Where's The Redistricting?

 In his book Critical Elections and Congressional Policy Making, David W. Brady defines a critical election as one in which one political party takes control of the House, Senate and Presidency for at least a decade. No election after the New Deal era meets these criteria. I believe that his definition is too strict and therefore fails to consider several elections that have had a great deal of impact on public policy.

After critical elections, the House of Representatives has created major policy changes, such as ending slavery or creating Social Security. Baker's own introduction credits the 1965 Congress for the major civil rights legislation it passed, yet in his conclusion he states that neither 1964 nor 1968 were critical elections. However, there was a dramatic shift in each party's stance on civil rights during this time period, accompanied by regions of the country shifting loyalties: the Democratic states in the South began to vote Republican, and Republican strongholds in the North began to vote Democratic. These opposing movements prevented either party from making large gains in the House or the Senate, but it was still an era of great change, much like earlier critical elections.

Baker's book was published in 1988, but if he had waited until after the 1994 election, he would not have included it as a critical election. President Clinton was reelected in 1996, an immediate disqualification in Baker's book. However, there was a 54-seat swing to the Republicans in the House and an 8-seat swing in the Senate. This also brought on great political polarization, culminating in government shutdowns, similar to the polarization noted by Baker after earlier critical elections.

In 2008, Democrats did take back the Presidency in another possible critical election, but they didn't hit the decade mark: Republicans took back the House two weeks ago after just 4 years of a Democratic majority. However, the health care reform bill was passed after this election, a major public policy shift similar to those seen after the elections of 1932 and 1964.

Mr. Wilson Goes (Back) To Washington

Congratulations to Representative Joe Wilson, who won reelection Tuesday night in South Carolina's 2nd Congressional district with 138,755 votes, compared to 113,354 votes for his Democratic opponent Rob Miller. Miller had a strong campaign, but in the end, toppling a Republican incumbent in a poor year for Democrats was too tall a task.

Representative Wilson will be joining a different House of Representatives on January 6th. His party will now be in the majority, and Wilson's favorite bogeyman during this campaign, Nancy Pelosi, will no longer be the Speaker of the House. Instead, it appears that John Boehner of Ohio, the current Minority Leader, will be the Speaker of the House. As the majority party controls what legislation is brought to the floor for debate, Representative Wilson will now have a better opportunity to bring up laws he would like to see passed. It will be interesting to see if he does propose legislation that would cut spending and eliminate all or part of the recently passed health care reform law, as he promised during his campaign. It will also be interesting to see how Wilson runs his campaign in 2012, since his party will bear more responsibility for what happens in Washington, D.C.

I would also like to point out something about the results: Wilson garnered 53% of the vote, compared to Miller's 44%, a 9-point difference. That is certainly a respectable result for Representative Wilson, and it is a slight improvement on his margin of victory in 2008, when he defeated Mr. Miller by 8 points. (Interestingly, Representative Wilson actually got less of the vote this year. He won 54% in 2008 to Miller's 46%, but there were no minor party candidates in 2008. In 2010, Libertarian Eddie McCain and Marc Beaman of the Constitution Party each got a small percentage of the votes.)

In my last blog post before the election, I noted that FiveThirtyEight's model predicted a 21-point win for Wilson, and I disagreed with this, saying that the 7-point margin predicted in an October poll was much more likely to be accurate. I know it's mostly political science majors reading this blog, not math majors, but I think even we can figure out that 9 is much closer to 7 than 21.

So does this mean I'm smarter than Nate Silver? Probably not, but a girl can dream.