Voters speaking loud and clear
So after every election here, whichever party won starts saying nonsense like “voters spoke loud and clear.” That is simply nonsense. In every one of these elections that were claimed as overwhelming wins for one party the popular vote never goes beyond 45-55 or vice versa. The house vote was 52-44 this time around, last time it was 42-52. Let’s just assume 45-55. That’s like if you have some sort of club with 20 people, one person changed their mind. Hardly a “voters spoke loud and clear.”
Furthermore, in these midterms there were fewer people voting for the winning party than there were voting for the losing party in the last elections. So it’s entirely possible (though very unlikely) that not a single new person voted for republicans. That’s like in your club of 20 people where your side of an argument had 11-9 majority, suddenly only 15 people show up and you have
a 7-8 minority (actually that would be far far worse in terms of percentage of vote than what happened in the midterms). The members of the club would not have spoken loud and clear. Actually perhaps nobody actually changed their minds, it was just that there was a furniture sale somewhere that they had to go to.
From my experience with clubs related to any sort of activity, this is precisely what always happens, and why morons take over at some point. Actually come to think of it, that’s exactly what always happens in any sort of politics too.
The democrats are just as much to blame on this as the republicans. Whichever side wins always claims absolute mandate of the masses, even though nothing so drastic happened. This even happens when one side wins by 1 or 2 percent, which is really something that could have gone either way if the weather was bad. So if you win within such a small margin, you might as well flip a coin, you won on a technicality. So many democrats were angry about Gore and Bush. But that was all within margin of error. Maybe if the elections were held a week later it would have gone the other way. It was 50-50, there was no majority for either side. The same thing happened in ’04, except the roundoff error seemed to have gone in favor of Bush.
There should be a rule against such rhetoric unless your side wins 70-80 percent of the vote and the voter turnout is so large
that over 50 percent of eligible voters actually cast their ballot for you.
