After waiting more than two weeks for the early votes to be properly counted (and entirely by the way, can we just pause to savor the irony in that little sentence-fragment?), Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich has been declared the winner of the United States Senate seat currently occupied by convicted felon Ted Stevens. Mr. Begich becomes the fifty-eighth member of the Democratic caucus in the Senate (now that we can all go back to thinking about everything else besides the fate of Joe Lieberman) and the only Senator who does not possess a college degree. One other interesting tidbit: Alaska's house race was also just conceded within the past day or so, securing a nineteenth term for Republican Don Young--whose first victory in 1972 was won when the airplane in which the Democratic incumbent was traveling, disappeared. The Democrat in that race? It was Mark Begich's father, Nick.
Many major news outlets have not yet called the race, despite the fact that the number of remaining uncounted absentee ballots is smaller than Begich's current margin. There's actually a pretty good (if somewhat tortuous) explanation for the media reticence, if only in this case: Should the absentee ballots close Begich's margin to within 0.5%, the state must automatically hold a recount. Trouble is, recounts always favor democrats, and with so few ballots actually cast the likelihood of making up a 0.5% margin is considerably smaller than it would be if Stevens could hang his hat on the prospect of 50,000 presumably staunch supporters showing up as undervotes in suburban Minneapolis. Stevens can also pay for a recount out of his own pocket if the margin is larger than 0.5%, but with senior members of his own party calling for his expulsion from their caucus, it seems more likely that Mr. Stevens will take a page from the George Allen playbook, letting the sting of defeat die down a little before quietly conceding.
As the Alsaka race fades from prominence, along comes the beginning of the much-anticipated Minnesota recount, to captivate our attentions for the next few news cycles. As your intrepid columnist has stated with rather foolish confidence on several occasions before, the fact that Mr. Coleman is presently ahead by about 200 votes is utterly irrelevant to the relative prospects of victory for each of the two candidates in that race: Recounts always favor Democrats, and with this many undervotes in profoundly pro-Democratic areas of the state, I should think it a stunning upset if Mr. Franken does not prevail. (At all events, he's in Washington attending freshman orientation, presumably under the same set of assumptions.)
Which leaves only Georgia--where early voting is already underway in the runoff between Republican incumbent Saxbe Chambliss and his Democratic challenger, Jim Martin. Martin's runoff strategy has been considerably more aggressive at highlighting Mr. Chambliss' shortcomings on domestic policy (which are manifold), and with some big Democratic guns fanning the Atlanta base, anything is possible. The Key Grip remains, however, less than persuaded by the media's portrayal of an ultimate, Alamo-style showdown for the life and death of the Republican party.
As the friend of a man who owns vacation property in North Carolina, I've criss-crossed the State of Adventure more often in the past two years than Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton combined, and I can tell you that outside of a handful of royal-blue enclaves scattered around the state, Georgia is exactly the sort of place that Ricahrd Pryor had in mind when he said, of the south, "They've got white folks down there that scare white folks." Surely if the polarizing and suddenly dated-seeming Atwater playbook is going to work anywhere, it's in Georgia. Besides, the Georgia Republican base won't mind the extra attention as the bearers of such grim responsibility, and will happily turn out in massive numbers to stop those icky Democrats from making their decidedly un-magic "magic number" of 60 Senate seats. For all of these reasons, smart money is still on Chambliss.
With the election and its associated after-dramas winding down, your columnist lightly turns his attentions to thoughts of travel, and of movies--a promise he's made more than once before, if you're keeping score at home, and hasn't yet quite managed the courage to try out on an audience of five hard-boiled political junkies. Will Cinema Democratica survive its transition to a three-topic column? Will the comment field be peppered with angry feedback from jilted news hounds? Will the vote to chew up bandwidth with non-political posts come down to a razor-thin margin and, most importantly, who will pay for the manual recount, and who gets the money when they do?
Hey, we've gotta have some drama in our lives, now, don't we.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Monday, November 17, 2008
Eyes on the Senate (but not how you think!)
With his (surprisingly re-energizing) maiden voyage to the Miami Book Fair now successfully concluded, the Key Grip turns his attentions to the unfolding drama in the United States Senate--in 2010.
First, the column you might have been forgiven for expecting, redux: The Alaska Senate race will now almost certainly go for Mr. Begich. The remaining votes to be counted in the state are from the most significantly pro-Begich areas, and not even Mr. Stevens' own party wants him to win a protracted after-battle in the courts. With respect to Minnesota, your intrepid columnist might be whistling past the raw count by anticipating a Franken victory, but my memories of logging on to the Florida Secretary of State's website and watching Mr. Gore's numbers creep closer and closer to Bush's in 2000 are just too vivid not to expect a +204 vote pickup for the Democrats in the Gopher state. My guess is that Franken defeats Coleman in both the recount and the courts, but that it will take several more weeks before that prediction is vindicated.
Georgia, in my opinion, will come down to both sides GOTV efforts, though the funnybusiness we've already seen there leaves me even less optimistic than Mr. Martin's deficit in the original contest would suggest, so I'll classify that one as "likely GOP" until convinced otherwise. As I've noted before, nobody who knows anything about these processes really gives a damn about whether the Democrats make it to 60 seats or not; my guess is that they make it to 59 including Lieberman (which, the way things are going, would suggest a final tally of 58, at least for now).
While I'm at it, a word or two about Hillary Clinton becoming Secretary of State: It's a move that makes some sense--for Brack Obama. He takes Clinton out of the Senate, where any difference of legislative opinion or agenda would be amplified by a Jennifer-v-Angelina style of feeding frenzy. Besides, such an appointment would get John Kerry off Obama's back about the same job, which just might be enough political embarrassment to get Mr. Kerry off the rest of our backs, too. As for Clinton playing nice, the last Democrat to occupy the White House certainly had a strong and independently minded woman for his Secretary of State, and the experience of that relationship might have shown the rest of us that competing internal agendas are significantly less embarrassing to a President on the foreign policy side of the ledger.
