Brain is Hurting!

It's been about a month since the election now, and I've had some time to sit down and really digest some of the details about what happened. Something didn't seem quite right when I first looked at the returns, but I wanted to wait a while until the numbers became a bit more firm. After looking at the still-unofficial 2006 returns on the State's website, I find a paradox that my brain simply can't begin to fathom. It looks like a decent number of people -- possibly as many as 60,000 or so -- voted for the victorious Ed Rendell as Governor, and yet then turned around and voted for the enormously unpopular Rick Santorum as U.S. Senator.

How in the hell can those two choices co-exist within the brain of any one person? It's like matter and anti-matter, for crying out loud!

Here are the numbers as they stand now. Voting in the governor's race was, for whatever reason, slightly more popular than casting a vote for the U.S. Senate. A total of 15,836 more votes were cast in the gubernatorial election than in the senate race. So, even if disdain for Republicans affected both Santorum and Lynn Swann equally, one would have expected Swann to receive a few more votes than Santorum, simply because Swann's contest with Ed Rendell attracted a larger number of voters.

But it didn't happen that way. Both of the Republicans lost big, but Rick Santorum still managed to secure 60,972 more votes than Lynn Swann. That's not a huge number, by any means; it amounts to all of 1.5% of the votes cast for governor. Moreover, there's no way to do a true cross-tabulation of individual voters across the two races; some of this difference will stem from voters who cast ballots in one race but not in the other. But even when one makes some allowances for that, it still looks like between 50 and 60 thousand people split their vote between Rendell and Santorum.

I really don't get it. If Ed Rendell is your man in Harrisburg, that's fine. You think he's great, you agree with most of his policies, and you like want him to be governor for four more years. So how do you then turn around and vote for Rick Santorum, who is about as non-Rendell as anyone can be? On the other side of the coin, if you were happy with Santorum, were down with his family values, and wanted to see him return to the U.S. Senate, that's O.K. too. That's why we have elections, so that you can express your choice. But how can you possibly square your support of Rick Santorum with the policies and behavior of Ed Rendell. It just doesn't make sense!

After thinking about it for a while now, I can come up with only three explanations for these numbers, two of which absolutely sicken me.

The one non-disgusting (but still kind of disturbing) explanation centers on Republican voters in and around Philadelphia. Ed Rendell has a (mostly) solid reputation in that part of the state as someone who did a fairly good job as Philly's mayor. But Bob Casey isn't from around there, and thus didn't enjoy the same degree of regional support. So maybe there really were people who consciously cast their votes both Santorum (because they usually vote for the Republican) and Rendell (because he's from their area and has a good regional reputation). These kinds of votes are at least partially understandable, even if they are glaringly illogical when you consider the completely contrary policy positions of their two selected candidates.

The second explanation is simply the raw power of incumbency. Name recognition can carry a great deal of weight with those voters who know almost nothing else about the candidates. The only odd thing here is that the voters here had to go out of their way to cast a Rendell-Santorum split ticket. Unlike party-line voters, they couldn't just push one big "Incumbent" button on the voting machine, and instead had to drill down a bit into the individual races to vote this way. That's not the way that I would normally expect uniformed voters to behave, since most of them take the path of least resistance and vote a straight party line. But there probably were a small number of them.

The third, most disturbing, and least-discussed explanation for this particular voting patterns is (of course) simple racism. Although some mean-spirited folks have tried to claim otherwise, the fact remains is that Lynn Swann is black. I have no doubt at all that there are voters out there -- Republicans in this case, but they exist in the Democratic party as well -- who simply couldn't ever bring themselves to cast a vote for a black man. If racism is behind some of these votes, it must be an especially virulent and vile strain. After all, it caused these particular voters to completely abandon any semblance of logic and select the polar opposites of Ed Rendell and Rick Santorum.

In the end, all three of these explanations played some role in creating this small number of Rendell-Santorum voters. There may even be some reasons that I haven't come up with, such as confusion when using the new touch-screen machines. But I keep coming back to racism as the most viable explanation. I truly hope that racism wasn't the prime mover driving this particular voting pattern, and yet I fear that it was behind a good deal of it.