Mistakes, distortions and outright lies appeared so frequently in media coverage of the elections of 2009 that they made accurate analysis all but impossible.

The most serious of these errors built upon gross misrepresentations of the presidential election of 2008 falsehoods repeated endlessly and shamelessly enough to become enshrined in the conventional wisdom. Before this years whoppers achieve similar acceptance, its worth re-examining some of the most familiar confusions regarding the last two election cycles.

LIE NUMBER ONE: By winning New York’s 23rd Congressional District, Democrats captured a seat Republicans had held without interruption since the 1850s. Nancy Pelosi herself recycled this misunderstanding in her anomalous claim of victory on the morning after the election. When the Speaker spoke, she declared: We had one race that we were engaged in, it was in northern New York, it was a race where a Republican has held the seat since the Civil War. Reporters on every network, and in every major newspaper, thoughtlessly repeated this formulation, but an astute caller to my radio show had the audacity to question it. He declared that he had researched the district and found scant evidence to support the claim of an unprecedented, ground-breaking, shocking Democratic breakthrough.

In fact, the caller was correct. First of all, the 23rd District as currently constituted is a relatively recent creation, with no consistent history going back to the Civil War. As recently as 1950, New York State sent 45 members to the House of Representatives in Washington, compared to the 29 elected today; the state has obviously lost considerable ground to faster-growing regions of the country in the West and South. Today’s 23rd District therefore contains large pieces of three former Congressional districts and comprises 11 upstate counties; while the size of the New York delegation has shrunk, the geographic spread of each Congressional district has greatly increased. Six of the eleven counties now in the 23rd district have indeed been represented by Democrats in the years since World War II; two of them (Madison and Essex Counties) helped elect Democrats as recently as 1976. Even by the fast-and-loose mathematical formulations that characterize Speaker Pelosi, there’s a notable difference between since the Civil War and since 1976.

Moreover, the district has been trending Democratic long before this years bitter split between the liberal Republican Congressional candidate Dede Scozzafava and the Conservative Party’s Doug Hoffman. In contrast to its description as a previously unassailable bastion of stalwart Republicanism, the district (with its current boundaries) carried comfortably for Barack Obama over John McCain a year ago: 52% to 47%. George Bush barely carried the district (51% to 47%) in the strong Republican year of 2004. Even if Hoffman hadn’t split Republicans with his Conservative Party challenge, its entirely possible (even probable) that a controversial candidate like Scozzafava would have lost the district anyway to the formidable Democratic nominee, Bill Owens.

LIE NUMBER TWO: Democrats lost in 2009 because of low turnouts with African-Americans and young people in particular failing to get out and vote the way they did for Barack Obama. Actually, the turnouts on November 3 were respectable particularly in New Jersey. In the Garden State 2,355,000 voters went to the polls a strong increase of 182,000 over the last gubernatorial election in 2005. Contrary to all press reports of a listless black turnout, African-American voters came out in formidable numbers, comprising a bigger proportion of the electorate (16%, according to exit polls) in support of Democrat Jon Corzine in 2009 than in support of Barack Obama in 2008 (only 14% of all New Jersey voters). The reason Corzine lost by 4.5% (compared to Obama’s resounding victory of 15.5%) had nothing to do with decreased black support, and everything to do with Republican Chris Christies success in recapturing suburban white voters.

The 2009 Republican landslide in Virginia also reflected changed minds, far more than depressed turnout. Obama beat McCain in the state by a margin of 233,000 votes but the newly elected Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, swamped his Democratic opponent Creigh Deeds by more than 345,000 votes (and 17.4 percentage points). While the turnout last week was down somewhat from the previous gubernatorial election in 2005, even if Creigh Deeds had won every single vote cast for the victorious Democrat (Tim Kaine) four years ago, he still would have lost substantially (by 133,000 votes) to the popular Bob McDonnell. The GOP swept Virginia because their candidate swayed voters who previously supported Democrats (like Kaine and Obama) not because the Democrats simply stayed home.

LIE NUMBER THREE: Barack Obama’s historic 2008 campaign energized millions upon millions of new voters, who turned out for him in unprecedented numbers and drove voter participation to all-time highs. This constantly repeated (and utterly false) observation continues to warp out thinking about politics, leading to dumb mistakes like the widespread suggestion that 2009 represented a sad decline from the glorious turnouts of 2008. Actually, this years election was more-or-less typical for off-years contest, and last years much ballyhooed race in no sense represented a high water mark in voter turnout or involvement.

In fact, the final, official numbers in 2008 show that turnout didn’t increase at all but actually went down slightly from the Bush-Kerry race in 2004. In 2004, 63.8% of eligible citizens cast ballots for president; four years later, despite all the press hysteria surrounding Barack Obama, that number declined to 63.6%. Its true that 5 million more Americans voted in 2008 than in 2004, but the citizenship rolls went up by more than 9 million, explaining the small decrease in the rate of participation. Exit polls also conclusively demonstrated the lack of substance behind the awe-struck rhapsodies concerning hordes of idealistic new voters inspired by the glorious contagion of Obamamania: in 2008, 11% of those who cast ballots qualified as first time voters; four years earlier, for the less than inspiring Bush-Kerry battle, an identical 11% of those who came to the polls did so for the first time. Among the youthful 18-24 age group, supposedly the heart-and-soul of the Obama revolution, 44% cast ballots in 2008, compared to 42% four years earlier; hardly a remarkable upsurge. Meanwhile, the participation for every other age group went down in the four years between 04 and 08, accounting for the overall decline.

In other words, Obama’s campaign largely failed in its efforts to expand the electorate. He won the presidency not because he drew new voters to the polls, but because he persuaded previously Republican voters particularly among Latino, Asian and suburban communities to switch their support (at least temporarily) to the Democratic side.

LIE NUMBER FOUR: McCain lost in 2008 because dispiried conservatives stayed home and denied him their support. Leading conservatives, particularly in talk radio, love to recycle this idiotic misinterpretation despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary. While its certainly true that many loyal Republicans on the right side of the spectrum never warmed to John McCain, they most certainly rallied behind Sarah Palin. In fact, the McCain-Palin ticket nearly matched the Bush-Cheney ticket of 04 in drawing strong conservative support. In both 2004 and 2008, identical percentages of voters (34%) told exit polls that they saw themselves as conservatives. In both elections, only miniscule percentages of these voters went to minor party candidates: in 2004, the two leading right wing parties (the Libertarians and the Constitution Party) drew a combined percentage of 0.44%, four years later, Libertarians and “Constitution” People together polled an equally meaningless 0.55%. Continued...