A paragraph in the political correspondents’ code requires us to tell voters “what it all means” shortly after an election.
Personally, I’ve always believed that by now you’ve all figured it out for yourselves, but to break the code means I could get assigned to some less attractive duty, such as monitoring the police scanner or covering WSU football. So rather than risk packing up the furniture and calling the moving truck, here’s what we learned from the late, great, and sometimes grating, 2014 election:
- It was not a throw-the-bums-out election, regardless of what some pollsters suggested for months based on approval ratings for the president, Congress and government in general being lower than whale poop. It’s not that local, state and national government doesn’t contain its fair share of bums. More likely, the public preferred the bums they have to the bums they would get through the trade-in. Very few seats actually changed hands. The state Senate went Republican, by a single vote, on the strength of a Democrat-turned-Republican winning an open seat previously held by a Democrat. That leads to:
1A. The two major parties are willing to bet control of the Legislature on just a few races. Redistricting, which has become a synonym for incumbent protection, made many seats that were solidly Republican or Democratic even more so. Some incumbents faced no opponents, and some races were a choice between two candidates of the same party. That means:
1B. The parties are willing to abandon some voters to the opposition. Eastern Washington had some legislative races with no Democrats, and the West Side had some with no Republicans. A few incumbents even ran unopposed, which seems odd if incumbent is synonymous with “bum.”
