The big political news from the President’s Day weekend was the surprise retirement announcement of Indiana Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh. According to reports, the decision was so sudden that even some staff members were taken by surprise.
The peerless Nate Silver has come up with an analysis of what this means for Democrats:
Of the 59 Senate Democrats in the current Congress, he was the 2nd most conservative after Ben Nelson, according to the DW-NOMINATE database. Nevertheless, because he comes from a fairly red state, Bayh was reasonably valuable to his party, ranking about in the middle of the pack among all Democratic Senators based on his roll call votes.
Throughout his career, Bayh has come under fire from the left for his resolutely centrist positions. But such criticisms almost always leave out the political context in which moderates like him operate. As Silver points out, Bayh was representing a generally conservative state (it’s R+5 according to the Partisan Voting Index) in which the chances of a Democrat being elected are about 40 percent. And yet, according to Silver’s analysis, Bayh’s voting record was actually more liberal than the Indiana norm.
Complain all you want about his unreliability as a Democratic vote, but the fact is that Bayh was to the left of the median voter in his state. Considering the constituency that he had to represent, Bayh was actually a relatively valuable member of the Democratic caucus. Of course, it’s not impossible for Democrats to run a more liberal, populist candidate in Bayh’s place who could win. But the likelier possibility, especially in this environment, is that a Republican far more conservative than the incumbent will take the seat, and an iffy vote for Democrats now becomes a reliable “party of no” vote.
“[T]he fact is that over time, the median voter theorem tends to prevail, and that electing someone slightly to the left of center is usually a win for the liberal party in a slightly-to-the-right-of-center jurisdiction,” Silver concludes. That seems obvious, but it’s a lesson that progressives tend to forget. Indeed, Bayh’s departure has been met by cheers of “Good riddance!” from some progressives. If the objective is to make the progressive tent a little smaller and the conservative one a little bigger, then yes, good riddance indeed.
