Over on MSNBC, Evan Thomas of Newsweek reports that "both the Hillary Clinton campaign and the John McCain campaign were a mess" (emph. orig.), and that the Palin shopping spree was an even bigger distraction than we knew at the time. Told to buy three suits for the Republican National Convention--according to a still unattributed senior campaign staffer--the Alaska Governor instead raided high-end clothing stores across the Twin Cities with her entourage, buying up everything in sight. "It was like the Beverly Hillbillies," the campaign staffer told Mr. Thomas. Which begs the question: if any of this stuff ever goes full-on-record, will Palin try to order the Alaksa State Public Safety Commissioner to have all of these people fired from their jobs in other part of the country?
Electoral funny business in Georgia and Alaska hasn't gone unnoticed, but it remains to be seen whether the Republicans will get away with it this time. If Ted Stevens is certified as the victor in the Alaska Senate Race and then loses his appeal, he'll undoubtedly be expelled by a chastened Republican caucus, after which there would be a special election in the state, with far fewer reasons for the Republican voters in the state to turn out at the polls. Over in Georgia, meanwhile, it now appears likely (if not actually certain) that Chambliss and Martin will have a runoff.
Rahm Emmanuel has not yet accepted President-elect Obama's offer to be his Chief of Staff--which begs the question of whether the Obama transition really will be any more disciplined or polished than the Clinton transition was in 1992, since an eventual "no" from Emmanuel would expose Obama as a man unable to get what he wants. The good news is that Emmanuel won't say no, in the end, for this very reason.
Many thanks to all the readers who've made me a part of their day over the past few weeks and months--but also a pledge: If you'll keep checking-in, I'll keep providing the best commentary I can on the three topics on which this column was originally intended to speak: Politics, movies, and travel. I'll be taking the next few days to recharge my own batteries, but Monday doesn't just begin a whole new kind of work-week for Barack Obama, it also begins a whole new kind of challenge for all of us--writing, agitating, pulling our own weight to fulfill the visions of this man who may, just may, go on to be one of the greatest Presidents we've ever had.
See you all Monday?
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
A Morning-After Roundup - UPDATED
Good morning, fellow citizens of a country in which the black son of a single mother can become President!
The election returns for President are still trickling in, with very ominous signs of funny business in Georgia, where the President-elect crushed Senator McCain in early voting, apparently so much for naught that McCain is projected to win 53-46, a not-even-particularly close outcome. According to CNN, Obama has amassed only 1,700,000 votes in the State of Adventure, despite the fact that 35% of the 2,000,000 early votes banked in the state were cast by African-Americans (0.35 x 2,000,000 = 700,000 people, which would suggest that Obama only received about as many total votes on election day as he did from African Americans in two weeks of early voting, which doesn't sound right to me.
Meanwhile, drama abounds in the remaining un-called states: Obama leads McCain by about ten thousand votes (out of 4.2 million cast) in North Carolina, and by about 23,000 (out of 2.7 million cast) in Indiana. (UPDATE: INDIANA HAS BEEN CALLED FOR BARACK OBAMA, bringing his electoral-vote total to 349.) John McCain's lead in Missouri, meanwhile, is only about 6,000 votes, out of 2.9 million cast. Other recent Presidential contests have been closer in their overall electoral vote tallies, to be sure, but I can't remember a contest in my lifetime in which three different states had come down to such razor-thin margins in the same election. Incidentally, I can't resist the chance to gloat just one last time about the prediction that the mainstream media's inability to call Indiana would set the tone for the coverage. Sorry: I promise not to bring it up again. (The second district of Nebraska may also have to be taken down from McCain's column, incidentally.) Here's your new map:
Over in the Senate, the Democrats have picked up seats in New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado and New Mexico, but while nobody was looking there's plenty of room to wonder about electoral funny-business in other hotly contested races with Republican administrations. For one thing we have Saxby Chambliss in Georgia, magically sitting on exactly fifty percent of the vote after an all-night tally in which he'd only been at 47 or 48 (which would've required a runoff).
Meanwhile in Republican-Governed Minnesota, Norm Coleman has mysteriously squeaked back in front of Al Franken this morning, after trailing him by a few thousand votes all night. That race will probably be headed for the courts, since Mr. Franken isn't about to pull a John Kerry on us and lie down. Oregon might be the big disappointment for the Democrats, this time around.
But the big head-scratcher is in the Republic of Sarah Palin, where her husband's long-standing membership in a secessionist party may not have won her the right to anoint herself President--yet--but where convicted felon (and twelve-point underdog) Ted Stevens is somehow, "miraculously" clinging to a lead of a few thousand votes over centrist Democrat and popular Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich. My guess is that this last one was definitely hacked. ...The silver lining in which is that Governor Palin has overreached and gotten caught for it before, so she just might live to regret this one. (The other possible explanation is that Sarah Palin just had $150,000 coattails, but that seems more a convenient excuse to yours truly.)
It was a decent night for Democrats in the House, but for the high expectations that had been set beforehand. They were never going to pick up thirty additional seats over the comfortable majority they came in with, and accordingly a great many of the major media franchises are reporting the outcome in the House as a chastening moment for Team Blue. With eleven races still undecided, the Republicans are assured of 173 votes in the lower house of the next Congress, and while that's not exactly a roadblock of an opposition, it isn't comic-book-small, either.
Of the as yet un-called races, the Republicans lead in six and the Democrats lead in five--though the head-scratcher of the bunch is Colorado-02, an open seat in suburban Denver: as these words are written the Democratic candidate, wealthy philanthropist Jared Polis, is leading Republican graphic designer Scott Starin by a 60-37 margin. So why isn't the race being called for Polis, you wonder? So does your author: At 9:24Am on the east coast, fewer than half of the precincts--in a suburban Denver congressional district that has reported all of its votes for President--have been counted in this race. Something very, very, very fishy going on there.
All three of the principal players on the Presidential stage were gracious last night, notably George W. Bush, whose congratulatory telephone call to the President-elect was significantly longer and significantly more cooperative in tone than was either necessary or reasonable to expect under the circumstances. (Perhaps we can look forward to an SNL sketch in which Mr. Bush and his wife sell jewelry on QVC, in the near future?) Both Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama extended substantive olive branches, and if they are to be believed at their word, the next few weeks and months could easily lay the foundations for a tone-setting start to the Obama Administration.
Safe money is on Tom Daschle for Chief of Staff, but I've never bet safe money before so I'll throw my wager behind Rahm Emmanuel. Daschle, meanwhile, will be a cabinet secretary--possibly Ambassador-at-large for health care reform. Hillary Clinton wants no part of the Administration, not for reasons of leftover angst but because she'll be in a much better position to prosecute her own agenda from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The Treasury Secretary position (remember when that one seemed all wonky and uninteresting?) will be the first and most closely watched appointment, and it's likely to be a moderate with unimpeachable credentials--probably current NY Fed Bank President Timothy Geithner, Paul Volcker would be perfect in this respect but he's way too old.
I've got a bizarre little fantasy for Obama's choice of Attorney General, but you won't like it at first so bear with me: Arlan Specter. It probably won't happen, but Specter is one of the few Republicans left in the country who is also a decent, inoffensive guy who wants what's best for the rest of us. His positions on stem-cell research, choice, and gun control are all solidly Team Blue and his legal credentials (and his relationship with the rest of the Judiciary Committee) could easily result in a confirmation by voice-vote without a hearing. Why would the President-elect choose a Republican for such a high-level position, you ask? Because the vacancy he'd create in the US Senate would be filled by a Democratic Governor. Stay tuned.
On the foreign policy side, first thing's first: William Jefferson Clinton is your next U.S. Ambassador to either the UN or to Israel (a wider assortment of poon-tang over at the UN, plus no commute back and forth to Tel Aviv, so he's probably rooting for that one), while Robert Gates will almost certainly stay on for a time as Sec-Def, eventually giving way to either Chuck Hagel (if John Kerry can squeeze him out as Secretary of State), or Jack Reed (if Hagel gets the State Department). The odd man out in the foreign policy arena is Bill Richardson, who took a big risk by switching sides in the primary fight, but who's got a pretty good job already and might be perfectly happy to keep it. As for really dark-horses, don't put it past the President-elect to extend the biggest of olive branches to Joe Lieberman, not just because it'd be good politics, but because it would (at least technically) gain the Democrats a Senate seat when next the matter came up for a vote--though in the meantime the Republican governor of the state would appoint a replacement.
Public financing of election campaigns is, of course, dead. And if the Republicans can take any solace from last night's repudiation, it is that they will never again have to worry about complaints from the other side involving any kind of funding gap. Look for the evangelicals, in particular, to gear-up a massive netroot fundraising apparatchek for the next contest in 2012, regardless of whether their favorite Hocky Grandmom is running.
We're only just getting started, here, people!
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
The election returns for President are still trickling in, with very ominous signs of funny business in Georgia, where the President-elect crushed Senator McCain in early voting, apparently so much for naught that McCain is projected to win 53-46, a not-even-particularly close outcome. According to CNN, Obama has amassed only 1,700,000 votes in the State of Adventure, despite the fact that 35% of the 2,000,000 early votes banked in the state were cast by African-Americans (0.35 x 2,000,000 = 700,000 people, which would suggest that Obama only received about as many total votes on election day as he did from African Americans in two weeks of early voting, which doesn't sound right to me.
Meanwhile, drama abounds in the remaining un-called states: Obama leads McCain by about ten thousand votes (out of 4.2 million cast) in North Carolina, and by about 23,000 (out of 2.7 million cast) in Indiana. (UPDATE: INDIANA HAS BEEN CALLED FOR BARACK OBAMA, bringing his electoral-vote total to 349.) John McCain's lead in Missouri, meanwhile, is only about 6,000 votes, out of 2.9 million cast. Other recent Presidential contests have been closer in their overall electoral vote tallies, to be sure, but I can't remember a contest in my lifetime in which three different states had come down to such razor-thin margins in the same election. Incidentally, I can't resist the chance to gloat just one last time about the prediction that the mainstream media's inability to call Indiana would set the tone for the coverage. Sorry: I promise not to bring it up again. (The second district of Nebraska may also have to be taken down from McCain's column, incidentally.) Here's your new map:
Over in the Senate, the Democrats have picked up seats in New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado and New Mexico, but while nobody was looking there's plenty of room to wonder about electoral funny-business in other hotly contested races with Republican administrations. For one thing we have Saxby Chambliss in Georgia, magically sitting on exactly fifty percent of the vote after an all-night tally in which he'd only been at 47 or 48 (which would've required a runoff).Meanwhile in Republican-Governed Minnesota, Norm Coleman has mysteriously squeaked back in front of Al Franken this morning, after trailing him by a few thousand votes all night. That race will probably be headed for the courts, since Mr. Franken isn't about to pull a John Kerry on us and lie down. Oregon might be the big disappointment for the Democrats, this time around.
