A Mild and Pleasant Surprise

Erfurt

Halfway through the year, we all knew that Thuringia would be our weakest state of the three that would be going in the second half of 2019.

So when we only finished in second in Brandenburg and Saxony back on September 1, mainly due to the first place finishing parties in both states busing in old women, and Operation Chaos style operations relating to Green Party voters, and then combined with what happened in nearby Halle just 16 days before election day here, the brain trust here was ready for at best finishing in a strong third.  Much of the polling even suggested that.

The second place we got was therefore a mild and pleasant surprise.

Now some relatively random thoughts:

(1)  ARD’s projection was Linke 29.5, AfD 24, CDU 22.5.  The final numbers were Linke 31, AfD 23.4, CDU 21.8.

Back on 9/1, ARD overshot the first place finishers in both states and undershot us.  This time, just the opposite.

Also, the 23.4 we actually got overperformed almost all of the pre-ED polling.

(2)  Obviously, you can figure out who had the biggest gain, and it represents a doubling and a quarter.  The CDU was the biggest loser, it bled out more than a third of its 2014 voters — As late as 1999, the CDU won an absolute majority in the state.  In spite of scandals, Die Linke gained a noticeable share.

(3)  Overall turnout was way higher yesterday over 2014, and when the twisted ribbon graphic was officially released today, it confirmed my guess that we were going away the leading party for new voters.  Predictably, most non-voters in 2014 were non-voters yesterday, and in fact, there were more 2014 non-voters that either died or moved out of the state than 2014 non-voters who voted this year for Linke, the second-place finisher among 2014 non-voters who voted yesterday.

(4)  The reason Die Linke was able to gain in spite of scandals is because around a third of people who voted for the other two major left-of-center parties, the SPD or the Greens, four years ago, switched over to Linke, probably for Operation Chaos reasons.  Even though I saw that a significant percentage of Linke voters in 2014 died before yesterday.

(5)  The SPD had the largest percentage share of its 2014 migrate to death this year.

(6)  Our team’s biggest source of newbies was from the non-voting universe, obviously, but the second biggest source in percentage terms were from 2014 voters who voted for “other” parties, which in German parlance means that parties that got less than 5% of the vote and therefore got no representation.

(7)  CDU is panicking today, because it put up what was in its mind a flawless leader, and still lost big ground.

The easy answer to that riddle is what I’ve been saying for months, that it’s not the personalities, it’s the fact that normiecons and normielibs are waning, because their ideologies are getting more and more irrelevant.

(8)  The outgoing governing coalition is the three left of center parties, Linke+SPD+Greens.  Because all three now have 42 out of 90 seats, that’s not possible now.

The CDU for now is promising not to touch Die Linke, mainly because Linke was the 1990 democratic reboot of the old East German Socialist Unity Party, and it’s easy to see why Christian Democrats in eastern Germany might have a lingering hostility toward them.  However, the CDU nor anyone else will touch us.

If all that holds up, then there will be no viable majority, and therefore, we’ll be doing this all again in very short order.

But I think that the CDU’s hatred of us will get the better of their chronic contempt for Die Linke, and they’ll agree to Linke+CDU.  The CDU doesn’t want a do-over here in Thuringia for the same reason it didn’t want a Federal do-over two years ago, because a do-over would put us in better shape and them in worse.

(9)  I didn’t throw a party last night like I did in Potsdam back on 9/1, because I was expecting to be headed back to Wiesbaden by now.  But the people who I drove here with and will be driving back with put it off until tomorrow.  Yesterday was clock change day through the entire European Union, so now the sun sets early now, 4:58 PM today in Erfurt, and it’s cloudy anyway as I write this coming up on 2 PM, so we won’t see the early sunset.  Tomorrow, we’ll get going at least by late morning so that we can do the entire drive in daylight hours.

If I would have known this, I would have set up a party, maybe to see if I can get a second helping of Germans singing the German lyrics to the instrumental of Free Bird.

UPDATE 11/6

CDU has absolutely promised not to touch either Linke or AfD.  If that promise holds up, it means new elections very soon.