More Votes Cast Against Democratic Senators Than For Them

Sometimes I wonder why liberals care so much that Gore won the popular vote in 2000, or that the populations of states represented by Democratic senators are larger than those represented by Republicans. Do they feel more emotionally secure believing the majority of Americans really do agree with them, despite losing elections? Or do they simply enjoy dreaming that a few rejiggered Constitutional clauses would return them control of American government? (Conservatives fall prey to a similar fallacy when they count Presidential acreage instead of votes, but that doesn't seem quite so prevalent or vehement.) Someone's even created a blog named Democratic Senators Represent More Americans. (Or "savedemocracy" if you go by the link--as though democracy is suddenly in danger because the Federal election system, humming along the same way for decades, has recently spit out a few results they don't like.) The proprietor counts half of a state's population for each party in mixed states (one senator from each party) and counts the full population for the party with both Senators in non-mixed states. He links to a chart showing that nearly 9.4 million more Americans are represented by Democratic senators than Republican ones. But that's not a very refined way to count representation because to be consistent--horror of horrors--you'd need to put the full U.S. population in the Republican column since we're all represented by President Bush. And liberals are quite fond of telling us Bush doesn't represent them. Here's another demonstration of the silliness of this method of counting support: if the three biggest states--California, New York, and Texas--changed to mixed states, Republicans would pick up just one additional Senate seat but 15 million new represented voters and a 21 million voter lead over Democrats. A more equitable solution is to count the number of votes cast for each senatorial candidate in 2000, 2002, and 2004. And with this a slightly different picture emerges: 4,058,810 more votes were cast against Democratic candidates than for them. True, Democrats had a slight edge in vote totals over Republicans, but nearly six million votes for independant candidates swing the majority decisively against the Democrats. Ahhhh. I feel secure again.

	2000	2002	2004
Republican	37,186,653	21,443,548	39,920,562
Democrat	36,944,395	19,244,015	44,014,943
Other	1,530,679	1,905,007	2,275,714

	Total All Years	Percent
Republican	98,550,763	48.2%
Democrat	100,203,353	49.0%
Other	5,711,400	2.8%
Total All Parties	204,465,516	100.0%
Non-Democrat	104,262,163	51.0%

U.S. Senatorial Election Vote Totals (Compiled from CNN.com - 2004, 2002, 2000)

UPDATE: DSRMA responds--I think. He mentions "some right wing bloggers" but doesn't name or link anyone:

It seems like some right wing bloggers are saying that if you didn't vote for Bush you don't have to pay taxes. They are taking issue with my finding that Democratic Senators Represent More Americans. They say that those people who didn't vote for a Democratic Senator, don't have to be counted as being represented by them. In that case president Bush doesn't represent me. He's not my Head of State. It sure sounds like the bloggers are saying I don't have to pay taxes because I didn't vote for the guy running this country. I mean are we supposed to be one country or two? I could have counted every person in a state as being represented by each Senator. The percentages would have come out the same. But if the right wingers want to break up the country, who am I to stop them? So much for unity. And, BTW, if I didn't vote for my Congressman, does that mean I don't have to obey laws?

He's trying a neat little trick: implying he really just meant more Americans are legally represented by Democratic senators, not that Democrats represent the political viewpoints of most Americans. But that's not what the left means when it drags out this claim to justify filibustering judicial nominees, as done by the reliably fuzzy-headed E.J. Dijonnaise and others last year. It's a claim of moral authority, a cry for Liberté, égalité, fraternité, a claim they've been cheated of their rightful majoritarian primacy. To claim otherwise is to relegate the title "Democratic Senators Represent More Americans" to a mere truism--like "Most Chinese Live in China".

Neil Young Forgot

My wife wanted me to blog on Neil Young's new "Impeach the President" song. Yawn. What a rebel. I have no idea what the music sounds like, but he could have assembled the lyrics by copying and pasting randomly from any one of a million angry-lefty blogs. Poetic and subtle they aren't. Well, put him ahead of that ex-ER actor for next year's Heroic Hollywood Dissident Award anyway.

UPDATE: Ok, on second thought I do have a few more things to say about this. Politically strident art is an incredible waste of time. Art delivers moral messages effectively through subtle emotional engagement. The entertainment industry has failed miserably at that over the past few years, especially when it tries to directly confront conservatism (or what it perceives as conservatism). Having lost control of American government over the past decade (Congress, the Presidency, state governorships, state legislatures, etc.), leftist artists seem to think elevated intensity will make their messages more convincing. They may feel better after producing songs and movies that are political primal screams, and their efforts may be appreciated by other leftists, but they aren't very effective or entertaining.

Each year I rank the top-100 highest user-rated movies in the Internet Movie Database and add any good ones I've missed to my DVD rental list. I've done year-by-year searches all the way back to 1970 or so, and in the past few years I've noticed a definite increase in the number of highly-rated, yet mediocre and politically tendentious films. These films have C-shaped rating graphs--meaning everyone who agreed with the film's "message" rated it a ten and everyone who disagreed rated it a one. I find that highly annoying.