But the big head-scratcher is in the Republic of Sarah Palin, where her husband's long-standing membership in a secessionist party may not have won her the right to anoint herself President--yet--but where convicted felon (and twelve-point underdog) Ted Stevens is somehow, "miraculously" clinging to a lead of a few thousand votes over centrist Democrat and popular Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich. My guess is that this last one was definitely hacked. ...The silver lining in which is that Governor Palin has overreached and gotten caught for it before, so she just might live to regret this one. (The other possible explanation is that Sarah Palin just had $150,000 coattails, but that seems more a convenient excuse to yours truly.)
It was a decent night for Democrats in the House, but for the high expectations that had been set beforehand. They were never going to pick up thirty additional seats over the comfortable majority they came in with, and accordingly a great many of the major media franchises are reporting the outcome in the House as a chastening moment for Team Blue. With eleven races still undecided, the Republicans are assured of 173 votes in the lower house of the next Congress, and while that's not exactly a roadblock of an opposition, it isn't comic-book-small, either.
Of the as yet un-called races, the Republicans lead in six and the Democrats lead in five--though the head-scratcher of the bunch is Colorado-02, an open seat in suburban Denver: as these words are written the Democratic candidate, wealthy philanthropist Jared Polis, is leading Republican graphic designer Scott Starin by a 60-37 margin. So why isn't the race being called for Polis, you wonder? So does your author: At 9:24Am on the east coast, fewer than half of the precincts--in a suburban Denver congressional district that has reported all of its votes for President--have been counted in this race. Something very, very, very fishy going on there.
All three of the principal players on the Presidential stage were gracious last night, notably George W. Bush, whose congratulatory telephone call to the President-elect was significantly longer and significantly more cooperative in tone than was either necessary or reasonable to expect under the circumstances. (Perhaps we can look forward to an SNL sketch in which Mr. Bush and his wife sell jewelry on QVC, in the near future?) Both Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama extended substantive olive branches, and if they are to be believed at their word, the next few weeks and months could easily lay the foundations for a tone-setting start to the Obama Administration.
Safe money is on Tom Daschle for Chief of Staff, but I've never bet safe money before so I'll throw my wager behind Rahm Emmanuel. Daschle, meanwhile, will be a cabinet secretary--possibly Ambassador-at-large for health care reform. Hillary Clinton wants no part of the Administration, not for reasons of leftover angst but because she'll be in a much better position to prosecute her own agenda from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The Treasury Secretary position (remember when that one seemed all wonky and uninteresting?) will be the first and most closely watched appointment, and it's likely to be a moderate with unimpeachable credentials--probably current NY Fed Bank President Timothy Geithner, Paul Volcker would be perfect in this respect but he's way too old.
I've got a bizarre little fantasy for Obama's choice of Attorney General, but you won't like it at first so bear with me: Arlan Specter. It probably won't happen, but Specter is one of the few Republicans left in the country who is also a decent, inoffensive guy who wants what's best for the rest of us. His positions on stem-cell research, choice, and gun control are all solidly Team Blue and his legal credentials (and his relationship with the rest of the Judiciary Committee) could easily result in a confirmation by voice-vote without a hearing. Why would the President-elect choose a Republican for such a high-level position, you ask? Because the vacancy he'd create in the US Senate would be filled by a Democratic Governor. Stay tuned.
On the foreign policy side, first thing's first: William Jefferson Clinton is your next U.S. Ambassador to either the UN or to Israel (a wider assortment of poon-tang over at the UN, plus no commute back and forth to Tel Aviv, so he's probably rooting for that one), while Robert Gates will almost certainly stay on for a time as Sec-Def, eventually giving way to either Chuck Hagel (if John Kerry can squeeze him out as Secretary of State), or Jack Reed (if Hagel gets the State Department). The odd man out in the foreign policy arena is Bill Richardson, who took a big risk by switching sides in the primary fight, but who's got a pretty good job already and might be perfectly happy to keep it. As for really dark-horses, don't put it past the President-elect to extend the biggest of olive branches to Joe Lieberman, not just because it'd be good politics, but because it would (at least technically) gain the Democrats a Senate seat when next the matter came up for a vote--though in the meantime the Republican governor of the state would appoint a replacement.
Public financing of election campaigns is, of course, dead. And if the Republicans can take any solace from last night's repudiation, it is that they will never again have to worry about complaints from the other side involving any kind of funding gap. Look for the evangelicals, in particular, to gear-up a massive netroot fundraising apparatchek for the next contest in 2012, regardless of whether their favorite Hocky Grandmom is running.
We're only just getting started, here, people!
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Live Blogging the Election Returns
12:23AM - FINAL THOUGHTS: Sorry I went dark there for a while, just now, as the President- and Vice President-elect were strolling the stage with their extended families; I was... well... I was crying. You'll forgive me, presumably, but either way that's what I was doing. And now I'm going to bed, folks. It's been a long day for me (started before 6:00AM) and I'm totally exhausted. I'll be updating the electoral map first thing in the morning. Thanks for sharing this historic moment with me, everybody.
12:16AM - Not his best speech, but that's the thing about Barack Obama: He's such an amazing speaker that every time he opens his mouth he raises his own bar. I think, personally, he was just a little bit tired. ...And who could blame him?
12:12AM - Time to wrap it up, Senator.
12:07AM - Getting a lot more forward-looking, now, which is important. (And it looks to me like Obama will win North Carolina, Indiana, and Montana as well, which would give him 367 electoral votes, total.)
12:06AM - Speech leaning a little bit too far in the celebratory direction right now (though I forgive him for wanting to toss a bone to all of his volunteers).
12:03AM - If Senator Obama and Senator McCain really mean what they say about working together over the next few weeks and months, that much alone could tell the tale of Obama's legacy. (And by the way, Obama is fifteen-thousand votes up in INDIANA.)
12:01AM - This man's going to be one of the greatest Presidents we've ever had.
12:00AM - Great opening.
11:58PM - Can't help but feel a little bit afraid, right now, despite the better angels of my nature. That's an *awful* lot of people, there in Grant Park.
11:56PM - Obama is leading by 30,000 votes in North Carolina, now, with 96% reporting. That's getting the tarheel state pretty doggone close, folks. (OBAMA IN THIRTY SECONDS!)
11:52PM - As the big moment draws nearer (when we'll hear from Senator Obama), I decided to scroll through the entire election returns for the House of Representatives, where the Democrats are currently up twelve seats, with about half the races decided. If that number doesn't plump-up considerably before it's over, the Republicans will probably find something in it to build on.
11:44PM - Both Udall's have now won their (Democratic pickup) Senate races. Meanwhile the Lincoln Diaz-Ballart house race has closed to within two percent, and is now "un-called" on the CNN election center map.
11:39PM - ABC just called Nevada for Obama, which took longer than it should have--but it's worth the wait. Here's your map:
11:37PM - As we await the President-elect, you might be interested to know that Indiana has swung the other way, now, with Barack Obama about 8,000 votes ahead.
11:29PM - Fewer than eight thousand votes separate the candidates in Indiana, and fewer than five thousand votes separate the candidates in Montana. All of which confirms my swiftly hardening conviction that the mainstream press is just jaw-droppingly, profoundly lazy. All of this "true to type" coverage is completely missing the story of the night.
11:27PM - While John natters on like this, you might be interested to know that North Carolina is hanging in the balance, with fewer than five thousand votes separating the two candidates. It's gonna come down to provisional ballots there, me'thinks.
11:25PM - I was almost feeling a little sorry for John, for a minute there, and then he had to go and say how proud he was of Sarah Palin. Seriously, the content of this speech isn't bad, but the delivery is nothing short of painful, and listening to nothing--almost nothing--coming from the audience, is making it even worse.
11:23PM - THIS IS BIZARRE.
11:20PM - McCain's speech is gracious (if also a little affectless), but the crowd went from being nasty to being eerily, almost preternaturally quiet. I've never heard so little ambient noise from an audience that large, and it's creeping me out. Meantime, here's your map:
11:12PM - ABC calls Colorado for Obama. I can't make the new maps fast enough!
11:09PM - THE ASSOCIATED PRESS CALLS FLORIDA FOR OBAMA.
11:05PM - CNN calls Virginia for Barack Obama, as well. (And you've waited for the map long enough.)
11:01PM - The CBS crew is completely speechless. Not just the meteoric four-year rise, not just the urban background, not just the age--we've just put a black man in the White House. We now live, for the first time, in a country in which a black man can be President. The heck with the map, folks, Barack Obama is your next President.
11:00PM - WELCOME TO HISTORY, PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA.
10:56PM - Talk about "not pretending to be stupid": A few weeks ago the networks were all visibly grappling with the question of how to handle reporting on a race that could end up decided fairly early--whether to say so, or try to preserve the suspense--all of which led some senior editorial staffer at one outlet to say, "we're not in the business of pretending to be stupid." Well, just now Katie Couric signed off of the ten o'clock hour of coverage by saying, "When we return, history will be made." I guess that's your cue to pick up the phone, John.
10:51PM - Just a reminder: It's not actually possible to do what I just did, at 10:42--namely, to base a guess about how a state will go on the partial precincts. The precincts themselves don't report their results on a proportionate basis, they come in completely at random. So if, for example, the only places we haven't heard from in a state are in the blue-leaning areas, then the current state of the partial precincts in a state will skew the race toward McCain. (Generally, the last precincts to report are from crowded, lower-income areas in urban areas, which means Democrats tend to do better and better as the percentage of precincts reporting increases.)
10:47PM - Anyone care to wager when the next big undecided state will be called, and which one that is? My guess is that the networks will call Colorado for Obama before the top of the hour.
10:42PM - Obama finally inches ahead in Virginia, 51-49 with 91% reported. It's also 51-49 for Obama with 80% reporting in Florida, while McCain continues to cling to a 15,000 vote lead in North Carolina with 86% reporting. Color me puzzled; I'd never have dreamed that these states would stay gray this long after Ohio went for us, and I certainly didn't think we'd lose any of them.
