2010: The Year of Voters Behaving Badly

"If the ruler is upright, the people will do things without being ordered; if the ruler is not upright, even though he orders people to do something they will not comply."
- Analects of Confucius

"There's something wild about you child
That's so contagious
Let's be outrageous
--let's misbehave!!!"
- "Let's Misbehave" by Cole Porter.

The June 8th South Carolina Democratic senatorial primary is an important harbinger of the fall elections. Vic Rawl, the candidate supported by most of the Democratic party leaders, was expected to handily win the nomination. In a stunning upset, Rawl lost in a landslide to Alvin Greene, an unemployed veteran who did no fund raising, virtually no conventional campaigning, and whose campaign had neither a twitter account nor even a website. How could this happen?

Greene insists that he won with old fashioned stumping, driving across the state and meeting with the voters. As appealing as this explanation is, Greene does not appear to have the charisma to pull this off in his post-primary interviews. Some S.C. Democrats speculate that Greene is a Republican plant. This seems unlikely for a number of reasons. Pollsters agree that Senator Jim DeMint will almost certainly win re-election. Why would the S.C. Republicans take the risk of cheating when they can win honestly? Also, the only outside support that Greene allegedly received was the payment of his filing fee. If some conspirators came up with that fee, why didn't they back up their investment with some campaign funds? But more importantly, even if Alvin Greene were a plant, why did nearly 60% of S.C. Democratic voters pull the lever for him?

The answer is as simple as it is troubling for the major political parties. South Carolina voters resented the idea of anointing the Democratic leadership pick of Vic Rawl, and they resented it so much that they were willing to pick any other name on the ballot, even if it was someone they never heard of. This is part of a trend this year: voters in this year's primaries and special elections are refusing to follow the unwritten rules of behavior.

• The special election to fill late Senator Ted Kennedy's seat was widely expected to be over with the Democratic party primary. Conventional wisdom said that solidly Democratic Massachusetts would never replace the late senator with a Republican. Conventional wisdom was wrong; Republican Scott Brown won that race.
• In the Utah Republican senate primary, the party leaders lined up behind the incumbent Senator Bob Bennett. The Republican voters of Utah disagreed, deciding that they preferred a newcomer over their sitting senator.
• Much of the Democratic establishment, including the President, welcomed Senator Arlen Spector into their ranks and endorsed his bid to be the Pennsylvania Democratic nominee. A group of liberal Democrats disagreed, and successfully defeated Spector's nomination.
• In Arkansas, local labor groups ignored pleas from the national party and President Obama and campaigned against the re-nomination of Rep. Blanche Lincoln. Lincoln just barely won the nomination, but the aggressive primary fight has made her defeat in the general election an almost certainty.
  

This trend cuts across both party and ideological lines. Voters of all stripes are refusing to obey the unwritten rules. What has made this year's voters so ornery?

Maybe the problem could be traced to our leaders. After all, they also have unwritten rules. How good have they been at following them? Let's take a look at the Republicans. The rules say that the Republicans will avoid foreign entanglements, support free markets, cut excessive regulation and reduce deficits. For six years under the previous administration, Republicans held the presidency and a majority in both houses, and in those years:

• We entered two wars that have no clear end date;
• Congress enacted the most strongly protectionist policies since the Hoover administration, including high steel tariffs and farm subsidies;
• From 2001 to 2007, our supposed de-regulators actually added another 13,652 pages of regulations to the Federal registry; and
  
• By any measure, the federal deficit rose to a historic high.

It is interesting to note that on several of these issues (free trade, deregulation, balancing the budget), the Clinton administration had a better record of following the Republican rules than the Republicans did!

Now let us take a look at the Democrats. The rules say that Democrats will bring the troops home, counter corporate influence over our government, reign in executive power, and protect our civil liberties. Well, let's look at the record:

• In Obama's first year, he increased Afghanistan troop levels substantially;
• More than 40 former lobbyists hold senior positions in the current administration;
• Despite candidate Obama's criticism of G.W. Bush's use of the constitutionally dubious practice of evading executive limits through "signing statements", president Obama is now embracing the practice; and
• the Democrats actually worsened the already abysmal civil liberties record of the Bush administration by extending the use of warrantless wiretaps, opposed informing suspected terrorists of their Miranda rights, and even authorizing the execution of an American citizen!
  

Given the Obama record, it is no surprise that Daniel Ellsberg, the man behind the Pentagon Papers, said in a recent Der Spiegel interview

"I think Obama is continuing the worst of the Bush administration in terms of civil liberties, violations of the constitution and the wars in the Middle East."

The question is not why voters are so contrarian this year. The real mystery is why voters have been so obedient for so long. As Confucius taught us more than two thousand years ago, politicians will see better behavior only after they model better behavior themselves. In the mean time, voters will continue to reason that "If our leader won't follow the rules, why should we?"