IDS editorial board analyzes election results

This election wasn’t about electing Republicans to power. It was about un-electing Democrats.
 
Anyone that believes the rhetoric coming from so many in the Tea Party that tells us that voters were looking to convert en masse to radical libertarian principals of extremely limited government is misguided and short-sighted.

Meager reforms to the health insurance industry did not cost Democrats this election. The underperforming economy did.

The so-called cap and trade bill that was endorsed even by many major energy companies, including Duke Energy, did not cost the Democrats the election. The underperforming economy did.

Startling increases in taxes did not cost Democrats the election — President Barack Obama has actually cut taxes for the vast majority of Americans. The underperforming economy did.

Ballooning public debt and an increase in the size of government did not cost the Democrats the election either. The underperforming economy did.

When it comes down to it, none of the issues that the Tea Party campaigned on were what actually mattered to voters when they cast their ballots Tuesday. It was simply the fact that the candidates they voted for weren’t Democrats.

It doesn’t matter who is in power because whenever the economy is doing badly, the ruling party always suffers. The economy is improving — for the past nine consecutive months, we’ve seen stable growth in jobs. But it still isn’t doing very well.

If the Democrats had magically been able to turn the entire economy around with a single vote that put us back where we were before the economy collapsed during the Bush Administration, the Democrats would not have lost this election.

But economies do not work like that; it takes a lot of time for them to turn back around.

The last few months have shown that we’re on the road to recovery, but, from the view point of an average middle class voter, things still don’t seem to be that much better than they were a year or two ago, even though in the grand scheme of things, they are.

Voters don’t care about that. They care (rightfully) about what’s directly impacting them. And the currently dismal economy is what is affecting them.

So Republicans should be cautious about proclaiming overarching agendas of repealing the health insurance reform bill or ending the stimulus. Those are things a majority of Americans will benefit from, and Republicans will likely be punished if they
do everything they’ve planned.

Republicans across the country have reason to be happy. But they must not interpret the election results necessarily as a repudiation of the Democrats’ philosophy or a validation of their own. Rarely does the public change its mind so drastically and quickly about what it believes ideologically.

Rather, Republicans should reflect on the new power that they have been given and use it to keep the country moving in a direction of recovery, not repealing everything that the Democrats have done in the past two years.