10:36PM - CNN calls Mississippi for John McCain, and CBS (not wanting to be left out?) calls South Dakota for John McCain as well. By the way, CBS is also demurring on the competitive congressional districts in Nebraska. Here's (one version of) your current map:
10:33PM - Obama winning 37% of the whites and 97% of the blacks in North Carolina, which explains why that state is so neck-and-neck (fewer than 8,000 votes separate the two candidates, at the moment).
10:28PM - CBS is calling Nebraska for McCain and (apparently) awarding all three of its congressional districts to him, too, keeping the state's electoral vote total intact. Here's the map:
10:22PM - Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) holds on in Pennsylvania, after calling his own constituents racists, while Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT) goes down to defeat in Connecticut. Pardon my gracious frame of mind, but Chris Shays is not a bad guy. ...Which isn't quite the same as saying that I feel sorry for him, you understand.
10:18PM - Here's a thought: One of the biggest "assists" in Obama's victory tonight is deserved by a certain Hillary Clinton. By dragging-out the primary contest instead of going gently into that good night, Hillary pushed Barack Obama into our living rooms, coast-to-coast, and forced him to build an enormous field operation that kept working at full, hot-house tempo all the way through... well... they're still working, out west.
10:10PM - Nobody's talking about this, but frankly I think this is kind of a bizarre night: The early voting advantage isn't helping Obama in the very places where the canvass was looking the most favorable for him, and other places are going bluer than most of the reasonable political voices expected. Can someone explain to me how McCain might win Virginia on the same night that Kay Hagen beats Libby Dole? Why isn't anyone talking about this???
10:03PM - CBS' county-by-county returns in Florida showing Obama out-performing in the I-4 corridor. Coupled with the Hispanic support for Obama, I think it's only a matter of time there. Here's your current map:
10:00PM - CBS calls Iowa for Obama, and Mississippi and Utah for McCain and (gutless!) doesn't call Nevada.
9:56PM - Virginia is, essentially, down to a single vote. I still don't understand how to reconcile this with the enormous advantage Obama had in polling numbers and early vote totals, and I'm still inclined to wonder if the early votes are being counted as absentees, at the end? I didn't expect Virginia to be close, and neither did Fivethirtyeight.
9:53PM - Couric talks to Ambinder about Obama's ground-game in Ohio, I wonder if Ambinder will mention that series of pieces on Fivethirtyeight about McCain's closed and locked field offices all over the country? Probably not.
9:50PM - Another mini-drama of call differentials, right now: CBS is apparently calling only one of the two congressional districts in Maine, since their electoral vote tally for Obama is 199 and all the other networks have him at 200. Wouldn't it have been a pisser if Obama had hit exactly 270 on three of the major networks, and 269 on the other one, and the other one had turned out later to be right?
9:46PM - Nevada and Iowa will both close in fourteen minutes, and they'll both pop immediately for Barack Obama.
9:42PM - Oh, this'll be good: Katie Couric is about to interview Peggy Noonan about the election; anyone wanna bet on what Ms. Noonan decides to say, this time, about Sarah Palin? :-)
9:41PM - I just lost my mappy-thingy, somehow. I don't know how, but it's not working anymore, so I'll be screen-capturing the networks' maps from now on.
9:30PM - CBS projects for McConnell and Cochran. This is very interesting, folks--a much more interesting night than the top-line numbers would suggest. So far what's been happening is that the close Republican states in the north are blowing out for Obama and the close Republican states in the south are blowing out for the Republicans. By the way, CBS ALSO JUST PROJECTED NEW MEXICO. Here's your map:
9:25PM - TALK ABOUT AN EARLY NIGHT? With Ohio, Barack Obama makes it virtually impossible for McCain to win. The Pacific coast states, plus Obama's current total, adds up to virtually all of the 270 electoral votes he needs. (Entirely by the way, CBS has also called Louisiana for McCain--another state that had showed signs of tightening.) Here's the map:
9:23 CBS CALLS OHIO FOR BARACK OBAMA!!!!
9:20PM - CBS just showed a shaded map of Virginia and McCain's doing very well in the south and west, but he's doing so much better in the central than any polling data had suggested that I'm inclined to wonder if the early votes are being left 'til the end. Indiana is looking very good for Obama--even if it doesn't ultimately fall, it's still spinning the coverage (and, to that extent, influencing things out west). I had to chuckle, though, when the guy playing with the map of Indiana circled the Gary/Hammond area and said, "this is where Notre Dame is."
9:15PM - I know there are a lot of really smart people thinking about this stuff, but still I'm wondering if the early votes (for Obama) are being taken into appropriate consideration with these projections. What if, for example, the early votes in Virginia were all counted as absentee? Then it could be that Obama's advantage in early votes wouldn't show up until after all the precincts have reported.
9:10PM - Most over-hyped story of the night so far? Whether the Democrats will get to 60 Senate seats and be "filibuster-proof." Cloture votes are NEVER along straight party lines, and with the power of the White House to toss pork at a Republican or two, the Democrats absolutely do not care whether they make 60 or not. Most under-hyped story of the night so far? The inability to call Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, or Missouri. With every second that ticks off with those states un-called, John McCain's chances just get slimmer and slimmer and slimmer.
9:00PM - Huge Top-of-the-Hour in numbers, maybe not drama. Katie Couric can make it sound like a big moment if she wants to, but nobody lost money on TX and KS going for McCain or MN and WI and NY going for Obama. If there's a surprise this hour, it's only an air-quote surprise--Obama not forcing North Dakota to go a little deeper into the night. That's the third state that I thought we had a shot at winning, and to have them all red, this early, is disappointing, since it'll cut into Obama's mandate. Here's your map:
8:54PM - First big disappointment of the night. NBC has just called Georgia for John McCain. I shouldn't let that bother me, but gosh those early voter numbers for African Americans were awfully, awfully impressive, and it breaks my heart to see all that hard work go to waste. Maybe it'll help Jim Martin in his bid to unseat Saxby Chambliss, at least. Come to think of it, I'm probably like Steve Spurrier in this respect: He doesn't call a single play on offense without expecting it to end in a touchdown. Anyway, with the top of the hour fast approaching, here's your map:
8:44PM - Let's play a game. Can John McCain still win this election? Well, technically the answer is, of course, yes--until someone has 270 electoral votes, nobody can't have 270 electoral votes. But now that the only two creaky John Kerry states (PA and NH) have both been called for Obama, McCain must keep Obama from peeling another eighteen electoral votes from the Bush '04 map. It would only take eighteen more--that's Ohio all by itself, but it's also Nevada and Virginia all by themselves, too--for Barack Obama to make the magic number.
Of all the states that are still at least theoretically in play, McCain must win all of them and then-some. He must win IN, MO, VA, OH, FL, and NC -- all of which are trending Obama's way, to one extent or another -- but he must *also* keep Obama from making eighteen electoral votes out of NV, NM, CO, and IA. And those last four are states that nobody's been talking about for weeks because the race in those four places has been so solidly for Obama that nobody's been seriously considering them up for grabs.
I would also like to take a moment to toot my own horn, here, on two small scores: First, you heard it here first on the subject of McCain's Palin pick raising questions about his age and judgment--back when I was about as close to the lone voice in the wilderness as a person can get in the blog era without claiming that Neil Armstrong faked the 9/11 attacks. Second, you heard it here first on the subject of Indiana's stubborn refusal to be called, and the dramatic effect it would have on the evening election coverage on the TV. No constructive purpose for calling attention to that, you understand--but on the other hand, my Presidential seal isn't back from the printer's yet, either.
8:39PM - CNN calls Alabama for McCain, but the story of this election has definitely been told with the inability to call Indiana for McCain, on the one hand, and the very, very quick pop for Pennsylvania, on the other. The McCain/Palin ticket put a lot of time and energy and money into the Keystone State, and they're getting walloped, there. Here's your map:
8:30PM - Arkansas for McCain, and CBS finally climbs aboard with the Pennsylvania call. There's a surprising amount of disparity between the networks tonight (although not right at the moment). Let's see which of the big networks decides to take the plunge first on one of the other big prizes.
8:24PM - Arkansas at the bottom of hour.
8:21PM - Taking a breath. At this moment, the big news is that McCain's last best hope for winning--the Pennsylvania gambit--is off the table. A conservative mainstream press is hesitant to call Virginia or Florida for Obama but both of them are showing some extremely promising crosstabs in their exit polling. If Obama wins 55-60% of the Hispanic vote in Florida, he just might be on track to break through the 353 electoral vote total we've been bandying about in here.
8:17PM - CBS CALLING NC SENATE FOR KAY HAGEN!!!! I guess that's the first death-rattle of the Karl Rove culture wars--especially with that whole "godless" business falling flat. They're also calling NH Senate for Jean Shaheen, but we expected that one.
8:13PM - Governor Ed Rendell interviewed on CBS just now said that well over ninety percent of the registered voters in the Philadelphia area have voted. Probably explains why NBC and ABC have put it in Obama's column, huh?
8:08PM - ABC NEWS CALLS PENNSYLVANIA FOR BARACK OBAMA. If that call holds up with the other networks, this thing is pretty-much over. Here's your map (amended to take Rhode Island back down from the Obama campaign, which I mistakenly awarded him earlier).
8:00PM - Katie Couric announces that Florida, Pennsylvania, and Missouri are all un-called, but a gaggle of other states have fallen: Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, and Delaware, and the District of Columbia (Obama), while Tennessee and Oklahoma are called for McCain. Looking for a spin? How about that New Hampshire fell the instant it closed? Maybe the press is trying to be cautious with this thing, and some of those other states are going blue, too.
Meanwhile, CBS is reporting that Obama is winning the Hispanic vote in Florida (uh-oh) and significantly out-performing expectations in the Republican areas--the so-called "T"--of Pennsylvania.
Here's your map:
7:57PM - Fasten your seatbelts, Pennsylvania and Ohio are about to close at the top of the hour. A double-blue is the end of the road for John McCain.
7:53PM - Fun fact of the half-hour? How about this one, courtesy of CBS: Of all the money Barack Obama raised for this campaign, seventy percent was spent on red states. Call him arrogant all you want, but he'll take that label if it comes with a change of address.
7:49PM - CBS calls South Carolina for McCain. Pass the No-Doz, please....
7:41PM - Still no big calls, which is pretty bad news for McCain. Indiana, in particular, sitting there gray is having disproportionate effect on the way the news is being spun. CBS is hinting that Obama is outperforming his own expectations in rural Virginia and rural Indiana, and is even more significantly outperforming past Democrats in young-voter turnout. If they're not full of baloney, that's a very steep hill for McCain, indeed.
