Age of the Geek

By: 
Travis Fischer

 

Predictable Politics

 

     Finally. The midterms are over.

     I’d say I was disappointed in the results, but that would imply that I was at all surprised.

     I don’t think anybody was shocked that Terry Branstad won his sixth election. The most notable thing about the governor’s race was that Branstad finally carried Lee County.

     In video games, you can often replay them once you have beaten then, setting additional goals for yourself along the way. Gamers call this “Achievement Hunting.” In Branstad’s case, it took him six playthroughs, but he finally got the “Lee County Achievement.”

     So good for him. I didn’t vote for him, but he’s been Iowa’s governor for most of my life and we’ve done OK. The Tea Party doesn’t like him, so he must be doing something right.

     On the other hand, I’m not at all happy that I will continue to be represented in Washington by a man who thinks that dog fighting should be legally equivalent to boxing. But while Jim Mowrer was a more sensible and better qualified candidate in every way, he didn’t do nearly enough to let people know that, resulting in a 23-point loss to Steve King.

     It’s not entirely Mowrer’s fault though. It’s the midterms, where Republicans are naturally favored.

     If there’s one thing that’s true about the Republican Party, it’s that the fewer people who vote, the better it is for them. And in many states in this year’s midterms, voters literally hit a new low. Nationwide only 33 percent of eligible voters took part in the midterms, a little over half of what presidential election years bring in.

     (Iowa, as usual, picked up some of the slack, with nearly 50 percent turnout for the midterm election. Still depressingly low, but better than average.)

     One result of the evening that did disappoint me was the re-election of the soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. After winning re-election, McConnell, a man whose political strategy of unwavering obstruction has given the nation an unprecedented number of filibusters, the least productive congress in history, and one actual government shutdown, said, “We do have an obligation to work together on issues where we can agree. I think we have a duty to do that.”

     Shortly after, a Louisville suburb was crushed under the sheer weight of the hypocrisy of that statement. McConnell then instinctively berated the president for the government’s failure to stop spoken words from manifesting into physical form while simultaneously blocking the appointment of the director for the Department of Metaphysical Incursions, which has been running without an administrator since 2009.

     Ultimately though, the next two years will be just as predictable as this election was.

     Don’t expect a sudden increase in productivity now that the GOP has majority control of the Senate. The only things Republicans have vowed to do is “Stop the Obama agenda,” which should be pretty easy considering Obama doesn’t appear to have one. Upon realizing that there’s literally nothing he can do that would make people happy, he’s been coasting through his presidency since the Affordable Care Act.

     But even on that note, Republicans still haven’t come up with the “Replace” part of “Repeal and Replace.”

     I wouldn’t expect much in the way of tax or immigration reform either. Not that the GOP doesn’t desperately need to pass some kind of reform if they want any chance at 2016. However, McConnell is about to learn what John Boehner discovered four years ago. That Tea Party candidates may be good for winning elections, but they are nothing but a headache when it comes to actually governing.

     While McConnell says he’s willing to start working with Democrats, now that his party is in charge of Congress, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is already positioning himself to be an antagonist against any form of compromise.

     And thanks to Iowans, and a weak campaign from Bruce Braley, Cruz will have a playmate in Joni Ernst. Iowa’s first female senator looks poised hit the national stage by being the next Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann, relying on folksy charm and extreme rhetoric over rational policy.

     If there was one good thing about these midterms, it’s that it will be endlessly entertaining to watch McConnell try to get anything done while Cruz and his faction of extreme right conservatives set the Senate on fire in an attempt to shore-up base support for 2016.

     As for Cruz, he knows that people vote against things that aren’t working. If he has presidential aspirations, his only way through the Republican Primary is to stall, obstruct, and make a lot of noise until the base is so fed-up with the people in charge that they’ll see him as a viable alternative to the current leadership.

     In other words, he’s going to what’s left of the moderate Republicans exactly what they’ve been doing to Democrats since 2008.

     Not that it will matter.

     There are 18 states accounting for 242 electoral votes that have voted Democrat for two decades. Republicans have a similar chuck of safe states, but they only account for 179 electoral votes. That leaves 117 votes in play, of which Democrats need only 28 to keep the White House.

     A far-right Republican simply won’t hit the 270 threshold. Even a moderate Republican has a long road ahead of them. Particularly if the party continues to ignore this country’s demographic changes.

     Likewise, a major factor in this year’s power shift was the unusually high number of vulnerable Democratic Senate seats up for grabs. In 2016, the opposite will be true. So while gerrymandered districts will keep Republicans in power in the House of Representatives until at least 2020, odds are good that, without a significant change in the Republican platform, Democrats will likely keep the White House and regain the Senate in two years.

     Until then, Republicans will either lean left and finally start doing their job for the first time in this decade, or they will lean right and negate the gains they’ve made for 2016. In either case, they will doubtlessly tarnish their brand, leading to a Democratic bounce back until the Democrats screw it up again and the cycle starts anew.

 

     Travis Fischer is a newswriter for Mid-America Publishing and hopes for an interesting two years.

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