There's been lots of commentary about why the Democrats lost. A little analysis of the actual numbers provides a lot of information. In the House, the Blue Dogs got crushed while relatively few Progressives lost. Some have taken that as indicating the Blue Dogs adopted a dreadful strategy and they should have had more spine and taken more forceful positions. Their response was that they did the best they could given the economic and political landscape. So who is correct?
Let's consider the relative performance of the members of the Blue Dog caucus vs. the Progressive caucus. When comparing performances, it's appropriate to compare the performance with the district results four years earlier, in the 2006 midterm elections. Using the NY Times data for the districts represented by members of the two caucuses, the mean drop in the Democratic vote in Blue Dog districts was 10.7 percent. (The median drop was 8.0 percent.) In Progressive districts, the mean drop was only 6.6 percent (and the median 5.1 percent). The comparison excludes those districts where there was no opposition in either 2006 or 2010.
These differences are statistically significant and indicate that the Blue Dogs performances on average deteriorated more than that of Progressives. While the data is not definitive, it does suggest that on average the Blue Dog strategy was not effective.
But that's not really the most interesting result in the data. The most interesting result is in the number of Democratic votes cast. The sum total across all Blue Dog districts in 2006 was 6.0M Democratic votes; in 2010 it was only 5.1M, about a 15 percent decline. The comparable numbers for the Progressive districts was a change from 9.3M to 8.2M or about an 11 percent drop.
Had Blue Dog districts been able to maintain the same number of votes as in the last mid-term, perhaps 15 more would be returning for the next Congressional session. For the Progressives, Hall and Hare would be returning but Grayson appeared to be doomed by the conservative nature of his district.
The enthusiasm gap - if that's what's being measured - however, shows up in the districts for both caucuses. For the Blue Dogs, only 12 of 53 districts - 22% - had an increase in the number of Democratic votes. For the Progressives, only 17 or 76 - 22% - had an increase in the number of Democratic votes.
These results by themselves need not indicate an enthusiasm gap. If the Progressive's districts are home to more Democrats while the Blue Dog's districts are home to more Republicans and Independents, then the total votes cast could give some direct evidence on that subject. Total votes in Progressive districts averaged 156K both in 2006 and 2010. In contrast, votes cast in Blue Dog districts averaged 185K in 2006 and increased to about 196K in 2010. It's possible that there was more population growth in the Blue Dog districts, but it seems more likely that the increase in votes across district types reflects higher enthusiasm, albeit not on the Democratic side. Of course, hundreds of millions of dollars in negative advertising may have had something to do with that enthusiasm gap or with the vote counts. And I'm guessing that Progressives, with a few notable exceptions, were generally less likely to face a ton of negative ads because of their perceived invunerability.
Are their lessons for 2012? Certainly, and moving to the center doesn't appear to be one of them. If that was the lesson, then Progressives should have seen greater percentage vote declines - even if not more defeats - than Blue Dogs. That didn't happen.
What also appears to have happened is that Democrats stayed home. At one level, it's unfair to compare turnout in 2010 with turnout in 2008, a Presidential election. However, that does represent the basic population of voters. In both Progressive and Blue Dog districts, the Democratic 2010 vote total was only about 55 percent of the 2008 vote total (54% in Blue Dog districts; 56% in Progressive districts). While we can congratulate ourselves about the GOTV efforts, the bottom line is that if we were able to pull that percentage up just to 57, we would still have Speaker Pelosi in 2011.
Bottom line: pretty elemental statistics strongly suggest that the disaster in the House should not be laid at the feet of Progressives. That's certainly been the theme of many on the right and it fits their agenda nicely. Unfortunately, it's not consistent with the data.