7:37PM - FIRST SIGN OF A BIG NIGHT? Now that I'm caught up a little, I had a quick peek at one of the other big political news aggregator sites, and there's a blurb there about exit polls being so good for Obama that the site manager from that other place doesn't even believe them.
7:31PM - West Virginia pops for McCain at the moment of poll-closings, which is a shame because we got it close there for a couple of weeks, but it's the sort of state that Rick Davis probably had in mind when he said that Obama "won this election three weeks too early." At all events, it doesn't come across as a surprise, so it won't hurt Obama's chances anywhere else. Here's your map:
7:29PM - BIG MOMENT COMING, as polls close in Ohio and North Carolina in just over a minute. If one or both fall immediately for Obama, this is an early night. If they remain uncalled, Obama wins later tonight. If they both pop instantly for McCain, Obama could lose.
7:20PM (EST) - Sorry I'm late; I've been working for the Obama campaign all day and just got home. Final pregame thoughts? Look for Virginia, Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida to tell the early story. If more than one or two of those go blue, it's a back-breaker for McCain. Obama doesn't need any of them to become President. Here's your map, up-to-the-minute.
Click Here to Read More...
12:16AM - Not his best speech, but that's the thing about Barack Obama: He's such an amazing speaker that every time he opens his mouth he raises his own bar. I think, personally, he was just a little bit tired. ...And who could blame him?
12:12AM - Time to wrap it up, Senator.
12:07AM - Getting a lot more forward-looking, now, which is important. (And it looks to me like Obama will win North Carolina, Indiana, and Montana as well, which would give him 367 electoral votes, total.)
12:06AM - Speech leaning a little bit too far in the celebratory direction right now (though I forgive him for wanting to toss a bone to all of his volunteers).
12:03AM - If Senator Obama and Senator McCain really mean what they say about working together over the next few weeks and months, that much alone could tell the tale of Obama's legacy. (And by the way, Obama is fifteen-thousand votes up in INDIANA.)
12:01AM - This man's going to be one of the greatest Presidents we've ever had.
12:00AM - Great opening.
11:58PM - Can't help but feel a little bit afraid, right now, despite the better angels of my nature. That's an *awful* lot of people, there in Grant Park.
11:56PM - Obama is leading by 30,000 votes in North Carolina, now, with 96% reporting. That's getting the tarheel state pretty doggone close, folks. (OBAMA IN THIRTY SECONDS!)
11:52PM - As the big moment draws nearer (when we'll hear from Senator Obama), I decided to scroll through the entire election returns for the House of Representatives, where the Democrats are currently up twelve seats, with about half the races decided. If that number doesn't plump-up considerably before it's over, the Republicans will probably find something in it to build on.
11:44PM - Both Udall's have now won their (Democratic pickup) Senate races. Meanwhile the Lincoln Diaz-Ballart house race has closed to within two percent, and is now "un-called" on the CNN election center map.
11:39PM - ABC just called Nevada for Obama, which took longer than it should have--but it's worth the wait. Here's your map:
11:37PM - As we await the President-elect, you might be interested to know that Indiana has swung the other way, now, with Barack Obama about 8,000 votes ahead.11:29PM - Fewer than eight thousand votes separate the candidates in Indiana, and fewer than five thousand votes separate the candidates in Montana. All of which confirms my swiftly hardening conviction that the mainstream press is just jaw-droppingly, profoundly lazy. All of this "true to type" coverage is completely missing the story of the night.
11:27PM - While John natters on like this, you might be interested to know that North Carolina is hanging in the balance, with fewer than five thousand votes separating the two candidates. It's gonna come down to provisional ballots there, me'thinks.
11:25PM - I was almost feeling a little sorry for John, for a minute there, and then he had to go and say how proud he was of Sarah Palin. Seriously, the content of this speech isn't bad, but the delivery is nothing short of painful, and listening to nothing--almost nothing--coming from the audience, is making it even worse.
11:23PM - THIS IS BIZARRE.
11:20PM - McCain's speech is gracious (if also a little affectless), but the crowd went from being nasty to being eerily, almost preternaturally quiet. I've never heard so little ambient noise from an audience that large, and it's creeping me out. Meantime, here's your map:
11:12PM - ABC calls Colorado for Obama. I can't make the new maps fast enough!11:09PM - THE ASSOCIATED PRESS CALLS FLORIDA FOR OBAMA.
11:05PM - CNN calls Virginia for Barack Obama, as well. (And you've waited for the map long enough.)
11:01PM - The CBS crew is completely speechless. Not just the meteoric four-year rise, not just the urban background, not just the age--we've just put a black man in the White House. We now live, for the first time, in a country in which a black man can be President. The heck with the map, folks, Barack Obama is your next President.11:00PM - WELCOME TO HISTORY, PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA.
10:56PM - Talk about "not pretending to be stupid": A few weeks ago the networks were all visibly grappling with the question of how to handle reporting on a race that could end up decided fairly early--whether to say so, or try to preserve the suspense--all of which led some senior editorial staffer at one outlet to say, "we're not in the business of pretending to be stupid." Well, just now Katie Couric signed off of the ten o'clock hour of coverage by saying, "When we return, history will be made." I guess that's your cue to pick up the phone, John.
10:51PM - Just a reminder: It's not actually possible to do what I just did, at 10:42--namely, to base a guess about how a state will go on the partial precincts. The precincts themselves don't report their results on a proportionate basis, they come in completely at random. So if, for example, the only places we haven't heard from in a state are in the blue-leaning areas, then the current state of the partial precincts in a state will skew the race toward McCain. (Generally, the last precincts to report are from crowded, lower-income areas in urban areas, which means Democrats tend to do better and better as the percentage of precincts reporting increases.)
10:47PM - Anyone care to wager when the next big undecided state will be called, and which one that is? My guess is that the networks will call Colorado for Obama before the top of the hour.
10:42PM - Obama finally inches ahead in Virginia, 51-49 with 91% reported. It's also 51-49 for Obama with 80% reporting in Florida, while McCain continues to cling to a 15,000 vote lead in North Carolina with 86% reporting. Color me puzzled; I'd never have dreamed that these states would stay gray this long after Ohio went for us, and I certainly didn't think we'd lose any of them.
10:36PM - CNN calls Mississippi for John McCain, and CBS (not wanting to be left out?) calls South Dakota for John McCain as well. By the way, CBS is also demurring on the competitive congressional districts in Nebraska. Here's (one version of) your current map:
10:33PM - Obama winning 37% of the whites and 97% of the blacks in North Carolina, which explains why that state is so neck-and-neck (fewer than 8,000 votes separate the two candidates, at the moment).10:28PM - CBS is calling Nebraska for McCain and (apparently) awarding all three of its congressional districts to him, too, keeping the state's electoral vote total intact. Here's the map:
10:22PM - Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) holds on in Pennsylvania, after calling his own constituents racists, while Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT) goes down to defeat in Connecticut. Pardon my gracious frame of mind, but Chris Shays is not a bad guy. ...Which isn't quite the same as saying that I feel sorry for him, you understand.10:18PM - Here's a thought: One of the biggest "assists" in Obama's victory tonight is deserved by a certain Hillary Clinton. By dragging-out the primary contest instead of going gently into that good night, Hillary pushed Barack Obama into our living rooms, coast-to-coast, and forced him to build an enormous field operation that kept working at full, hot-house tempo all the way through... well... they're still working, out west.
10:10PM - Nobody's talking about this, but frankly I think this is kind of a bizarre night: The early voting advantage isn't helping Obama in the very places where the canvass was looking the most favorable for him, and other places are going bluer than most of the reasonable political voices expected. Can someone explain to me how McCain might win Virginia on the same night that Kay Hagen beats Libby Dole? Why isn't anyone talking about this???
10:03PM - CBS' county-by-county returns in Florida showing Obama out-performing in the I-4 corridor. Coupled with the Hispanic support for Obama, I think it's only a matter of time there. Here's your current map:
10:00PM - CBS calls Iowa for Obama, and Mississippi and Utah for McCain and (gutless!) doesn't call Nevada.9:56PM - Virginia is, essentially, down to a single vote. I still don't understand how to reconcile this with the enormous advantage Obama had in polling numbers and early vote totals, and I'm still inclined to wonder if the early votes are being counted as absentees, at the end? I didn't expect Virginia to be close, and neither did Fivethirtyeight.
9:53PM - Couric talks to Ambinder about Obama's ground-game in Ohio, I wonder if Ambinder will mention that series of pieces on Fivethirtyeight about McCain's closed and locked field offices all over the country? Probably not.
9:50PM - Another mini-drama of call differentials, right now: CBS is apparently calling only one of the two congressional districts in Maine, since their electoral vote tally for Obama is 199 and all the other networks have him at 200. Wouldn't it have been a pisser if Obama had hit exactly 270 on three of the major networks, and 269 on the other one, and the other one had turned out later to be right?
9:46PM - Nevada and Iowa will both close in fourteen minutes, and they'll both pop immediately for Barack Obama.
9:42PM - Oh, this'll be good: Katie Couric is about to interview Peggy Noonan about the election; anyone wanna bet on what Ms. Noonan decides to say, this time, about Sarah Palin? :-)
9:41PM - I just lost my mappy-thingy, somehow. I don't know how, but it's not working anymore, so I'll be screen-capturing the networks' maps from now on.
9:30PM - CBS projects for McConnell and Cochran. This is very interesting, folks--a much more interesting night than the top-line numbers would suggest. So far what's been happening is that the close Republican states in the north are blowing out for Obama and the close Republican states in the south are blowing out for the Republicans. By the way, CBS ALSO JUST PROJECTED NEW MEXICO. Here's your map:
9:25PM - TALK ABOUT AN EARLY NIGHT? With Ohio, Barack Obama makes it virtually impossible for McCain to win. The Pacific coast states, plus Obama's current total, adds up to virtually all of the 270 electoral votes he needs. (Entirely by the way, CBS has also called Louisiana for McCain--another state that had showed signs of tightening.) Here's the map:
9:23 CBS CALLS OHIO FOR BARACK OBAMA!!!!9:20PM - CBS just showed a shaded map of Virginia and McCain's doing very well in the south and west, but he's doing so much better in the central than any polling data had suggested that I'm inclined to wonder if the early votes are being left 'til the end. Indiana is looking very good for Obama--even if it doesn't ultimately fall, it's still spinning the coverage (and, to that extent, influencing things out west). I had to chuckle, though, when the guy playing with the map of Indiana circled the Gary/Hammond area and said, "this is where Notre Dame is."
