Elections in unstable times
The most troubling electoral result of the year, as far as I’m concerned, was the Scottish vote on independence. Not the referendum's failure itself—few people outside the UK had much of a stake in that either way—but the fact that elite opinion elsewhere seemed relatively unshaken by the implications when 45 percent of Scots voted to dissolve the United Kingdom. The defeat of an electoral coalition is a routine matter. From our privileged perspective, even the fragmentation of a country like Syria feels less shocking that it ought to. But a serious move to break up a historically successful first-world state with a common language and (more or less) common religion was, or should have been, an occasion for grave alarm. If the UK was facing a split, something in the global economy must be going very wrong.
Nothing so constitutionally radical was at play in yesterday's midterm elections, but as I read the details of the Democratic Party's national collapse, I found myself thinking about Scotland. Republicans performed dramatically better at every level than even the sanguine pre-election polls suggested, not only picking up most of the closely contested Senate seats but also increasing their majority in the House. The country’s most divisive Republican governors—Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, Florida’s Rick Scott, Kansas’s Sam Brownback, Maine’s Paul LePage—were all re-elected; while Democratic strongholds that resisted the 2010 Republican wave—Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland—saw Republicans take over. One big factor was dramatically lower turnout than is typical in presidential years, but this isn't the whole story. Republicans also did better among Latino and African-American voters than they did in 2012.
Most interestingly, ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage fared very well last night—even while candidates who support such an increase did badly. Voters in Arkansas approved a minimum-wage increase by a crushing margin; they also voted to replace Sen. Mark Pryor with current congressman Tom Cotton, who has supported budget proposals extremely unfavorable to the economic interests of poor and working-class people. Similar splits took place in Illinois, Alaska, and South Dakota.
