Insights into the 2006 elections and beyond.

It's perhaps a testament to the fury of the news cycle that today, a mere three days after the historic 2006 midterm elections, it almost seems passé to engage in yet more political analysis, the vast majority of readers having already overdosed on cables news and blogosphere commentary. That said, a few additional thoughts from the Slate camp felt worthy of sharing:

In response to David Greenberg's debunking of the "six-year itch" electoral mythology, randy-khan highlights in statistical terms just how big of a Democratic wave hit the Senate:

A closer look at the Senate highlights how well the Democrats really did. They started the night with 18 of the 33 seats that were up - which is unusual in a body where overall the other party had a 10 seat lead. The Republicans had a whopping 40 seats that weren't up for reelection, so all they had to do was win 10 elections, just under 1/3 of the seats in play this time, to keep control, thanks to having Dick Cheney as Vice President.

In the end, they won 9, just over 25 percent. Worse, the only places where it ended up that the Republicans were even close to getting a 10th or 11th seat were in states that currently had Republican Senators, Missouri, Montana and Virginia. On top of that, in the two states that were supposedly plausible Republican pick-up opportunities, Maryland and New Jersey, they ended up getting beaten handily, by 11 and 8 points respectively.

The point that may be overlooked here is that the Republicans thought, going into this election cycle, that they had a fair chance of keeping even or possibly gaining seats. Allen was supposed to be a dead lock, and a potential Presidential candidate, Steele was supposed to siphon off lots of black votes, particularly after Mfume didn't win the Democratic primary; Kennedy was supposed to be a rising star running against a so-so Democrat in Minnesota; and Chafee was both much beloved in Rhode Island and one of the rare Republicans who'd opposed the Iraq war. The Democrats had to have nearly everything go right to gain control of the Senate, while the Republicans needed only a couple of races to break their way. In the end, the Democrats got the breaks and the Republicans didn't really get any. That's a pretty big wave.

From exit-poll data, Daniel Gross suggests that the Dems are stealing away upper-income voters who would otherwise gravitate towards the GOP for economic reasons. Not so fast, says cmd9000:

It's not that the higher income voters are voting against their economic interests. It's that their interests have changed. On the coasts, the 100K-150K voting block are likely to be skilled professionals who's economic interests are still primarily middle class. They have more disposable income, but their primary economic challenge is still paying the mortgage and their primary income source is still salary rather than anything that would benefit from capital gains cuts. Let's face it, 150K just doesn't buy what it used to. :>

It's one of the few really smart moves that democrats have made to stick to an extremely broad definition of middle class when discussiong their tax policies, so as to include these folks in the "middle class tax relief" group rather than the "make the rich pay their share" group. And it obviously works. Especially when the republican focus on (less affluent) values voters forces them away from their traditional economic policies.

moodyguppy re-examines conventional wisdom on wealth, political affiliation, and the Bush tax cuts:

Some people, "high income people" who make six or seven figures, may have benefited from tax cuts. But not so much those high-earners in blue states with high state/local taxes, where AMT would have clawed back most of it (CA and NY for example). Most of those people work hard for a living, and if they stopped working, they'd run out of money. That's not rich.

I know people who really are rich. Asset rich. They have 20+ million dollars in investments, or more. Those investments kick off enough income to put them in the top 1%, except they don't have to work, ever. Nor do they pay much income tax, not if they have a decent banker; they live on capital gains, tax-free munis and such. Now THAT is rich.

So the truly rich don't care about tax cuts, at least not income tax cuts. And, "rich people" (defined by me as "I am unemployed and I still have a six-figure income, indefinitely") are more likely to be Democrats. About 60/40. Trustafarian? Most likely a dem.

High income people skew more Republican, but not overwhelmingly so. They're the one paying 80%+ of all income taxes so you'd expect them to like income tax cuts. But they're still 1/3 or more dems, perhaps because AMT insures tax-cuts go to people in low-tax (mostly red) states.

Weisberg's contention that Democratic Senate victories mark the revival of economic nationalism brought this response from Degsme:

The cat has long been out of the bag on economic nationalism. The USA has to import too many resources to realistically shut down significant amounts of trade (bauxite, sulpher, oil, lumber, programmers, GPs). What we really have going on is an unbalanced foreign trade policy: NAFTA et. al. focussed on 'free flow' of Capital and Goods. But realistically those are only one side of the free-market equation. And if you only 'free' one side of the equation, you inherently distort the whole balance.

Labor is the other side of the 'production free market'. Currently we have pegged the migration of labor, but freed the flow of capital. Any surprise there are distortions?

Realistically there needs to be a wholesale reform of both voting rights (nothing in the US Constitution requires citizenship for voting) - which would empower some 5%-10% of the population that currently have had to suffer Taxation Without Representation. This population currently has Congressional Representatives "assigned" to it, but those Reps have no reason to listen to that constituency since it cannot vote.

Anticipating what the new Democratic agenda might have in store, Timothy Noah touts the counterintuitive conservative appeal of a "carbon tax" to combat global warming. not_abel provides this additional rationale: