U.S.A. -- Election 2014: Congratulations, Republicans! (Now what?)

In all sincerity:  Congratulations to the Republican Party for its success in yesterday's elections.

It's only fair to say so.

Also, it's only fair to say that there's always another election in another two years.

The truth--and this is disappointing to me (not a surprise to most readers)--is that the Democratic brand just did not sell well to yesterday's voters.  The Republicans created and sold a more appealing brand.

The election results will be parsed and re-parsed intensively over the next few weeks, so this posting isn't going to go into things like how Republican voters tend to have a better turnout than do Democratic voters in mid-term elections, or how President Obama's approval ratings did one thing or another.  Lots will be said about that, and you'll read it elsewhere in great detail if you care to do so; maybe you already have.  I suppose that most all of those things are true; what really matters for the future is how true they will be come the next election.

After all, there's another election coming in two years.

But there's just one little numbers-parsing that I will indulge in here and now:  voter turnout.  As I am writing this I have seen no overall analysis of turnout for this election, but I imagine that it's pretty low.

Case in point:  California's election for governor.  It looks like just over 5 million votes were cast in total for Jerry Brown--the Democratic incumbent and winner--and Neel Kashkari, the Republican challenger; those two being the only choices for governor on the ballot.  Let's be charitable and add in a few thousand additional votes that might have been made without including a choice for governor, and allow for the fact that not all the votes have been counted yet, and let's say that 6 million Californians voted in yesterday's election.

Does that sound like a lot of votes?  It is, but consider that California has about 18 million registered voters, with about 24 million people who are eligible to vote (out of a total state population of around 38 million).

Which means that Mr. Brown has won an unprecedented fourth term as governor by less than one quarter of the state's residents who could have, and should have, voted.

We get the government we vote for -- or maybe it's the one we don't vote for.

And there'll be another chance to do this again in two years.  Not for California governor, of course; that will be in four years, and Jerry Brown will not be running for reelection again because he's reached his legal limit (besides, he'll be 80 years old then, and I presume he will have better things to do with his time than campaign for elected office. . .not that he spent much time campaigning for this election).

Are California voting patterns representative of the nation as a whole?  In some ways, no they are not, and in other ways, yes they are.  Politically, the state seems to slide leftish, although that could be argued simply by noting that two of the last four governors have been Republican, and two have been Democratic.  But when it comes to the urge to vote, I suspect that there are some pretty compelling laws of large numbers that suggest the state's voter turnout for this last election is representative of the nation overall.

In other words, both the Democratic and the Republican parties now have just two years to develop and implement some kind of compelling message to deliver to the other three-quarters of the nation's potential voters, because the winners in the next election ought to be--and probably will be--decided by some numbers from yesterday's non-participating three-quarters.

Speaking of California -- yesterday's election results have set the state up as a potential national poster child for the benefits--or shortcomings, depending on how things work out--of spending public monies on infrastructure projects.  Proposition 1, authorizing $7.5 billion in bond sales for water-related projects, was easily approved by voters.  Also, Governor Brown is on the record as saying that he will stoke the boilers on the state's high-speed rail effort so that the project will soon have a full head of steam.  (Can't help myself; I like trains.)  That one is commonly quoted as having a $62 billion price tag.

Only a fraction of those amounts will be spent over the next two years, but that could still end up being worth a few billion dollars.  It will be interesting--to say the least--to see what it means for California's economy, and then make comparisons with Kansas, for example, where the deeply conservative state government has been indulging itself in extreme austerity, and looks likely to continue that practice for the near-term future.  It could end up being a national political message.  Perhaps it will even be compelling, which would be an important thing.

Because there's another election two years from now.