9:15PM - I know there are a lot of really smart people thinking about this stuff, but still I'm wondering if the early votes (for Obama) are being taken into appropriate consideration with these projections. What if, for example, the early votes in Virginia were all counted as absentee? Then it could be that Obama's advantage in early votes wouldn't show up until after all the precincts have reported.
9:10PM - Most over-hyped story of the night so far? Whether the Democrats will get to 60 Senate seats and be "filibuster-proof." Cloture votes are NEVER along straight party lines, and with the power of the White House to toss pork at a Republican or two, the Democrats absolutely do not care whether they make 60 or not. Most under-hyped story of the night so far? The inability to call Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, or Missouri. With every second that ticks off with those states un-called, John McCain's chances just get slimmer and slimmer and slimmer.
9:00PM - Huge Top-of-the-Hour in numbers, maybe not drama. Katie Couric can make it sound like a big moment if she wants to, but nobody lost money on TX and KS going for McCain or MN and WI and NY going for Obama. If there's a surprise this hour, it's only an air-quote surprise--Obama not forcing North Dakota to go a little deeper into the night. That's the third state that I thought we had a shot at winning, and to have them all red, this early, is disappointing, since it'll cut into Obama's mandate. Here's your map:
8:54PM - First big disappointment of the night. NBC has just called Georgia for John McCain. I shouldn't let that bother me, but gosh those early voter numbers for African Americans were awfully, awfully impressive, and it breaks my heart to see all that hard work go to waste. Maybe it'll help Jim Martin in his bid to unseat Saxby Chambliss, at least. Come to think of it, I'm probably like Steve Spurrier in this respect: He doesn't call a single play on offense without expecting it to end in a touchdown. Anyway, with the top of the hour fast approaching, here's your map:
8:44PM - Let's play a game. Can John McCain still win this election? Well, technically the answer is, of course, yes--until someone has 270 electoral votes, nobody can't have 270 electoral votes. But now that the only two creaky John Kerry states (PA and NH) have both been called for Obama, McCain must keep Obama from peeling another eighteen electoral votes from the Bush '04 map. It would only take eighteen more--that's Ohio all by itself, but it's also Nevada and Virginia all by themselves, too--for Barack Obama to make the magic number.Of all the states that are still at least theoretically in play, McCain must win all of them and then-some. He must win IN, MO, VA, OH, FL, and NC -- all of which are trending Obama's way, to one extent or another -- but he must *also* keep Obama from making eighteen electoral votes out of NV, NM, CO, and IA. And those last four are states that nobody's been talking about for weeks because the race in those four places has been so solidly for Obama that nobody's been seriously considering them up for grabs.
I would also like to take a moment to toot my own horn, here, on two small scores: First, you heard it here first on the subject of McCain's Palin pick raising questions about his age and judgment--back when I was about as close to the lone voice in the wilderness as a person can get in the blog era without claiming that Neil Armstrong faked the 9/11 attacks. Second, you heard it here first on the subject of Indiana's stubborn refusal to be called, and the dramatic effect it would have on the evening election coverage on the TV. No constructive purpose for calling attention to that, you understand--but on the other hand, my Presidential seal isn't back from the printer's yet, either.
8:39PM - CNN calls Alabama for McCain, but the story of this election has definitely been told with the inability to call Indiana for McCain, on the one hand, and the very, very quick pop for Pennsylvania, on the other. The McCain/Palin ticket put a lot of time and energy and money into the Keystone State, and they're getting walloped, there. Here's your map:
8:30PM - Arkansas for McCain, and CBS finally climbs aboard with the Pennsylvania call. There's a surprising amount of disparity between the networks tonight (although not right at the moment). Let's see which of the big networks decides to take the plunge first on one of the other big prizes.8:24PM - Arkansas at the bottom of hour.
8:21PM - Taking a breath. At this moment, the big news is that McCain's last best hope for winning--the Pennsylvania gambit--is off the table. A conservative mainstream press is hesitant to call Virginia or Florida for Obama but both of them are showing some extremely promising crosstabs in their exit polling. If Obama wins 55-60% of the Hispanic vote in Florida, he just might be on track to break through the 353 electoral vote total we've been bandying about in here.
8:17PM - CBS CALLING NC SENATE FOR KAY HAGEN!!!! I guess that's the first death-rattle of the Karl Rove culture wars--especially with that whole "godless" business falling flat. They're also calling NH Senate for Jean Shaheen, but we expected that one.
8:13PM - Governor Ed Rendell interviewed on CBS just now said that well over ninety percent of the registered voters in the Philadelphia area have voted. Probably explains why NBC and ABC have put it in Obama's column, huh?
8:08PM - ABC NEWS CALLS PENNSYLVANIA FOR BARACK OBAMA. If that call holds up with the other networks, this thing is pretty-much over. Here's your map (amended to take Rhode Island back down from the Obama campaign, which I mistakenly awarded him earlier).
8:00PM - Katie Couric announces that Florida, Pennsylvania, and Missouri are all un-called, but a gaggle of other states have fallen: Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, and Delaware, and the District of Columbia (Obama), while Tennessee and Oklahoma are called for McCain. Looking for a spin? How about that New Hampshire fell the instant it closed? Maybe the press is trying to be cautious with this thing, and some of those other states are going blue, too.
Meanwhile, CBS is reporting that Obama is winning the Hispanic vote in Florida (uh-oh) and significantly out-performing expectations in the Republican areas--the so-called "T"--of Pennsylvania.
Here's your map:
7:57PM - Fasten your seatbelts, Pennsylvania and Ohio are about to close at the top of the hour. A double-blue is the end of the road for John McCain.
7:53PM - Fun fact of the half-hour? How about this one, courtesy of CBS: Of all the money Barack Obama raised for this campaign, seventy percent was spent on red states. Call him arrogant all you want, but he'll take that label if it comes with a change of address.
7:49PM - CBS calls South Carolina for McCain. Pass the No-Doz, please....
7:41PM - Still no big calls, which is pretty bad news for McCain. Indiana, in particular, sitting there gray is having disproportionate effect on the way the news is being spun. CBS is hinting that Obama is outperforming his own expectations in rural Virginia and rural Indiana, and is even more significantly outperforming past Democrats in young-voter turnout. If they're not full of baloney, that's a very steep hill for McCain, indeed.7:37PM - FIRST SIGN OF A BIG NIGHT? Now that I'm caught up a little, I had a quick peek at one of the other big political news aggregator sites, and there's a blurb there about exit polls being so good for Obama that the site manager from that other place doesn't even believe them.
7:31PM - West Virginia pops for McCain at the moment of poll-closings, which is a shame because we got it close there for a couple of weeks, but it's the sort of state that Rick Davis probably had in mind when he said that Obama "won this election three weeks too early." At all events, it doesn't come across as a surprise, so it won't hurt Obama's chances anywhere else. Here's your map:
7:29PM - BIG MOMENT COMING, as polls close in Ohio and North Carolina in just over a minute. If one or both fall immediately for Obama, this is an early night. If they remain uncalled, Obama wins later tonight. If they both pop instantly for McCain, Obama could lose.7:20PM (EST) - Sorry I'm late; I've been working for the Obama campaign all day and just got home. Final pregame thoughts? Look for Virginia, Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida to tell the early story. If more than one or two of those go blue, it's a back-breaker for McCain. Obama doesn't need any of them to become President. Here's your map, up-to-the-minute.
Click Here to Read More...
Monday, November 3, 2008
Final Predictions
Call me irrationally exuberant, but I think the mainstream press has completely missed the story of Barack Obama's massive advantage in field operations, and I think the "likely voter" screens employed by the major polling firms are, as a result, dramatically under-counting Obama's support.
...And I won't keep you hanging in suspense any longer, no: I don't think it'll be enough to carry Arizona. But I do think Mr. Obama will win a larger share of the electoral vote than almost anyone is giving him credit for, including carriage of some states that even a few short months ago would've seemed literally unthinkable as part of any blue wave. In my last act in a country that has never elected a black man, I am calling Obama's total at 385. He will win all of the Kerry states (yes, including Pennsylvania), together with Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Iowa, and Virginia -- those will surprise no one. A few might be surprised by his capture of Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina, but early voting tells the story of these three and they're all going blue.
Early voting, too, is telling the story in a state no one's talking about, the first big surprise of tomorrow night, Georgia. Senator Obama will win it--indeed will win it by a margin comfortable enough to permit the networks to call it essentially the moment the polls close, and to that extent it will set a tone that will have domino effects out west, as disheartened Republicans step out of long voting lines and go home. After Georgia falls, nothing will save Mr. McCain's hopes of preserving victory in North Dakota or Montana, and by that time Indiana will have been called for Senator Obama as well. (Field operations, not early voting, will win Obama the Hoosier state.)
Below is your final prediction for the electoral map. Tomorrow I'll be live-blogging the results, complete with a state-by-state lighting of the map. Now go vote.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
...And I won't keep you hanging in suspense any longer, no: I don't think it'll be enough to carry Arizona. But I do think Mr. Obama will win a larger share of the electoral vote than almost anyone is giving him credit for, including carriage of some states that even a few short months ago would've seemed literally unthinkable as part of any blue wave. In my last act in a country that has never elected a black man, I am calling Obama's total at 385. He will win all of the Kerry states (yes, including Pennsylvania), together with Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Iowa, and Virginia -- those will surprise no one. A few might be surprised by his capture of Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina, but early voting tells the story of these three and they're all going blue.
Early voting, too, is telling the story in a state no one's talking about, the first big surprise of tomorrow night, Georgia. Senator Obama will win it--indeed will win it by a margin comfortable enough to permit the networks to call it essentially the moment the polls close, and to that extent it will set a tone that will have domino effects out west, as disheartened Republicans step out of long voting lines and go home. After Georgia falls, nothing will save Mr. McCain's hopes of preserving victory in North Dakota or Montana, and by that time Indiana will have been called for Senator Obama as well. (Field operations, not early voting, will win Obama the Hoosier state.)
Below is your final prediction for the electoral map. Tomorrow I'll be live-blogging the results, complete with a state-by-state lighting of the map. Now go vote.
Dave O'Gorman("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
If They Say "Tightening," You Have to Drink
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AUTHOR'S NOTES: Late Monday evening I will upload a final electoral map showing my predictions for the final results, and Tuesday evening I'll be live-blogging the election returns as they come in, complete with my own version of lighting-up the map.
