This article from the New York Times interviews different people and asks them about their reactions to the elections results. It focuses mainly on Larimer County, Colorado and the Senate race in Colorado. Despite the fact that recent nationwide trends favor the Republicans, Democratic incumbent Michael Bennet won the election by a slim margin. But many like Ms. Hamrick, one of the people interviewed, thought that the Republican resurrengy was beneficial; as she put it, "challenge is good...It’s like 'Kind Coffee' and Starbucks...competition makes you check everything that you do." (1) But the problem with this analogy is that competition for a political position is not nearly as close to perfect competition as the coffee market. But what is interesting to note is how close the elections results actually were. Mr. Bennet won by less than 16,000 votes in an election in which 1.4 million voted! That means he won by less than one percentage point. Based on these voting results, a person that favors an independent candidate or any third party candidate might feel indifferent because they feel that both parties are essentially the same; in this scenario, the political system would be far from pefectly competitive.
Based on different interviews, it seems that many people genuinely believe in the workings of democracy. Annyce Stone for example, a Republican college professor, believes that if representatives "don’t listen, I think they’ll be voted out." (1) This Downsian view proclaims that we will not see shirking. But in this Colorado Senate race, it seems that Mr. Bennet displeased his constitutency by voting with health care and other spending bills. In order to understand how this democratic incumbent was able to stay in office at a time when a majority of Republicans were winning, it is helpful to see who his top contributors were. It turns out that the Colorado race was actually the most expensive race in the country; it recieved 33.4 million dollars from outside groups! Mr. Bennet's number one contributor was ActBlue, a Democratic political committee that raises money for Democratic candidates on the internet. Although there would be a considerable incentive to free ride, thousands contribute to this large group that has become one of the largest fundraisers for democratic candidates.
In order for all these outside contributions to be meaningul and have an impact, these various groups must have expected this Senate race to be very close, otherwise, their investment would have been futile. In order to overcome the wave of conservative voting trends, a lot of money was spent on persuasive advertising. To illustrate this point, the article explains that "In a state about evenly split...the Senate battle was noisy, costly and nasty to the end, with a barrage of television and radio ads." (2) The Democratic campaign focused on highlighting the social conservative policy preferences of Republican Ken Buck had, including his opposition to abortion in all cases and his questioning of the seperation of church and state.(3) Although Bennet might have been shirking by voting with the health care bill, the persuasive advertising by the Democrats motivated socially liberal voters, such as college students, to go out and vote. In this case, the reason shirking can persist is because politicians have views on many issues and people care about certain issues more than others. Furthermore, despite being an effective strategy for Democrats, a rational voter should realize that the major bills that were voted on by the Senate dealt with issues such as health care reform, banking reform, budget resolutions and not with exclusively social issues. It seems that the campaigning by Democrats attacked certain socially conservative beliefs while remaining vague on actual policy preferences. Anthony Downs must have been correct when he said that in a two-party system, "if any party believes it can increase its changes of gaining office by discouraging voters from being rational, its own rational course is to do so."
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