With the World series starting up tonight (go Giants) I thought it appropriate to take a little look at the upcoming elections and the likely Republican victory. One of the many things that stats junkies will be pondering is how many unearned runs will be scored by the two teams.
I can’t predict where that number will come in but I do think it is clear that there is at least one unearned victory on the horizon, but it’s not happening tonight. Rather it will happen next Tuesday when, unless all of the polls are wrong, the Republicans are going to score the ultimate in unearned victories.
The rising wave is not the result of any big swing to the GOP agenda, rather it is the result of the fact that the voters are tired of the Democrats and they don’t have any other choices. So the GOP is winning a victory without actually scoring anything.
This is an unfortunate trend in American Politics these days. While you could certainly argue that the Democratic victory in 2008 was built on the Obama change agenda, 2006 was pretty much the result of voter disgust with the GOP. And even in 2008 the agenda was in many ways symbolic instead of specific, and that could perhaps be the reason the Democrats have had trouble over the last two years.
It’s easy to promise ‘change’ or pledge to fix and change things for the better of the common man, but when it comes to actual governing you need to be more specific. The Democrats have had issues with that over the last few years and I am afraid the GOP made do so over the next two.
Now this doesn’t mean that the Republicans cannot benefit from this. In baseball an unearned run can still get you a World Series ring and in politics a successful agenda that is positive and productive can earn your party approval from the voters.
I hope that the Republicans will consider this and will accomplish something positive in the next two years, but I’m not confident that they will.
But I would love to be proved wrong.