I thought I’d look up how union members voted in the 2010 Wisconsin midterms. The exit polls didn’t actually provided the data, but they did ask about whether you live in a union household. Not surprisingly, union households like Democrats:

That’s a strong showing for Barrett but not nearly as strong as, say, his pull of 87 percent of the African-American vote. Had unions delivered 70 percent of the union household vote to Barrett, he would have won. Russ Feingold pulled 59 percent of the union household vote in his failed re-election bid. Nationally, 61 percent of union household voters pulled the lever for a House Democrat in 2010.

Anne Kim and Stefan Hankin report the “key findings” of Third Way’s latest poll:

In a new post-election survey, Third Way and Lincoln Park Strategies polled 1,000 Obama voters who abandoned Democrats in 2010, either by staying home (the “droppers”) or by voting Republican (the “switchers”). This report paints a portrait of these droppers and switchers—the voters that Democrats will need to win again in 2012. Our key findings:

Droppers are more than the base. One in 3 droppers is conservative, 40% are Independents, and they are split about whether Obama should have done more or did too much.

For switchers, it’s not just the economy. The economy matters but switchers also overwhelmingly think Democrats are more liberal that they are. Two in three say “too much government spending” was a major reason for their vote.

Republicans won a chance, not a mandate. Only 20% of switchers say that a major reason for their vote was that “Republicans had better ideas,” and nearly half say Republicans are more conservative than they are.

Two points here. One, I don’t think it’s very enlightening to rely on survey data to get people to explain their own voting behavior. Systematic surveys make it very clear that voters, in the aggregate, swing against presidents who preside over poor economic performance (as well as those who preside over elevated incidence of shark attacks) but presumably few swing voters subjectively perceive themselves to be fickely remaking their ideology according to macroeconomic fluctuations.

Second, the treatment of the “independent” vote in this bullet point is naive in the extreme. The result that most self-described independents are in fact consistent partisan voters is well-establishment. If 40 percent of droppers are self-identified independents that mostly goes to show that some non-trivial faction of the Democratic Party’s base vote self-identifies as independent.

Via James Fallows, a slice of Chinese media perspective on the midterms:

Global Times/Huanqiu Shibao (Daily, circ. 1.5 mil) [ 环球时报 - "Global Times," an influential but fairly raw-meat nationalist paper]

The U.S. looks for a scapegoat for its decline (pg1)

Quote: The world media believes that Americans did not take into serious consideration the current administration’s policy adjustments but abruptly hoped their leader would instantly bring them back to the golden time after Cold War, which is impossible. Obama has been completely denied. It is believed to be a “thought riot” in the U.S…. Yu Wanli at Peking University’s Center for International Strategic Research said that Americans will become more impatient than usual due to the elections. What Obama has encountered right now is because he has become the scapegoat for U.S. decline.

To state the obvious, the United States and China are very different societies. But one point we have in common, that separates us from our European partners, is that both are very large societies whose scale has allowed us to preserve a remarkable amount of solipsism even in the face of rapidly falling costs of transportation and communication. So in the United States you had a rash of really thoughtless China-bashing midterm ads, and in China you have this slightly odd conceit that Americans are primarily driven by China-related anxieties rather than primarily being totally indifferent to the world beyond our borders.

Managing this relationship is going to be one of the most important tasks of not only the current president, but all national political leaders for the next generation or two. I wonder if this kind of gigantism-induced mental isolationism will make the landscape easier or harder to navigate. The good news, after all, is that it is a real common point of reference.

I think relatively few people understand that one of the principal substantive complaints the new Republican House majority has about Barack Obama is that he’s been unkind to the incumbent firms in the financial services sector.

But here’s Spencer Bachus, the likely new chair of the relevant committee, firing warning shots on behalf of Wall Street:

Spencer Bachus, a potential Republican chairman of the House financial services committee, has fired the first salvo in a battle with regulators – warning them against harming US banks by curbing their trading activity. [...]

Underlining the change in Congress, Mr Bachus, who as ranking Republican on the committee could replace Barney Frank as chairman of the panel, expressed concern that shareholders of Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase will be hurt because the banks will be less profitable. [...]

“The derivatives provisions in Dodd-Frank alone… as they stand now they’re going to take a trillion dollars out of our economy. Think how many jobs that’s going to kill,” he said.

Rising stars in the conservative media firmament have painted an appealing picture over the past two years of a populist right outraged by allegedly undue entanglement between government and big business and eager to help out the little guy. But this is the reality. The article is via Tyler Cowen who remarks “It is difficult to fathom how that last pararaph can make any sense, other than as fabrication.”