Blame The Numbers

Nate Silver's morning after "What the hell happened?" analysis at least has the benefit of Nate's math behind it.

Overall, we have a 31-point swing in the vote to explain: from Barack Obama's roughly 26-point victory in November 2008, to Martha Coakley's roughly 5-point loss today.

At a bare minimum, 10 of those points must be assigned to the national environment. Generic ballot polling suggests that the Democrats' position has worsened by a net of 10 points since November 2008, from winning the House popular vote by 10 points in 2008 to being dead even with Republicans today.

Also at a bare minimum, 11 points of blame should be assigned to Coakley. That represents the difference between the 58 percent of vote that she received at her high-water mark in the polls to the 47 percent she received on Election Day. A fairly large number of voters, it appears, actually turned away from Coakley; it was not just a matter of undecided ones turning toward Brown.

That leaves us with 10 more points of blame to assign; let's just dole those out as evenly as possible, giving 3 more points to Coakley, 3 more points to the national environment, and 4 to Massachusetts-specific special contingencies -- it gets the extra point because it hadn't received any yet.

That would make the final score: national environment 13, Coakley 14, special circumstances 4.

(More after the jump...)

If you follow through on the math, this would suggest that Coakley would have won by about 8 points, rather than losing by 5, had the national environment not deteriorated so significantly for Democrats. It suggests that the Democrats would have won by 9 points, rather than losing by 5, had the candidate been someone other than Coakley. And it suggests that the race would have been a 1-point loss (that is, basically too close to call), rather than a 5-point loss, even if Coakley had run such a bad campaign and even if the national environment had deteriorated as much as it has, but had there not been the unusual circumstances associated with this particular election.

Obviously, this is a rather imprecise and unsophisticated exercise. But each of those implications feels about right to me. Maybe you'd do the math a little differently. But don't be sparing with your blame; there's plenty of it to go around.

And frankly all that seems perfectly logical to me, including the ratios.   The trick is "What defines the national environment?"  What's responsible for that 13 point hit Coakley took because of it?  The Village will tell you all 13 points are Obamacare (and so are the other 18 for that matter.)  Some will tell you all 13 points are still Coakley.

Me?  I gotta go with what what Brad at Sadly, No! says.

I’ll have more to say about this at a later date, but I think Obama’s biggest miscalculation upon taking office was that the American people were looking for a return to Clintonism — that is, a Democrat who is buddy-buddy with business elites and who won’t rock the boat too much on the economic populism front. Basically, it’s the sort of mentality that if you let the corporate elites work their magic and grow the economy, you can use the added tax revenue for social good.

But the times clearly demand something else. Corporate-friendly Democrats do well when the livin’ is easy, but these times demand angry populism in one form or another. The good news is that Obama can do a really good job of calling the Republicans out on their bullshit by launching populist initiatives including the bank tax, new financial regulations and a strong jobs bill. The GOP will reflexively hate all of these initiatives and will give Obama and the Dems an opening to say, “See? Same Republicans who spent eight years in bed with Wall Street.”

Obama's econ team has been the one really bad mistake he's made.  That's what he needs to correct.  Take the populist anger card back.  Make the Republicans defend Wall Street.  Take serious action to regulate the purple hell out of them.

Do it.