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If you're anything like me, you'll probably be spending an even bigger chunk of your productivity today, devouring political news in whatever forms you can get it. And assuming that you aren't taking all of your news from The Guardian (or perhaps even if you are, since I haven't seen the Guardian lately), it won't take you ten whole seconds of perusal to trip over the word "tightening"; it's as ubiquitous today as the phrase "probable fifty-seat majority in the House" was in the weeks following Bill Clinton's impeachment trial. And it's equally silly. There's no scientifically tractable evidence that this race has tightened one tiny little bit since the nadir of McCain's aimless and crank-headed wanderings through the three Presidential debates. Indeed for all of the breathless "developments" in the story, this election has been remarkably stable since the "suspending my campaign" fiasco, with Obama holding between a five- and thirteen-point lead (depending on a particular poll's house effect), and McCain's numbers stuck in the mid-40's and going absolutely nowhere.
So, never mind the usual avalanche of disconnected factoids. Never mind that the early voting canvass in places like North Carolina and Florida and Nevada and Ohio is running so dramatically better for Obama than his statewide polling numbers in any of those four places. Never mind that improbably red places like Montana and Arizona and Georgia are suddenly in play, or that while everyone has been watching Pennsylvania for signs that it might somehow move eight points over the past eight days, the states that Obama needs to win even without Pennsylvania (like Nevada and Ohio and Virginia) have receded farther and farther from McCain's reach. Never mind that, in a recent television ad, the McCain folks revealed to us that they may not even be capable of basic spelling. (Okay, I had to sneak one disconnectged factoid in there at the end--mostly because it's just too much fun not to share.) Never mind any of that. The news of the hour and the day is that Senator McCain has simply and inescapably run out of time.
And really, when the dust has truly settled and all the statistical noise is evident in hindsight for being just that, it is little wonder that McCain's comeback has fallen so short. As has been noted elsewhere, this past summer it took John McCain two solid months to whittle Barack Obama's national lead down from four points to zero with the Paris Hilton / Celebrity gambit. After the "suspending my campaign" fiasco, McCain woke to find himself trailing by twice that margin with fewer than six weeks to go, some of which included early voting in crucial states.
A careful examination of the crosstabs from one early-voting canvass by CBS and the New York Times reveals something about the measure of McCain's longshot status all along. According to that particular survey, Obama is leading in nationwide early voting by 57-38, almost double his overall lead in the tracking polls being conducted by the same two media outlets. But what makes the result so ominous for McCain is the underlying question about who these early voters supported in 2004, and only 45% of them indicated that they supported John Kerry in 2004. The conclusion is inescapable: Barack Obama's improbably strong showings aren't merely (or perhaps even mostly) the result of his superior turnout operation, or the result of a higher percentage of self-identifying Democrats this time around, either. If this one result is indicative, it suggests that a significant percentage of the middle-electorate is crossing over--from having supported George Bush in 2004, to supporting Barack Obama in 2008. What it suggests, in other words, is that John McCain has lost the only swathe of the population with whom his popularity was supposed to be inviolable: he's lost the independents.
...And in this country, when you've lost the independents, all the rest of this vote-counting, all the rest of this analysis, all the rest of this piecemeal discussion about which news stories will move the numbers and which ones won't, all of it is just so much rearranging the North Vietnamese bombing targets on the flight-plan.
Barack Obama is your next President.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Late Monday evening I will upload a final electoral map showing my predictions for the final results, and Tuesday evening I'll be live-blogging the election returns as they come in, complete with my own version of lighting-up the map.
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If you're anything like me, you'll probably be spending an even bigger chunk of your productivity today, devouring political news in whatever forms you can get it. And assuming that you aren't taking all of your news from The Guardian (or perhaps even if you are, since I haven't seen the Guardian lately), it won't take you ten whole seconds of perusal to trip over the word "tightening"; it's as ubiquitous today as the phrase "probable fifty-seat majority in the House" was in the weeks following Bill Clinton's impeachment trial. And it's equally silly. There's no scientifically tractable evidence that this race has tightened one tiny little bit since the nadir of McCain's aimless and crank-headed wanderings through the three Presidential debates. Indeed for all of the breathless "developments" in the story, this election has been remarkably stable since the "suspending my campaign" fiasco, with Obama holding between a five- and thirteen-point lead (depending on a particular poll's house effect), and McCain's numbers stuck in the mid-40's and going absolutely nowhere.
So, never mind the usual avalanche of disconnected factoids. Never mind that the early voting canvass in places like North Carolina and Florida and Nevada and Ohio is running so dramatically better for Obama than his statewide polling numbers in any of those four places. Never mind that improbably red places like Montana and Arizona and Georgia are suddenly in play, or that while everyone has been watching Pennsylvania for signs that it might somehow move eight points over the past eight days, the states that Obama needs to win even without Pennsylvania (like Nevada and Ohio and Virginia) have receded farther and farther from McCain's reach. Never mind that, in a recent television ad, the McCain folks revealed to us that they may not even be capable of basic spelling. (Okay, I had to sneak one disconnectged factoid in there at the end--mostly because it's just too much fun not to share.) Never mind any of that. The news of the hour and the day is that Senator McCain has simply and inescapably run out of time.
And really, when the dust has truly settled and all the statistical noise is evident in hindsight for being just that, it is little wonder that McCain's comeback has fallen so short. As has been noted elsewhere, this past summer it took John McCain two solid months to whittle Barack Obama's national lead down from four points to zero with the Paris Hilton / Celebrity gambit. After the "suspending my campaign" fiasco, McCain woke to find himself trailing by twice that margin with fewer than six weeks to go, some of which included early voting in crucial states.
A careful examination of the crosstabs from one early-voting canvass by CBS and the New York Times reveals something about the measure of McCain's longshot status all along. According to that particular survey, Obama is leading in nationwide early voting by 57-38, almost double his overall lead in the tracking polls being conducted by the same two media outlets. But what makes the result so ominous for McCain is the underlying question about who these early voters supported in 2004, and only 45% of them indicated that they supported John Kerry in 2004. The conclusion is inescapable: Barack Obama's improbably strong showings aren't merely (or perhaps even mostly) the result of his superior turnout operation, or the result of a higher percentage of self-identifying Democrats this time around, either. If this one result is indicative, it suggests that a significant percentage of the middle-electorate is crossing over--from having supported George Bush in 2004, to supporting Barack Obama in 2008. What it suggests, in other words, is that John McCain has lost the only swathe of the population with whom his popularity was supposed to be inviolable: he's lost the independents.
...And in this country, when you've lost the independents, all the rest of this vote-counting, all the rest of this analysis, all the rest of this piecemeal discussion about which news stories will move the numbers and which ones won't, all of it is just so much rearranging the North Vietnamese bombing targets on the flight-plan.
Barack Obama is your next President.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Sunday, November 2, 2008
One Surprising Performance, Another Still to Come
In thinking about how to spend my annual extra hour, I'd intended to aggregate a cluster of more-or-less typical news stories from Friday and Saturday--go with the very sort of barometric electoral hodgepodge for which I'm known and respected by all four of the loyal readers who logged a comment yesterday to object to the idea that I only had four.
There would have been a paragraph on the rapidly unfolding story of early voting--how a nationwide canvass by the Washington Post reveals that nearly 60% of the early votes cast have been for Senator Obama, and separate surveying by the Public Polling Policy Institute show that Obama's lead is ten- and seventeen points in Colorado and New Mexico, among the roughly two-thirds of the electorate that has already voted in those two states. There was going to be a screen-capture of the (almost) current statistics in North Carolina (click on the image to expand it if you're having trouble reading the numbers)...
...and in Florida...
...and the net effect of all this early voting data would have pointed the discussion inexorably toward a reprieve of the shocking disparity between the ground operations of Senator Obama and Senator McCain, with room at the bottom for a mention that the race for President is now statistically tied in Louisiana and, not quite shockingly, in Arizona as well--and I probably would've carved a quiet little corner for the news that, as the electorate continues to "lock-in" its support, the pool of persuadable voters is evaporating faster than Senator McCain can win them over, to such an extent that many Republican columnists are beginning to wonder if it isn't already too late.
In ruminating on the question of how we got to this point, there would of course have been an obligatory paragraph describing Sarah Palin's increasingly disastrous influence on McCain's electoral fortunes--including the story of a Russian energy conglomerate's meetings in Alaska, that took place during Governor Palin's administration, but of which she was completely and blissfully unaware. I'd have found time to embed the link to Republican Senatorial Campaign Chair John Ensign, saying "of course not" to the question of whether Palin is ready to be President, and to mention the new ethics complaint that has been filed in Alaska against Palin, on the grounds that she's been using taxpayer money to fund the campaign travel of her kids. Space would've been made, too, for another dose of the "going rogue" angle to the growing story--specifically a mention of her weekend campaign rally in Florida in which all the audience signs described the state as "PALIN COUNTRY" and made no references whatsoever to John McCain. And of course there would have been yet a few more words about her continued (and now presumably permanent) refusal to release her medical records.
I'd have spoken about the enthusiasm gap too, of course--notably at the senior levels of opinion-making, where people like George Will have openly suggested that the wayward Republican party is about to get exactly what it deserves, while former Reagan Chief of Staff Ken Duberstein was across town on another network, endorsing Barack Obama, together with Ronald Reagan's own son, and a gaggle of other well-respected Republicans both in- and out of government. Indeed even Senator McCain's remaining high-level support, I'd have pointed out somewhere in that same paragraph, is only empowering the Obama campaign to make one of its most devastatingly effective television advertisements, yet.
With so little chance of winning Pennsylvania and by that measure preserving their dwindling electoral chances, I would have cautioned, the McCain campaign and its surrogates would find themselves increasingly desperate and thus increasingly reliant on dirty tricks. From a nasty push-poll in the Keystone State, to the suspiciously timed news that an Obama relative may be residing in this country illegally, to the naked attempt by a senior McCain campaign official to suggest that Obama collaborates with antisemites, despite being unable to cite a single credible example, I would have sternly admonished every loyal supporter of Team Good-Guys to keep his or her foot squarely on the accelerator to bank every soft voter that we can get our hands on. Then I'd have signed off with a few words about how the whole thing will mercifully soon be over, and that in spite of all the patented Republican under-handedness, we were gonna win anyway.
