Center-right, dammit!

by kos [courtesy of Daily Kos]

Math is fun.

If you go through and add it up, leaving aside Minnesota's undecided 1.7 percent for now, only about 49.8 percent of the nearly 306 million people in the United States live in a state where there's even one Republican Senator. Only 24.4 percent live in a state where both seats are held by Republicans.

Taken from the other direction, 48.5 percent of the country's citizenry lives in states where the electorate wants to see only Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents run things in the Senate. Less than a quarter support having only Republicans do so. That's a 2:1 ratio of Democrat:Republican in terms of straightforward statewide mandates for one party or the other in terms of population represented. That leaves the potential public constituency for some sort of centrist (though it could as easily be center left as right, considering the presidential map and the makeup of the House) management of the Senate at slightly over a quarter.

To review, that's about a 2:1:1 ratio for left:center:right, with the cumulative left+center:right ratio of 3:1.

Yeah, the Senate, no matter what happened last night when a Republican shockingly won a Senate race in Georgia (gasp!), provides zero evidence of a "center-right" nation. Neither did the totality of the Democratic landslide the past two cycles:

"Our polling showed that more than 60 percent of voters identified Obama as a liberal," top John McCain aide Mark Salter told Politico. "Typically, a candidate is not going to win the presidency with those figures. But I think the country just disregarded it. People didn’t care."

Wrong. People did care. Obama ran on an explicitly progressive platform, and Americans responded enthusiastically, flocking to his campaign in mind-numbing numbers — rallies topping 100,000 people, 12 million on his e-mail list, a staggering 3.1 million donors. Republicans frantically screamed, "Liberal!" and America responded with a "Right on!" and pulled the lever for the guy. Is that what a "center-right" nation does?

Does a "center-right" nation take a 30-seat Republican advantage in the House and turn it into an 80-seat Democratic advantage in just two election cycles? Does it take a 10-seat Republican advantage in the Senate and turn it into a near-filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the same time frame?

But nothing disproves the "center-right nation" fiction more clearly than the campaign Republicans just ran.

They spent the bulk of the election ranting about "celebrities," "tire gauges," "Rev. Wright" and "William Ayers," then capped it all off with the silly "Joe the Plumber" nonsense. Fear-mongering isn’t a hallmark of a party confident that its agenda is squarely in the American mainstream. Rather, it’s a sign of insecurity — that it can’t win votes by running on substance.

Yet substance was all the voting public wanted this cycle, and they proved it by electing the "liberal."

Wise dude, the guy who wrote that.