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.
It's pretty impressive how well Miller did in a Republican district against a Republican incumbent in a year of the Republicans. It just goes to show how Wilson's questionable behavior lately nearly cost him. He needs to work on remaining scandal free for the rest of his time in office, as it seems like he has almost used up his popularity.
ReplyDeleteI agree with BN, Miller's percent of the votes, while it did not win him a seat in Washington, is impressive given this year's election climate. Also, in addition to remaining scandal free, Wilson should really use the next two years to prove that he can get legislation passed for the people of South Carolina. Without Pelosi as a scapegoat, Miller will now have to take responsibility since his party is in control.
ReplyDeleteI feel incumbency and name recognition definitely played a role in this election. Maybe Nate Silver's prediction factored in these two too much but that was great that your prediction was closer to the actual results. I agree with the previous comments about how Mr. Wilson should try to remain scandal free since he may cause negative attention to himself that could hurt him in later elections if he decides to run for a seat in Congress again.
ReplyDelete