Why Tom Perriello's defeat was nearly inevitable

The article called “Losing the Fifth” dated November 9th 2010 examines the reasons why Tom Perriello lost the 5th District Congressional race to former State Senator Robert Hurt after only serving one term in office. The paper gives many reasons as to why Perriello may have lost this election, but a couple of points stood out as more probable reasons. The article states that one of the reasons that Perriello lost was because he supported the Democrats unpopular legislation, from the $787 billion economic stimulus, to cap and trade, to health care reform in a district that is historically a conservative district. This relates to Peltzman’s idea that all votes can be explained by examining economics interests. Representatives vote for the economics issues of their constituency, and when they do not, they are punished by voters by not being re-elected for another term. This could have been the case with Tom Perriello.

Although the studies on legislative shirking disagree on what constitutes shirking and how to empirically test for shirking, it is the tendency of representatives to support their own economics self interests and ideologies rather than that of their constituencies. Robert Hurt said “Congressman Perriello, with all due respect, did not listen carefully to the people he represented or to those who are the job creators and instead voted for policies that harmed our economy.” Even so, A “no” vote on health care would have negatively affected Perriello’s campaign. Would President Obama still have still came out and rallied for him? Would liberals have been willing to donate so heavily and volunteer so much of their time for him if he had done that? It’s a known fact that representatives change their votes based on monetary contributions, but this could have hurt Perriello in the long run. In a district that is historically designed to swing Republican, it is hard for Democrats to hold on to the Fifth. To hold the seat in midterms, a Democrat will have to win over more voters somewhere, and it’s not enough to depend on college kids for votes. Regardless, of the way the election turned out for Tom Perriello, I expect him to accomplish great things in the future.