My Dad, the armchair pundit: The 2014 Midterm Elections

Every so often, my dad, lifelong Republican with an odd mix of entitlement protection, gun rights, and personal responsibility beliefs, will make bold political predictions based on nothing other than his own experiences and opinions, which are rooted in no political science.  Often times, these prophecies are apropos of nothing.  He’s the anti-Nate Silver. I’ll do my best to faithfully recreate his claims here.  This may become an ongoing series.

            In the upcoming midterm elections, my dad predicts a sweeping victory for the Democrats.  He is certain that the Dems are primed to take back the House and gain a few seats in the Senate.  When I asked him why he believed this was the case, he told me that it was because the Republicans are obstructionist, and the American public is tired of that.

I conceded that the American public was indeed tired of political gridlock, but pressed him to further explain his rationale for his prediction, because the political math did not bear out his prediction insofar as I have read.  In fact, my father’s intellectual rival, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, seems to believe that the Senate is looking like a toss-up, when it was once looking safe for the Democrats to hold.

My father claimed that, because it is the Republicans obstructing the operation and functions of our government, they would pay a hefty political price.  I told him that, of the third of the Senate that is up for re-election in 2014, many of them are in safe Republican states, meaning Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, and the like, which would re-elect a Republican as the solution to gridlock, rather than give power to the Democrats.  I felt like my logic was sound, especially when buttressed by the information I had been recalling.

Without warning, my father switched topics to the House of Representatives, claiming that the Republicans would be swept out of power because of their obstructionist tendencies, because that’s where the real problem was.  I asked why the Republicans in the house, who could not filibuster, were the problem.  He said that, in his experience, almost everyone was completely fed up with the House of Representatives.  I informed my Dad, who lives in a town of 450 people, many of whom are staunchly conservative, and would vote for a Democrat when hell freezes over, that the House of Representatives’ approval rating would have to drop well below 1% before any drastic changes would be felt.  He told me I was nuts; that his experience was similar to how ALL Americans felt, and that everyone would be voting for a change in their representatives.  I should note that my dad lives in NY-21 (formerly NY-23,) which is represented in the United States House of Representatives by Bill Owens, a Democrat.  If my dad truly votes for change, he will be voting against the claims he makes.

I explained to him that, as an individual voter, I could hate 434 members of the House of Representatives with a fiery passion, and want every one of those 434 do-nothing slobs out on their asses tomorrow, but I could love my own Representative, and every other American could do that, too, and not a single representative would be voted out of office.  That approval rating – one out of 435 representatives – is less than a quarter of a single percent approval rating.

My father doubled down.  They’re all crooks and criminals, and they are only interested in themselves, and in furthering their own careers, not being a public servant and voice of the people.  We agree, I claimed.  But that doesn’t signal any seismic shift in the House of Representatives, which the Republicans will indeed hold, or the Senate, where two-thirds of the elected Senators are not up for re-election, and the ones that are come from safe Republican states, largely.  I told him the Republicans are expected to gain 4 seats, leaving every Senatorial vote up for tie-breaking by the President of the Senate, a.k.a. Fightin’ Joe Biden.

My dad pulled his face into a strange smirk of dismissal, held up his left hand with his fingers splayed out, nodded his head as though he didn’t agree, and told me “They ought to all be out on the street.”  Conversation over.  I felt like I should throw it back to an overwhelmed Megyn Kelly at the America’s News Desk studios for a hard hitting expose about a black guy who is conservative.