Predicting post-Election Day feelings

Given the final poll numbers, it seems likely that Massachusetts Democrats will wake up tomorrow wondering why they didn't work harder on Martha Coakley's behalf. It's a fascinating psychological phenomenon that reverses the usual pattern. As Daniel Gilbert describes in Stumbling on Happiness, people tend to overestimate the extent to which positive or negative events will change their future happiness. But in politics, members of the majority party tend to become disillusioned until some election defeat spurs them again to action. In other words, they underestimate how upsetting an opposition party victory will be. Democrats experienced this feeling after the 1994 election and are likely to do so again in November 2010 if the Massachusetts race doesn't wake them up.

Comments

[neff]

Could you at least have saved the COAKLEY IS GOING TO LOSE!! crap until after the polls were closed? Jesus fucking Christ I hate being a liberal and having people like you on my side.

[Rob]

Predictably, Republicans see in Brown's victory a mandate to kill Obamacare, a not unreasonable interpretation given that both candidates and the President all told voters that the election was critical to the success or failure of the bill. Predictably, Democrats explain Coakley's loss as a result of her being a poor candidate, just as Deeds and Corzine were poor candidates two months ago.

The question Democratic legislators ought to be asking themselves is whether it may not be more advantageous to them to let Obamacare die, saving themselves from the wrath of voters who dislike the bill and letting them spend the rest of 2010 blaming the Republicans for the failure to enact health care reform, as opposed to finding a mechanism (getting the House to pass the Senate bill, using reconciliation to get the Senate to pass a conference bill or trying to get Senate action before Kirk gives up his seat to Brown) to pass Obamacare and letting the President chalk up a win but leaving themselves exposed in November.

[David]

This defeat could provide another you tube parody based on Inglorious Bastards.

[David]

The parody is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4aQCiRjvZY&feature=player_embedded