Tallying Up Some of the Scores for This Election Season

Sure, they won’t count the votes in the midterm election until Tuesday. But why wait? As the band U2 once put it: You miss too much these days if you stop to think.

Some of the big questions -- like who won control of Congress and the nation’s governorships, and whether Florida has learned how to count ballots -- can’t be answered yet. But even before the results are tallied, some of the winners and losers of this election season are already clear. Here’s a preliminary look:

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WINNERS

NASCAR Nation. It wasn’t that long ago that every politician with a pulse and a pollster was targeting soccer moms. Now the hot ticket seems to be racetrack dads.

Desperate to reverse their party’s decline among rural voters, Democratic Senate candidates from Erskine Bowles in North Carolina to Jean Carnahan in Missouri have been tooling around with NASCAR drivers, toting shotguns and ditching the Starbucks for Dr Pepper. Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.), who isn’t even on the ballot, set the tone earlier this year when he took to the Senate floor to deliver a paean to the pickup truck. (Unlike Bill Clinton, he didn’t mention anything about AstroTurf.)

Think of the election as an episode of “Green Acres”: Everyone is siding with Eddie Albert over Eva Gabor.

The gender realignment. Maybe this isn’t news to any couple that’s ever tried to pick a movie on a Friday night, but the differences between men and women are deep and lasting. Now they are hardening into an irreversible feature of American politics. In 2000, Mars and Venus elected different presidents: men backed George W. Bush and women Al Gore, by equal 11-point margins. Late polls are finding similar chasms in races around the country this year.

Outside of the two coasts, it sometimes seems the only white men who vote Democratic are either a) union members or b) university professors. (Call it the AFL and NPR coalition.) In many places, it’s just as hard to find Republican voters among either a) single women or b) married women who work outside the home. Depending on the angle, Republicans have a woman problem, Democrats have a man problem, or maybe men and women just have a problem with each other.

Niche ideas. It hasn’t been a fertile year for new ideas (in the way the Dust Bowl years weren’t fertile for the Great Plains). But some fresh stalks poked through the arid policy debate. In half a dozen governor’s races, the first signs emerged of a backlash against the reliance on standardized tests in education. Controlling the cost of prescription drugs for all Americans appears poised to seize the spotlight from expanding access to drugs for senior citizens. And while old favorites like a patient’s bill of rights faded, a new health-care idea showed some traction: tax credits to help small businesses insure their workers.

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LOSERS

Fiscal sanity. Maybe some accounting firm -- or, on second thought, somebody more trustworthy, like a bookie -- should have donated a calculator to every contender for Congress this year. Candidates in both parties have put forward agendas that simply don’t add up.

The problem is both sides still want to party like it’s 1999, when the federal government was sitting on an ocean of cash. Now that the war on terrorism, recession and President Bush’s tax cut has thrown the federal budget back into the red, neither party knows how to adapt.

Case in point: Social Security. For all the semantic quibbling about whether it should be called privatization, most Republicans still want to let younger workers divert some of their payroll taxes into individual accounts they can invest in stocks and bonds. That could cost as much as $1 trillion over the next decade. Where would the money come from? Republican candidates like Senate hopeful Elizabeth Hanford Dole in North Carolina have a ready answer: the surplus temporarily accumulating in the Social Security account before the baby boom retires.

Memo to Liz: That money is already gone. Poof. Spent. The Congressional Budget Office says that because the rest of the budget has fallen so deeply into deficit, Washington needs almost all of the Social Security surplus just to fund the federal government’s routine operations.

That means individual accounts will require higher taxes, a larger national debt, or big spending cuts elsewhere -- all of which Republicans have left off their bumper stickers.

The Democratic math is even fuzzier. Almost every Democratic Senate candidate in a competitive race this year has promised three things: to support Bush’s tax cut; to create a prescription drug benefit under Medicare; and to block the use of Social Security money to operate the rest of government.

The problem is 1 and 2 make 3 impossible; to fulfill both of the first two promises, Democrats would have to raid Social Security for at least $2.5 trillion over the next decade, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. Incoherent is the most charitable way to describe that collection of positions; mendacious might be the most accurate.

Meaningful House races. Bill Schneider, the waggish CNN political analyst, says that in a democracy voters are supposed to pick the politicians. But in the once-a-decade process of redistricting, politicians get to pick the voters.

This year, in states from coast to coast, politicians have used that leverage to improve their job security by drawing congressional districts that overwhelmingly favor one party or the other.

The result is that there was genuine competition in only as few as three dozen of the 435 House races. That means more than 9 in 10 Americans were denied the opportunity to cast a meaningful ballot for the House. It’s no exaggeration to call that a crime against democracy -- one that ought to inspire demands for fundamental redistricting reform.

The decency caucus. Love his views or hate them, the late Paul Wellstone brought decency and conviction to the Senate. He displayed, and inspired, passion. Some voters in Minnesota thought he was a liberal crank, others a progressive hero. Almost all agreed he was a man who took his causes seriously and himself less so.

What I’ll remember most about Wellstone is when he walked through the state fair in Minneapolis this summer, almost no one called him senator, or even Mr. Wellstone. They just called him Paul.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: www.latimes.com/brownstein.