Here We Go

So, it's August already and the deep, sticky end of the mid-term elections is nearly upon us. Do Australians know or even care? Well, yes, many know, some care and all will be interested in the results. For those of us here who are actually interested in the details it's pretty easy to keep up through the Internerd and cable news networks. And the best part is we get the news coverage but we're spared the advertisements. The tricky bit is we have no first hand feel for the electoral mood on the ground. We have to rely on second hand analysis of the electorate with the added twist of trying to fathom out where each analyst is coming from.

Who do I rely on? Well, CNN.COM (the US edition) in the first instance, for straight up news coverage. Not so much for commentary since they changed to just Molly Ivins (from the left) and R. Emment Tyrell Jnr (from the right, with a name like that it could hardly be otherwise). I find them both so polarised as to be useless for getting a real read. Who else? Time magazine, Australian broadsheets, cable rebroadcasts of ABC, CBS, NBC news, the New York Times email edition and Fox News (for a read on where the conservative punditry is at).

So, it's a wired world. We all knew that. On to the mid-terms.

The first thing that strikes an Australian observer about US congressional elections is the importance of money and second thing is the power of encumbancy. We have public funding of federal elections and whilst the parties raise corporate contributions at a national level, members of our house of reps spend nothing like the time and effort on fund raising that US congress members spend. Also, our electorates are small enough that they are not reachable as TV markets so there is next to no TV advertising for individual candidates in house seats.

Encumbancy seems to be a much bigger advantage in the US system than it is here. Partly this is because we have a genuinely independent, national electoral commission that sets all electorate boundaries. This means that there is no scope for fiddling at a state level and the political parties have little means to influence boundaries. Another reason for the difference is that voting here is more party based. That is, if the national leadership of a major party is popular every MP in that caucus gets a boost. Conversely, if a national leadership is on the nose with the general electorate every single MP in that party will take a hit. An individual MP's personal strengths might mediate the size of the hit but it is rare to buck a national trend on local factors alone.

So, at first blush, an Australian sees a national leadership with the seriously negative numbers that the Bush administration and the GOP congressional leadership have, and expects that every single GOP member of the House is going to pay, many of them with their seats. Of course this ain't necessarily so. Money, local factors, and encumbancy can be expected to protect many GOP members from the consequences of their leaders' failures . Also many are hard at work distancing themselves from the President and the leadership ("the Devil made me vote that way" defence).

My best guess at this early stage and from this great distance is that the House will change hands, very narrowly and that there will be enough softness on the righthand edge of the Democratic party for every vote in the new house to be a battle. This is not an enticing prospect. An even more do nothing congress. My sense is that the advantages of encumbancy act as a buffer but they can be overcome if the tide gets high enough. It's well inside the bounds of possibility that a couple more bad breaks for the GOP could see the electoral mood cross a tipping point and set off a rout. They know this, that's why they're in do nothing mode.

It's going to be an interesting ride.