October 05, 2007
Voting Out Incumbents: Getting Easier
Voting out incumbents, whose results as elected leaders are disappointing, is getting easier. In prior elections, one of the main obstacles to voting out an incumbent has been getting enough information about challengers to afford voters a reasonable alternative candidate to vote for. The internet to the rescue!
A number of political action sites are now providing comprehensive lists of incumbents and challengers, to include links to their campaign web sites and much greater volume of information about their pasts and qualifications. One such site is SourceWatch which updates its site regularly, covering not only the politicians and candidates, but, lobbyists, and campaign financing, as well as who is behind the news stories.
Vote Out Incumbents Democracy has a continually updating list of challengers for every Congressional race in every state, as candidates announce and file their candidacy with the Federal Elections Commission. These listings all include the challenger's web site. This page also provides zip code look up of your incumbent representatives and their records (courtesy Vote Smart, see link below).
An outstanding organization and web site is Project Vote Smart. Vote Smart is the premier voters self-defense web site designed to provide voters with all the information they need to make an intelligent voting decision covering everything from where candidates get their money from, who they are likely beholding to, and how incumbents have voted on the many bills that came before them on the Congressional floor.
In researching this information as part of my responsibilities at VOID, I was struck by two main categories of information, 'Hype' and 'Record'.
Hype is the kind of information about candidates and politicians bought and paid for either by the parties, candidates themselves, or their opponents. 'Hype' is designed specifically to hide lots of factual information about a candidate or party, while accentuating either the positive or negative, often out of context of the record. Included in 'Hype' are the web sites of the candidates themselves, obviously designed to hide the negatives and highlight the positives as they think voters want to see them. Also included in this category are the partisan PAC (political action committee) sites whose purpose is to promote one party or political perspective over others, like Swift Boat Veterans, or MoveOn.org. While 'Hype' sites can be informative, in as much as they will provide factual information which clearly favors their slant, they come up very short in providing context and a complete picture or information base about their targets of discussion.
'Record' sites may have a slant or bias by their owners or funders, but, their mission statement, charter, and obligations under non-profit and tax exempt non-partisan laws, require that their main purpose be to inform and educate on a factual and more holistic information set. These sites often provide records of historical time lines, biographies, or fairly political records of candidates, (hence the term 'Record' site as opposed to 'Hype') These sites are far more comprehensive in the information they provide and are largely accurate and complete as far as context is concerned for the information they provide on candidates, parties, and politicians. More prominent 'Record' sites include Real Clear Politics, Open Secrets.org, and of course, the incredibly rich and diverse C-Span web site.
I don't think it is unreasonable to classify voters into 3 broad categories based on their information sources.
- Party voters who seek information legitimized by Party sponsorship
- "Handed" partisan voters who may not identify strongly with either of the major parties but have a strong left or right partisan lean who seek information from left-handed or right-handed partisan sources, and often read and cite 'Hype' sources
- And true independent voters who rely in some major part on 'Record' sites, as mentioned above, and who seek amd are drawn toward candidates most likely to work to solve the problems and issues of concern to them, regardless of party affiliation.
America's future rests in the hands of these 3 categories of voters, and there are many new information sources springing up each election cycle to cater to each of these groups of voters. But, recently, elections have been decided by the "handed" and independent voters, making them the target audiences of candidates and parties after the primary elections. From this writer's perspective, it is very encouraging the number of new and varied 'Record' information sources arising out of the growth of that group of voters who identify themselves as Independents. Clearly, large numbers of independent voters remain biased against one party or another.
But if, and there is some evidence to support this, independent voters are more likely to acquire information from 'Record' sources as opposed to 'Hype' and clearly partisan sources, this group may indeed become the true political brokers of elections in the future. These swing voters are more inclined to give incumbents the boot for poor results. And because of their information sources, they are more inclined to focus on issue solutions and the pragmatism of the candidate they vote for, as opposed to political party ideology, spin, or rhetoric. And that would have to be a distinct improvement in American politics.
Posted by David R. Remer at October 5, 2007 05:25 PMThere was a 3.6% decrease (down rom 99.2% to 97.6%) in seat retention in Congress in the last 7-Nov-2006 election.
That demonstrates some voters are not happy.
While voters threw out a few bums, it wasn’t nearly enough.
The problem is that voters punished Republican politicians mostly (instead of both).
Congress still enjoyed a cu$hy 95.6% seat retention rate.
I hope in 2008 that voters will hold more politicians in BOTH parties accountable.
Rewarding Congress with perpetual 95% to 99% re-election rates is programming politicians to be more irresponsible, because they know 95% to 99% of them will still be re-elected no matter what. After all, Congress’ average seat retention rate since year 1855 is 95.4%.