So what changed the plan? Saturday Night Live changed the plan. In a stunning show of good-natured self deprecation, Senator John McCain appeared on the program last night in two separate skits, both of them funny and both of them consisting of just the sort of warm, gracious humor that had charmed so many Democrats and Independents in years gone by. "We would have liked to run a thirty minute program on all three major networks like Senator Obama did," McCain said at the outset of the first sketch, standing beside Tina Fey's pitch-perfect Sarah Palin impersonation, "but we can only afford QVC." By turns the Republican Presidential candidate poked fun at himself ("I'm going to try the 'reverse-maverick,' where I just do everything that anybody tells me to"), poked fun at his campaign ("I'm a true maverick: a Republican who doesn't have any money"), shared in some good-natured fun at the expense of both his running-mate and, in an unintroduced cameo, his wife, and--most telling of all--managed to poke highly effective fun at his opponents, without having to seem dirty or shrill or desperate. It suffices to say that, had this John McCain showed up for the election and stayed in it, the race for the White House would surely look a lot different, now.
Which begs only the question, if this kind of performance on his part was so effective, and so easy, why wait until its content amounted to a de facto concession of the race? Surely no one who makes jokes about himself as a "sad grandpa" or as a man whose temper is capable of "scaring the hell out of everybody in the room" is still expecting to win-over the persuadable voters he needs to win the Presidency, and by that measure it seems obvious that McCain's intention last night was to signal his desire to be seen as gracious in defeat--but the question stands: Why wait until defeat is inescapable, to be gracious? Especially if you're John McCain?
Loyal readers have heard me say this before, but the lesson that I believe we will all learn from this election (myself included) is that political campaigns aren't one-size-fits-all. If I'd been running the Obama campaign, for instance, I'd have coached him to be as sharply forceful in his responses to the Bill Ayers / Jeremiah Wright nonsense as Senator Kerry was not in 2004--and I'd have been dead wrong. Neither Senator Obama's temperament, nor the mood of the electorate, would've left any room for the sort of eye-for-an-eye rejoinders that I enjoy so much in my own gleeful disagreements with my enemies. People are different, situations are different, there is a time and a place for everything. By hiring Steve Schmidt to rescue his foundering campaign, John McCain left himself open to being turned into something he's not, and the biggest irony of that statement is that the something he was being turned into these past few months was the only thing that would lose him the election: another George Bush. And it is a sad state of affairs indeed, when a man we'd all come to respect for not being George Bush can appear on national television three days before an election, and surprise us by not being George Bush.
Meanwhile, if Senator McCain's big surprise-performance of the election happened last night, then I'd also like to take the last of your second cup of coffee to posit that Senator Obama's big surprise performance is yet to come--on election night. With the staggering advantage in field operations that he enjoys, coupled with the increasingly dubious-seeming filters that major polling firms must apply to every batch of data they see, and despite the electoral whip-counts that already show massive advantages for Team Blue from coast to coast, I believe that the election returns on Tuesday night will surprise everyone for the depth and breadth of the Obama victory. In 2006, with none of the advantages that Obama and his team have cultivated on the ground, some of us were surprised by the strength of Democratic performance in the midterm elections--taking as they did the Senate seats in Virginia and Missouri, both of which were supposed to be close-but-no-cigar contests for the good guys. Only a shamelessly racist TV ad in Tennessee stopped Harold Ford from running the score up to three-for-three.
This year, with an Obama campaign taking absolutely nothing for granted, anywhere, all while the conventional news media completely misses the story of the differences in the two ground operations, I now believe that we're going to see massive electoral surprises in just about every state where the Democrats have contested the matter at all. My previous best-guess was 353 electoral votes, but if anything I'd encourage avid speculators to "take the over" on that projection--specifically since it did not include victories in any of Missouri, Indiana, Georgia, Arizona, Louisiana, Montana, or either of the Dakotas, all of which are now well within reach. Four hundred electoral votes for Obama are a total that is, at this hour, no longer a suggestion worthy of howling protests of overconfidence.
With the prospect of further Republican dirty tricks lurking out there as always, I would of course sternly admonish every loyal supporter of Team Good-Guys to keep his or her foot squarely on the accelerator, to bank every soft voter that we can get our hands on. But now I'll sign off by reminding everyone that the whole thing will mercifully soon be over, and that in spite of all the patented Republican under-handedness, we're gonna win anyway.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
There would have been a paragraph on the rapidly unfolding story of early voting--how a nationwide canvass by the Washington Post reveals that nearly 60% of the early votes cast have been for Senator Obama, and separate surveying by the Public Polling Policy Institute show that Obama's lead is ten- and seventeen points in Colorado and New Mexico, among the roughly two-thirds of the electorate that has already voted in those two states. There was going to be a screen-capture of the (almost) current statistics in North Carolina (click on the image to expand it if you're having trouble reading the numbers)...
...and in Florida...
...and the net effect of all this early voting data would have pointed the discussion inexorably toward a reprieve of the shocking disparity between the ground operations of Senator Obama and Senator McCain, with room at the bottom for a mention that the race for President is now statistically tied in Louisiana and, not quite shockingly, in Arizona as well--and I probably would've carved a quiet little corner for the news that, as the electorate continues to "lock-in" its support, the pool of persuadable voters is evaporating faster than Senator McCain can win them over, to such an extent that many Republican columnists are beginning to wonder if it isn't already too late.In ruminating on the question of how we got to this point, there would of course have been an obligatory paragraph describing Sarah Palin's increasingly disastrous influence on McCain's electoral fortunes--including the story of a Russian energy conglomerate's meetings in Alaska, that took place during Governor Palin's administration, but of which she was completely and blissfully unaware. I'd have found time to embed the link to Republican Senatorial Campaign Chair John Ensign, saying "of course not" to the question of whether Palin is ready to be President, and to mention the new ethics complaint that has been filed in Alaska against Palin, on the grounds that she's been using taxpayer money to fund the campaign travel of her kids. Space would've been made, too, for another dose of the "going rogue" angle to the growing story--specifically a mention of her weekend campaign rally in Florida in which all the audience signs described the state as "PALIN COUNTRY" and made no references whatsoever to John McCain. And of course there would have been yet a few more words about her continued (and now presumably permanent) refusal to release her medical records.
I'd have spoken about the enthusiasm gap too, of course--notably at the senior levels of opinion-making, where people like George Will have openly suggested that the wayward Republican party is about to get exactly what it deserves, while former Reagan Chief of Staff Ken Duberstein was across town on another network, endorsing Barack Obama, together with Ronald Reagan's own son, and a gaggle of other well-respected Republicans both in- and out of government. Indeed even Senator McCain's remaining high-level support, I'd have pointed out somewhere in that same paragraph, is only empowering the Obama campaign to make one of its most devastatingly effective television advertisements, yet.
With so little chance of winning Pennsylvania and by that measure preserving their dwindling electoral chances, I would have cautioned, the McCain campaign and its surrogates would find themselves increasingly desperate and thus increasingly reliant on dirty tricks. From a nasty push-poll in the Keystone State, to the suspiciously timed news that an Obama relative may be residing in this country illegally, to the naked attempt by a senior McCain campaign official to suggest that Obama collaborates with antisemites, despite being unable to cite a single credible example, I would have sternly admonished every loyal supporter of Team Good-Guys to keep his or her foot squarely on the accelerator to bank every soft voter that we can get our hands on. Then I'd have signed off with a few words about how the whole thing will mercifully soon be over, and that in spite of all the patented Republican under-handedness, we were gonna win anyway.
So what changed the plan? Saturday Night Live changed the plan. In a stunning show of good-natured self deprecation, Senator John McCain appeared on the program last night in two separate skits, both of them funny and both of them consisting of just the sort of warm, gracious humor that had charmed so many Democrats and Independents in years gone by. "We would have liked to run a thirty minute program on all three major networks like Senator Obama did," McCain said at the outset of the first sketch, standing beside Tina Fey's pitch-perfect Sarah Palin impersonation, "but we can only afford QVC." By turns the Republican Presidential candidate poked fun at himself ("I'm going to try the 'reverse-maverick,' where I just do everything that anybody tells me to"), poked fun at his campaign ("I'm a true maverick: a Republican who doesn't have any money"), shared in some good-natured fun at the expense of both his running-mate and, in an unintroduced cameo, his wife, and--most telling of all--managed to poke highly effective fun at his opponents, without having to seem dirty or shrill or desperate. It suffices to say that, had this John McCain showed up for the election and stayed in it, the race for the White House would surely look a lot different, now.
Which begs only the question, if this kind of performance on his part was so effective, and so easy, why wait until its content amounted to a de facto concession of the race? Surely no one who makes jokes about himself as a "sad grandpa" or as a man whose temper is capable of "scaring the hell out of everybody in the room" is still expecting to win-over the persuadable voters he needs to win the Presidency, and by that measure it seems obvious that McCain's intention last night was to signal his desire to be seen as gracious in defeat--but the question stands: Why wait until defeat is inescapable, to be gracious? Especially if you're John McCain?
Loyal readers have heard me say this before, but the lesson that I believe we will all learn from this election (myself included) is that political campaigns aren't one-size-fits-all. If I'd been running the Obama campaign, for instance, I'd have coached him to be as sharply forceful in his responses to the Bill Ayers / Jeremiah Wright nonsense as Senator Kerry was not in 2004--and I'd have been dead wrong. Neither Senator Obama's temperament, nor the mood of the electorate, would've left any room for the sort of eye-for-an-eye rejoinders that I enjoy so much in my own gleeful disagreements with my enemies. People are different, situations are different, there is a time and a place for everything. By hiring Steve Schmidt to rescue his foundering campaign, John McCain left himself open to being turned into something he's not, and the biggest irony of that statement is that the something he was being turned into these past few months was the only thing that would lose him the election: another George Bush. And it is a sad state of affairs indeed, when a man we'd all come to respect for not being George Bush can appear on national television three days before an election, and surprise us by not being George Bush.
Meanwhile, if Senator McCain's big surprise-performance of the election happened last night, then I'd also like to take the last of your second cup of coffee to posit that Senator Obama's big surprise performance is yet to come--on election night. With the staggering advantage in field operations that he enjoys, coupled with the increasingly dubious-seeming filters that major polling firms must apply to every batch of data they see, and despite the electoral whip-counts that already show massive advantages for Team Blue from coast to coast, I believe that the election returns on Tuesday night will surprise everyone for the depth and breadth of the Obama victory. In 2006, with none of the advantages that Obama and his team have cultivated on the ground, some of us were surprised by the strength of Democratic performance in the midterm elections--taking as they did the Senate seats in Virginia and Missouri, both of which were supposed to be close-but-no-cigar contests for the good guys. Only a shamelessly racist TV ad in Tennessee stopped Harold Ford from running the score up to three-for-three.
