Monkey Cage reader Leonard W. sends the following:
bq. One of the claims made in the debate is that the voters knew about the fiscal problems posed by public sector unions and that candidates campaigned on that issue. It occurred to me that one way to test that claim would be to discover just how much information was available. I did a Lexis-Nexis search of (1) US newspapers & wires and (2) government & political blogs.
bq. It’s clear that voters likely did not have much information at all prior to the election, or even during the 2010 calendar year.
I tend to agree: it’s unlikely that the 2010 elections were in any ways referenda on public-sector unions. And, even if they had been discussed more frequently, “we can’t interpret elections as mandates”:https://themonkeycage.org/2008/11/does_obama_have_a_mandate.html.