Another site providing voting records is OnTheIssues.org. It also has some quizzes and some software (VoteMatch, SenateMatch, HouseMatch, etc.) that will try to match your up with politicians that support your most important issues (providing percentages of matches). Unfortunately, no matches for me exceeded 35%. That’s not very encouraging.
CORRECTION: (down from 99.2% to 97.6% 95.6%)
Remer, you overlooked the greatest failed source of all: our colleges and universities. Check out this report on how America’s students, Freshman and Seniors score on American history, civics, and economics knowledge. Would you have guessed a D+ overall grade? Perhaps this explains why our government with all its college grads, functions so very poorly.
I like this Watchblog because many of the writers provide information and sources to information that I was unaware of. I learn more on this site about general politics, history, and economics than I do in the same amount of reading on other debate sites. But, this site falls victim too to holes in some of the writer’s education about history, civics, and economics. But, my guess is writers here would score better than most college seniors. You can take the quiz yourself at ISI’s site. My score was 74. Not bad for a college drop out.
Posted by: Thaddeus at October 7, 2007 12:58 AMRemer, you overlooked the greatest failed source of all: our colleges and universities. Check out this report on how America’s students, Freshman and Seniors score on American history, civics, and economics knowledge. Would you have guessed a D+ overall grade
If they’re testing college freshmen, the “failed source” isn’t the college, it’s the high schools…
I took US history all thru grade school and high school…never reached past the depression…so my otherwise great education is lacking…we learned the Revolutionary War over and over and over, but yet never reached the years which covered WWII up to the present…
And, history in college was never a requirement…
To what do we owe the lack of knowledge of history of our very own current White House occupant who was a history major at Yale???
Posted by: Rachel at October 7, 2007 10:30 AMRachel
“To what do we owe the lack of knowledge of history of our very own current White House occupant who was a history major at Yale???”
what does this have to do with the public school system cheating you out of a quality education? i attended public school in the 1960s, and 70s. we studied history up through the vietnam war, which at that time was current history. sounds like the folks you need to be looking at are the teachers unions, and local bureacrats who actually set the agendas. unless you graduated highschool after 2001 george bush had no effect on your education, even then it is the state level politicians that control what is taught, content and everything else. you need to take a good look at the incumbent politicians in your state, they are the ones who cheated you, by supporting teachers unions who only about increasing thier membership in order to increase thier hold on the incumbent politicians who empower them. follow the money.
Posted by: dbs at October 7, 2007 12:54 PMeditor
what happened to SIC EAGLE, and his latest post? just curious. sorry to get of topic david.
Posted by: dbs at October 7, 2007 12:57 PMI missed one question on the QUIZ on judicial review, but confess to guessing right on 4 or 5 questions (by process of elimination):
- A. the Constitution.
- B. Marbury v. Madison. (correct)
- C. McCulloch v. Maryland.
- D. the Bill of Rights.
- E. a Presidential executive order.
(23) The power of judicial review was established in:
So, how many young Americans can’t identify Iraq on a world map (after 4.5 years of war in Iraq)?
How many can’t find Louisiana on a map of the U.S.? One-third. And the funny thing about it is that Louisiana is shaped like the letter “L”.
At any rate, voters should take a few minutes to really look at the candidates’ voting records and positions, because there are now web-sites galore that make it easy to do. And I think if voters will take the time to look at their senators’ and representatives’ voting records, they may choose to vote for someone else.
Here’s another good source (The U.S. Congress Votes Database) which breaks it down by state, by House, by Senate, by NNNth Congress, by recent votes, by types, etc.
It also has financial reports.
OpenSecrets.org is a good place to see where the money comes from and goes to. All you really need to know about that is that it all makes politics rotten and corrupt. Especially when only a tiny 0.15% of all 200 million eligible voters makes 83% of all federal campaign donations (of $200 or more; averaging $6667 per person in year 2004).
Some web-sites have an obvious partisan bias, and have to be taken with a grain of salt.
Another site with a huge searchable database is the U.S. Government Printing Office GPO: origin.www.gpoaccess.gov
These sources and wider-availability should help voters and make it harder for crooked politicians to hide from their deeds and corruption.
But it still would not surprise me (despite Congress’ dismal 11% to 18% approval ratings) at all to see 95.6% re-election rates in the 2008 election, because that’s the seat retention rate from the last election, and the overall average since year 1855 is 95.4%. This is why Congress is corrupt. They can pretty much do as they like; give themselves a raise every year (9 of the last 10 years), flip flop, lie, steal, take bribes, carry the water for their big-money-donor puppeteers, and even if ever convicted - stil get their cu$hy multi-million dollar pension and maybe even a presidential pardon.
