Result: Americans like Gridlock!

Have you seen that electoral map?  That is one scary sea of red.  In actuality, not many House seats changed hands and the ones that are still in dispute this morning are mostly leaning D.  This is what unlimited money will buy you – a lot of red.

And yet, this is a promising sign.  Demographically, the Republicans have seen their high water mark and are now looking at an ebb tide.  With all the money they threw at this election, this is the best they could do.  Even the most carefully crafted legislative districts and poorly educated electorate probably won’t help them next time.

The bright spots last night happened in the Senate with the election of Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin.  It looks like North Dakota will send Heidi Heitkamp to the Senate, bring the total number of women in the senate to 19%.  It’s a shame we couldn’t hit 20% but I’ll take what I can get.  Massachusetts has never had a female senator so this is a step in the right direction.  I wonder if the Democrats couldn’t have won other races if they had run more female candidates.

As for the top spot, well, we were going to get Pete or RePete.  It’s hard to tell which is which.  I didn’t have a dog in that fight.  But it looks like Obama lost a lot of popular support this year, about 10 million people’s worth of popular vote.

The Democrats will incorrectly assume that Americans want more Republican policies. I don’t think that’s what they want. I think they want more forceful Democrats who can cut through all the messaging money can buy. That’s going to be important going forward because the Republican base is going to start to die off in increasing numbers. Democrats and new parties must be ready to go on the attack.  Why not start now?  There is absolutely no reason for Democrats in the House or Senate to yield a nanometer on any kind of “reform” of the social safety net.  The Republicans are stuck.  This House can ram through any stupid thing it wants.  It doesn’t have to go anywhere.

Now would be a good time for the left to get the band back together for 2014.

The Confluence Demographics Survey Results

This is an update to the survey post I did on Tuesday.  We were having trouble with the graphics but have fixed the pics now.  Enjoy!

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Thanks to everyone who took our survey.  That would be 561 of you!  The survey was not intended to be scientific in any way.  It was more or less a show of hands to help us determine who our readers are.  It also wasn’t freeped.  There were a couple outliers.  They were dead giveaways.  It seems that children can’t help adding stupid comments to their responses. We have removed them.

Other than that, what does our survey say about us?  Well, we haven’t thoroughly analyzed and crosstabbed everything yet but in general, we’re very much like Firedoglake’s demographic.  We’re well-educated and fairly affluent.  That is not to say that people who don’t have degrees aren’t smart.  Maybe Jane Hamsher would say such a thing but we never would.  We suspect there are more than a few Michael Faradays in our cohort who don’t have degrees but still managed to get Obama’s number from the very beginning.  But enough talk, let’s do the numbers.

Note: You’d be surprised at how many grey hairs there were at YearlyKos 1 and 2.  The lefty blogosphere is older than you’d think.

Note: This is unsurprising.  We’ve tried hard to make sure women feel comfortable commenting here.  Of course, men are also welcome.

Note: Our readership is primarily straight but the gay community is well represented and should feel welcome here.

Note:  *Most* of you in the ‘other’ category have JD’s, followed by MDs.  The remaining others are working on their PhDs or other advanced degree.  Some others have degrees I’m not familiar with.  I’ll try to break this down a bit more later.  I’ll also try to cross check “some college” with age to see if it correlates to students.  (in my copious free time…)

Note:  This one surprised me.  Most of us make more than the average American.  Some of you answered for yourselves only and not for your entire family.  Why the Democratic party would want to throw away all of these potential donors is mystery to me but I guess we’re just not rich enough.

Note: Preliminary analysis shows that the less money you make, the more likely you are to be socialist.   Readers in the $80-100K range tended to identify more as Democrats.  Above that level, there were more Independents.  Ideas, anyone?

Note: I regret not including more categories for this question.  Most of the ‘others’ worked in the medical industry but some of you others had some very cool jobs.  We have published novelists and museum administrators and some very well paid bloggers among our group.  I’m still reading through all of the responses but, in general, I’d say our lives are fascinating.

Note: Many of you wealthier readers consider yourselves to be very liberal.  I guess you didn’t forget how you got to the top.  Well done.  We may be the voters now known as Liberal Not Democrat or LNDs.  The party is starting to fidget about us.  Good.  I suspect we are the ones who brought down Corzine.  Our numbers are small right now but growing.  We provide the margin of victory for some Democrats.

Note: This was no surprise, except for the fact that Joe Biden didn’t get even one vote from among our ranks. Eventually, even Joe got one vote.

Note:  My apologies to the Native Americans and bi-racial readers.  The survey was prepared rather quickly and the responses were already coming in when I realized my mistake.

Ok, so there you have it.  My initial impressions are that we are not Reagan Democrats.  We are mostly middle class to upper middle class, relatively well paid and smart.  We wouldn’t be outliers on Firedoglake or any other lefty blog.  We are them.  All you lurkers who have been afraid to identify yourselves with us can relax.  We’re smart, whether we have degrees or not and we’re not easily fooled.  The only thing that separates the rest of the lefty blogosphere from us is our higher number of female readers (a plus!) and the fact that we caught onto Obama earlier than they did.  We’ll have to do another survey to find out why that is.  Anyone have any ideas?