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Related Washington Post stories: Young's Protest Album Heads to Internet; Young's Anti-War Album

Abortion Law Confusion Quantified

Several pundits on the right and left believe overturning Roe v Wade would prove politically disastrous for Republicans, principally by mobilizing a great army of heretofore silent pro-choicers and secondarily by demotivating pro-life conservatives. Ramesh Ponnuru argues that this view is completely wrong because the public is not nearly so pro-choice as the left wishes. He theorizes in a related article that Roe enjoys majority support only because the public misapprehends the breadth of the ruling.

Ponnuru doesn't offer any data to quantify the size of this ignorance distortion, but I recently stumbled across a rarely asked poll question that starkly illuminates the scope of public confusion. This 2005 Harris poll asks "In general, do you think that abortion should be legal or illegal during the following stages of pregnancy?" Respondents could answer "legal" or "illegal" for each trimester of preganancy, described as "the first three months of pregnancy", "the second three months of pregnancy", and "the third three months of preganancy". A full 86 percent of those polled said abortion should be illegal in the third trimester of pregnancy, while 72 and 38 percent said abortion should be illegal in the second and first trimesters, respectively.

In the same poll, 52 percent of respondents favored Roe (the poll explains that Roe overturned state laws outlawing abortions in the first three months of pregancy). Juxtaposing this number with the 86 percent who would make abortion "generally illegal" in the third trimester shows that 73 percent of those who support Roe (38 of the 52 percent) would make third-trimester abortions illegal. These folks don't understand that the inextricably linked rulings of Roe and Doe v Bolton effectively eliminated all abortion restrictions through the ninth month of pregancy. (To calculate that number I'm simply extracting the overlap of the 86 and 52 percent--or those who selected two mutually exclusive answers: 86 + 52 - 100 = 38)

A similiar comparison shows how flexibly some label themselves "pro-choice". Fifty-one percent of respondents identified themselves as pro-choice while 44 percent called themselves pro-life. Thus over 72 percent of self-identified pro-choice respondents would outlaw third-trimester abortions (37 of the 51 percent) and 45 percent would also ban second-trimester abortions (23 of the 51 percent). On the flip side, just nine percent of pro-lifers would allow even first-trimester abortions (4 of the 44 percent). (Again this is calculated by overlapping the 60 percent of respondents who prefer abortion to be "generally legal" in the first trimester with the 44 percent who call themselves pro-life.)

UPDATE: James Taranto reports a fortuitously timed poll that roughly corresponds with my conclusions. The poll asked respondents to choose which of three answers best decribes the impact of Roe on abortion law. Seventy-one percent chose an incorrect answer or said they didn't know--almost exactly same percentage of Roe supporters I said misunderstood the ruling's impact in the 2005 Harris abortion poll. Note that the 71 percent who misunderstood Roe in this new poll were from the entire population of respondents, not just Roe supporters. However, it's not unreasonable to assume similar numbers of Roe opponents also underestimate the breadth of the ruling, and simply oppose abortion in nearly all circumstances. That fits well with my other conclusion that a very small percentage of pro-lifers would allow even first-trimester abortions.

Impeach the Leaker (Again!)

So the media now has angst in it's pants over President Bush's release of classified intelligence information to counter the false information Joseph Wilson was spreading about Iraq's attempts to purchase enriched uranium. That's bad you see because the public has no right to know the truth--unless it sells newspapers! And it's bad because it was political! Verrry baaaad! It's only good to illegally release classified information for political purposes!

I think I understand now. Governor pardons prisoner: bad; prison guard helps prisoner escape: good. Getting a bonus from your boss: bad; stealing from your company: good. A slight inversion of perspective clarifies the matter greatly!

I Alone Escaped McNulty's Clutches

In the summer of 1994, before my final semester at Grove City College, I served as a congressional intern for Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA). The internship program included a weekly public policy seminar with GCC alumnus Paul McNulty, then counsel for D.C. law firm Shaw, Pittman, Potts, and Trowbridge and previously spokesman for the Bush (senior) Justice Department.

At the time Paul was mulling a 1995 run for the Virginia House of Delegates. As the two of us got on reasonably well, and as I had worked on a winning 1993 campaign, and as I happened to be the only GCC intern from the Northern Virginia area, he asked if I might be interested in managing his campaign. Then came Newt Gingrich, the Contract with America, and the GOP tide which rolled over all of Washington in early 1995. Paul moved on to become chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, and I went in another direction entirely.

I watched with interest as Paul moved on to become the U.S. Attorney prosecuting John Walker Lindh, Zacharias Moussaoui, and other high-profile terror suspects. But I completely missed his rise to Deputy Attorney General until reading about the Moussaoui death penalty decision today. So on the one-in-a-million chance that you read this while googling yourself, congratulations, Paul.

You know you've arrived when you're important enough to be gratuitously villified by the looney leftists at the Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, and others. They were certain back in October that Paul "The Grinch" McNulty was a Bush loyalist being installed to axe independent prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald; and they seem genuinely upset about his bang-up job of prosecuting terrorists! The left's paranoid demonization of the Justice Department seems foolish enough most of the time; it's yet more poignant when you know and respect the target personally.

Keep giving the terrorists hell, Paul. Oh, and how about a tip for an old acquaintance just before you impose the police state?