Thaddeus, thank you for the links. My score was 81%, as a college grad U of Tx San Antonio. But, then I have been writing and researching some of this stuff for several years. They did a good job of spreading the questions from easy to tough. But, there weren’t that many tough questions according to my score, 1 out of 5, approximately.
It is incredible that our colleges and universities are producing students who can only manage scores on this test at 69% on average. And yes, you are right, it does call into question the competence of those with degrees in our government. Deeply into question, including Ivy League schools some of which didn’t fare too well at all, like Bush’s alma mater.
Posted by: David R. Remer at October 7, 2007 06:30 PMdbs, please refer such questions to the email address in our Rules for Participation link below the comment box at the end of this screen.
Posted by: David R. Remer at October 7, 2007 06:31 PM3) The Constitution of the United States established what form of government?
- A. Direct democracy
- B. Populism
- C. Indirect democracy
- D. Oligarchy
- E. Aristocracy
Although C. is the right answer, we appear to be headed for E. (if not already there).
David,
I plan on taking full advantage of this new direction in the election process.
I recently decided to run for Congress for Nebraska’s first district.
Posted by: Bryan Knoelk at October 7, 2007 07:08 PMWhew! Can’t believe the week I just had. Just now catching my breath.
Your right David about the Internet putting a whole heap of information out there on the candidates. And that’s a good thing. One thing ya can count on is the candidates aint gonna put that kind of information out on their own. It might make them look bad. Or their opponent look good. And neither is good for their chances of being elected.
While I lean to the right I can and have voted for more left leaning candidates if I feel they have the what it takes to tackle the problems facing this country.
How the candidate feels about abortion isn’t as big an issue as what the candidate will do to reduce the deficit, pay down the national debt, balance the budget, secure our borders, and improve education. Show me a candidate that has a proven record of working on these and the other problems facing this country and I’ll show ya a candidate that most likely has my vote regardless of party.
BTW d.a.n and David,
Told y’all I’d let ya know how the special election came out for the county school board. By 68% of the vote I’m pleased to say that I’m the newest member of the board. I’ll serve the rest of the my predecessors term and be up for reelection in 2010.
Ron Brown
Congrats… I’ve read many of your posts here and, based on those, think you’ll bring a lot of common sense to your board.
Posted by: Doug Langworthy at October 7, 2007 10:28 PMRon, Congratulations!
Is that a 4 year term?
Bryan Knoelk, Congratulations on running for Nebraska’s 1st district.
And I just received an E-Mail from an associate who will be running for Congress in 2008 against an incumbent.
I certainly hope this trend (below) keeps growing:
Another 3.6% would be good.
Another 11.6% would be great (matching 1895-to-1897).
Another 30.0% or more would be fantastic, and send a clear message to those lucky enough to hold onto their cu$hy, coveted seats of abused power.
That would get their attention?
Of course, the lowest Seat-Retention rate since year 1855 was 84.5% for the 54th Congress (1895-to-1897).
The highest Seat-Retention rate since year 1855 was 99.9% for the 95th Congress (1977-to-1979; after Vietnam ended; but strangely during a time of very bad (double-digit) inflation; but the rate fell to 97.8% in the subsequent election probably due in part to high inflation).
For the coming election, I think illegal immigration is going to be a bigger factor, and politicians in both parties might want to start thinkin’ about their current voter base instead of profits for illegal employers and another amnesty to get a few million more votes. I hope this is not lost on voters.
Posted by: d.a.n at October 7, 2007 10:36 PMRon Brown said: “How the candidate feels about abortion isn’t as big an issue as what the candidate will do to reduce the deficit, pay down the national debt, balance the budget, secure our borders, and improve education. Show me a candidate that has a proven record of working on these and the other problems facing this country and I’ll show ya a candidate that most likely has my vote regardless of party.”
We couldn’t think more alike on this if we were Siamese twins.
Congratulations on your Bd. position. Do the kids and teachers and janitors proud, Ron. Without them, there would be no Board position to win.
Posted by: David R. Remer at October 8, 2007 02:06 AMBryan, fantastik. Be sure to send me the district number, state, and link to your campaign web site. I can get it posted at VOID at the very least and very likely at some others as well.
Some of the sites will pick you up from your Fed. Elec. Comm. filing, but, they won’t have your campaign web site to post. Send the info to me via president at voidnow.org
Posted by: David R. Remer at October 8, 2007 02:10 AM
Bryan: Good luck. Don’t forget, if you win, you will be on VOIDS hit list two years from now.
jlw, that will depend on the voters, not VOID. VOID advocates booting ineffective, inefficient, and corrupt politicians. The voters decide who those are, NOT VOID. Please don’t mischaracterize what VOID is about. If you don’t understand it, fine, we will continue to try to educate you on it, as here.
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