the way I am most comfortable with. I of course looked at various political blogs—not for objective facts (that would be silly) but simply to get a handle on what activists in the district were talking about. Finally, I found it useful to go to each and every candidate’s campaign or Congressional website and look at what he or she says about him/herself. If you are actually trying to analyze a candidate’s plan (if any) on an issue, you shouldn’t let the media or the opponent define the plan. You are better off letting the candidates define their own plans and then trying to decide if those plans make sense to you. It’s easy enough to find these websites: Just Google the candidate’s name and the office they are running for, and it should be the first or second hit.