Please Look Back in Anger

So, most of the time, theories about micro-level voting behavior are not particularly gripping or important. This year, they will be.

So, here's a little guided tour through voting theory and research:

1. Almost everyone votes according to their party.

2. Insofar as people vote based on "policy" issues, that small group can be subvidided into:
a) People who vote out of their own personal economic interests.
b) People who vote from a "sociotropic" perspective. I.e., they vote according to how the country as a whole has fared.
C) Both of these groups can be further subdivided into people who judge retrospectively (based on past performance) and people who judge prospectively (based on campaign promises, etc).

3. People vote based on their assessment of the personal qualities of candidates.

So, there you go: thousands of pages of academic research and theory summarized in 9 lines.

What I want to highlight for the 2010 midterms is this issue of retrospective v. prospective voting. The sluggish economy is still the dominant issue of the day, with very real consequences for people in their local communities, particularly viz a viz state and local government cuts. Unemployment is still quite high, and the economy is still unstable. But, an argument can be made that the stock market has recovered and that, without the bailouts and stimulus spending, we'd be even worse off than we are.

My question is who will voters blame for this. George Bush presided over the emergence and collapse of the housing bubble, but is that now too long ago for voters to care? Has this officially become Obama and the Democrats' fault? I really don't know. I predict that Democrats will lose seats (not surprising in a midterm, and not surprising given the tight partisan balance of the country), but I don't think it's gonna be a 1994 style takeover.

One thing I'll say...I've come to believe in the astronomical shortness of American memory. As a consequence, I think much of the hullabaloo surrounding health care will have faded by November.