This year, with an Obama campaign taking absolutely nothing for granted, anywhere, all while the conventional news media completely misses the story of the differences in the two ground operations, I now believe that we're going to see massive electoral surprises in just about every state where the Democrats have contested the matter at all. My previous best-guess was 353 electoral votes, but if anything I'd encourage avid speculators to "take the over" on that projection--specifically since it did not include victories in any of Missouri, Indiana, Georgia, Arizona, Louisiana, Montana, or either of the Dakotas, all of which are now well within reach. Four hundred electoral votes for Obama are a total that is, at this hour, no longer a suggestion worthy of howling protests of overconfidence.
With the prospect of further Republican dirty tricks lurking out there as always, I would of course sternly admonish every loyal supporter of Team Good-Guys to keep his or her foot squarely on the accelerator, to bank every soft voter that we can get our hands on. But now I'll sign off by reminding everyone that the whole thing will mercifully soon be over, and that in spite of all the patented Republican under-handedness, we're gonna win anyway.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Stripping a Good (or Bad) Ground-Game
As all four of my loyal readers know, I spent yesterday driving people to early voting. Beginning at about 9:30AM, and running more or less continuously until the polls closed at 7:00PM, I shuttled a total of forty-four college students from a pick-up point on the campus of the University of Florida to the nearest early voting station in downtown Gainesville. And the remarkable thing about that statement is that there is nothing remarkable about it whatsoever.
For six months or more, all across the country, the Barack Obama campaign has run a pitch-perfect and hyper-disciplined ground operation. While John McCain was trying to decide whether Obama was a coddled celebrity and liberal elitist, or a nefarious black-underground wannabe with an ugly agenda for race-dividing, Team Blue was quietly building databases, developing a turnout plan, reaching every soft supporter that could possibly be reached, and all while cultivating supreme pride of ownership in the campaign among even the lowliest of its incidental volunteers ("If you have a suggestion for us about how this is or isn't working, Dave, here's a cell-phone with our regional offices already speed-dialed").
Perhaps not surprisingly, the local face of this juggernaut of retail prowess has been focused on turning out college students: state law allows any Florida resident to change his or her registration address at the time of voting, and as such any college-aged Obama supporter with a valid Florida driver's license may vote in the town of his college in favor of his "permanent" address, if he wishes. Thus it is, that an entire universe of potentially soft and fickle Obama supporters would be concentrated in an extremely small geographic area, ripe for banking.
What the Obama campaign did about this was to position teams of three or four (extensively trained) volunteers in strategic locations around the campus, specifically where large numbers of students would pass a small parking area on foot during class change-overs. The volunteers would ask passersby if they were Obama supporters, if they'd voted yet, if they'd like to vote, and if they'd like a ride--all while the vehicle in which they'd be riding was propped conspicuously a few feet away, its windows painted with waggish puns of the "Yes We Van!" sort. When drivers weren't driving, they were given cell phones and call lists, and phone-banked from their parked vehicles.
The effect of this one-two punch was to replace the entire, supposedly arduous process of gathering one's ambition to brave a monolithic and intimidating bureaucracy (the gathering process that so many college students had in past elections failed to accomplish) with an expression of support that could be officially manifested, on impulse. It is little wonder that, at my pickup point alone, the total haul for a single day's shuttle pickups was significantly over 300 people. And in case you've forgotten, Al Gore's official margin of "defeat" in Florida was less than twice that figure.
Meanwhile, the McCain campaign's ground operations have been all but non-existent, even in places where he simply cannot win without one. Some well-respected columnists have fallen for the campaign's argument that they've had to sacrifice the typical Republican advantage in mobilizing voters. But the intrepid young souls at Fivethirtyeight have in the meantime been driving literally all over the country, looking for stories about the two field operations in the very sorts of crucial precincts where 1992 became 2000 and then, alas, became 2004. And what those less-traditional reporters have found (by practicing the traditional, unglamorous, shake-the-bushes job that journalism used to be), is a McCain/Schmidt/Davis team so shockingly unable to marshal ground-level resources as to leave room to wonder how they've managed to keep this thing even as close as they have.
At three stops in what was once the crucial swing-state of New Mexico, the Fivethirtyeight reporters found a single dialer working the phones at McCain offices in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and were handed a staged photograph in Espanola. In Colorado they were greeted by two closed-and-locked offices (in Durango and Grand Junction) and a posed photograph of a door-knocker in Cortez. The Des Moines office was open but contained not a single volunteer, while at the Troy, Ohio office, the Fivethirtyeight team arrived to take their photograph of the front facade at the same moment two local women approached the building to volunteer--only to discover that the building was closed and locked (in the mid-afternoon on a Saturday). They found one dialer working in Columbus, two volunteers and a security guard in Toledo, two dialers in the entire state of Virginia--despite making five stops there--and two more at two offices in North Carolina.
To put all of that in its proper context, I'd met more Obama volunteers than that, at the local field office, before I'd driven my first voter to the polls. What struck me more than once over the course of the day is, Republicans are supposed to be good at this kind of organization, and Democrats are supposed to be bad at it. Instead the roles of the two parties seem strikingly reversed this time around, and it's really starting to show in the numbers we've been getting for early voting and for other forms of "banked" support. Fivethirtyeight has moved Colorado and Virginia to "safe DEM," for one thing, and McCain's all-in gambit to win Pennsylvania has so far made barely a dent.
Of course as any Cubs fan will tell you, nothing is absolutely for certain until the final out has been recorded--which explains why Mr. Obama and his campaign have seemed so ruthless in their pursuit of deal-closure, and so quick to tamp down the only slightly early celebrations. All of us must do our part, and all of us must keep doing our part--notably to counter the horrific fraud that the other side is sure to try once again to perpetrate on a credulous public. Only with sheer margin-of-victory can this deal properly be closed. And if this column ends up seeming a bit breathless, it's because I'm going straight back out today.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
For six months or more, all across the country, the Barack Obama campaign has run a pitch-perfect and hyper-disciplined ground operation. While John McCain was trying to decide whether Obama was a coddled celebrity and liberal elitist, or a nefarious black-underground wannabe with an ugly agenda for race-dividing, Team Blue was quietly building databases, developing a turnout plan, reaching every soft supporter that could possibly be reached, and all while cultivating supreme pride of ownership in the campaign among even the lowliest of its incidental volunteers ("If you have a suggestion for us about how this is or isn't working, Dave, here's a cell-phone with our regional offices already speed-dialed").
Perhaps not surprisingly, the local face of this juggernaut of retail prowess has been focused on turning out college students: state law allows any Florida resident to change his or her registration address at the time of voting, and as such any college-aged Obama supporter with a valid Florida driver's license may vote in the town of his college in favor of his "permanent" address, if he wishes. Thus it is, that an entire universe of potentially soft and fickle Obama supporters would be concentrated in an extremely small geographic area, ripe for banking.
What the Obama campaign did about this was to position teams of three or four (extensively trained) volunteers in strategic locations around the campus, specifically where large numbers of students would pass a small parking area on foot during class change-overs. The volunteers would ask passersby if they were Obama supporters, if they'd voted yet, if they'd like to vote, and if they'd like a ride--all while the vehicle in which they'd be riding was propped conspicuously a few feet away, its windows painted with waggish puns of the "Yes We Van!" sort. When drivers weren't driving, they were given cell phones and call lists, and phone-banked from their parked vehicles.
The effect of this one-two punch was to replace the entire, supposedly arduous process of gathering one's ambition to brave a monolithic and intimidating bureaucracy (the gathering process that so many college students had in past elections failed to accomplish) with an expression of support that could be officially manifested, on impulse. It is little wonder that, at my pickup point alone, the total haul for a single day's shuttle pickups was significantly over 300 people. And in case you've forgotten, Al Gore's official margin of "defeat" in Florida was less than twice that figure.
Meanwhile, the McCain campaign's ground operations have been all but non-existent, even in places where he simply cannot win without one. Some well-respected columnists have fallen for the campaign's argument that they've had to sacrifice the typical Republican advantage in mobilizing voters. But the intrepid young souls at Fivethirtyeight have in the meantime been driving literally all over the country, looking for stories about the two field operations in the very sorts of crucial precincts where 1992 became 2000 and then, alas, became 2004. And what those less-traditional reporters have found (by practicing the traditional, unglamorous, shake-the-bushes job that journalism used to be), is a McCain/Schmidt/Davis team so shockingly unable to marshal ground-level resources as to leave room to wonder how they've managed to keep this thing even as close as they have.
At three stops in what was once the crucial swing-state of New Mexico, the Fivethirtyeight reporters found a single dialer working the phones at McCain offices in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and were handed a staged photograph in Espanola. In Colorado they were greeted by two closed-and-locked offices (in Durango and Grand Junction) and a posed photograph of a door-knocker in Cortez. The Des Moines office was open but contained not a single volunteer, while at the Troy, Ohio office, the Fivethirtyeight team arrived to take their photograph of the front facade at the same moment two local women approached the building to volunteer--only to discover that the building was closed and locked (in the mid-afternoon on a Saturday). They found one dialer working in Columbus, two volunteers and a security guard in Toledo, two dialers in the entire state of Virginia--despite making five stops there--and two more at two offices in North Carolina.
To put all of that in its proper context, I'd met more Obama volunteers than that, at the local field office, before I'd driven my first voter to the polls. What struck me more than once over the course of the day is, Republicans are supposed to be good at this kind of organization, and Democrats are supposed to be bad at it. Instead the roles of the two parties seem strikingly reversed this time around, and it's really starting to show in the numbers we've been getting for early voting and for other forms of "banked" support. Fivethirtyeight has moved Colorado and Virginia to "safe DEM," for one thing, and McCain's all-in gambit to win Pennsylvania has so far made barely a dent.
Of course as any Cubs fan will tell you, nothing is absolutely for certain until the final out has been recorded--which explains why Mr. Obama and his campaign have seemed so ruthless in their pursuit of deal-closure, and so quick to tamp down the only slightly early celebrations. All of us must do our part, and all of us must keep doing our part--notably to counter the horrific fraud that the other side is sure to try once again to perpetrate on a credulous public. Only with sheer margin-of-victory can this deal properly be closed. And if this column ends up seeming a bit breathless, it's because I'm going straight back out today.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
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