What Mrs. Clinton gains from the proposition is, as others have written far more eloquently than I, significantly less clear. If the Obama Administration is unpopular in 2012, it wouldn't actually matter because a sitting Secretary of State can't run against her own boss. By 2016, if Obama were unable to rescue his popularity, Clinton would find herself in exactly the same position most recently experienced by Senator McCain: that of convincing an exhausted American electorate that she is different enough from the incumbent to merit a third installment of rule by the same party. If, by contrast, Mr. Obama's popularity is high, Clinton will face the difficult task of either extricating herself from a popular government without seeming overly opportunistic, or campaigning for her boss' job while serving as the sitting Secretary of State--a job not well-suited to justifications for criss-crossing the state of Iowa, given that it's been rather a long time since we last needed a treaty there.
Clinton no doubt believes that a foreign policy appointment would round-out her resume, but the problems with that calculation may well outweigh its benefits: Most people think her neither an expert on, nor particularly interested in, foreign policy, and so--left to scratch their heads about why she would accept such a position, they inevitably come to the conclusion that she's trying to round-out her resume, and thus already running for President in 2016. And given that Mrs. Clinton has just finished a rather protracted round of self-inflicted bruising for her unwillingness to cede the spotlight to Obama, a pre-candidacy for his replacement just isn't the sort of recovery that Mrs. Clinton needs, just at the moment.
One other consideration merits at least a word or two, here: Hillary Rodham Clinton was born on October 27th of 1947, which would make her, on election day of 2016, sixty-nine years old. This would tie her (in years) for the title of oldest person ever to win the Presidency, should she manage to do so. Now, maybe the American public will have forgotten that the "torch has been passed" by the time that distant day rolls around--goodness knows they've done so before--but this time the job of winning back the reins from the young turks will be complicated by the fact that there are numerous other, younger faces in Clinton's own party, many of whom are perceived as significantly more capable at the messy job of reaching bipartisan consensus to actually govern. At all events, hold all your cards, folks: eight years is a long time.
Two years, by contrast, is not.
And while it's typically the case that the party in power loses seats, a quick survey of the races that will be contested in the Senate in 2010 reveals the early makings of what could be yet another long and improbably rocky election night for the Republicans: Of all the Democratic senators who are up for reelection in 2010, only two--Byron Dorgan in North Dakota and Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas--represent states that voted for McCain in the election just concluded, and the Republican Party was unable even to find a candidate to run for Senate from the state of Arkansas this time, leaving Mark Pryor to win unopposed. Dorgan could be perceived as a (lone?) pickup opportunity for the Republicans, but for the small problem that North Dakotans like him--a lot--and by the time the question is put to them, they will have had two years of an Obama Administration's commitment to alternative energy like ethanol, through which to gauge just how committed to the culture wars they still really want to be. The Democrats from states that voted Obama, meanwhile, are nearly all completely safe, barring a totally unforeseen meltdown in Mr. Obama's popularity. Only Ken Salazar in Colorado and Barbara Boxer in California will face truly contested races, and that's assuming that either one finds him- or herself opposite a formidable Republican opponent.
The Republicans, by contrast, will face uphill battles to hold in a variety of races, chief among them in New Hampshire, where Judd Gregg must be looking around this morning and wondering what happened to his cushy victory in 2004. Indeed there was a time--not all that long ago, really--when New Hampshire was considered a relatively safe Republican state (owing to a quirky New England geography which managed to pile most of the Granite state's population into affluent Boston suburbs), but not anymore. Both houses of the state legislature are now controlled by comfortable Democratic majorities, and a Republican hasn't won a statewide race for office there since Mr. Gregg himself.
Arlan Specter has been for a long time now a (mostly) popular Republican Senator in an increasingly blue state, but the Democratic party in Pennsylvania is a well-oiled machine that knows how to win Senate races, and if Governor Ed Rendell were to run against Mr. Specter, the seat would be a very, very difficult one for Mr. Specter to hold. John McCain himself, whose most likely opponent in 2010 is the runaway-popular Governor there, Janet Napolitano, will have to work fast to burnish his independent image if he hopes to cling to what little Washington influence he has left. Mel Martinez of Florida will need a lot more than just a formula consisting of one part anti-Castro saber rattling, two parts security-mom fear mongering, and three parts good fortune to face a weak and ineffectual candidate who could never quite convince even some Democrats that her tenure policies at the University of South Florida hadn't amounted to a goal of harboring terrorists. Martinez, like the others, will face much stiffer opposition this time around, and the Cuban-American vote (as I just saw, first-hand) is far from reliably Republican these days. The state has several competent Democrats to offer, chief among them Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and if Mr. Obama is anything like as popular in south Florida in two years as he is right now, the Martinez campaign will have to sweat every single vote to carry the day, and indeed probably won't.
Ditto George Voinovich in Ohio, a Republican in a state that seems, even a precious few days after the election, a lot less like a battleground than it has in previous cycles. If the electoral fortunes of the two parties don't change significantly on a national scale in the intervening months, Voinovich will face a challenge from a top-tier Ohio Democrat and, I think, probably lose.
And these, you understand, are just the first flight of potential Democratic pickups. There are numerous other Republican Senators--John Thune (SD), Richard Burr (NC), Jim Bunning (KY), David Vitter (LA), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Kit Bond (MO), Johnny Isakson (GA), Sam Brownback (KS), and Chuck Grassly (IA), could all conceivably lose their seats--owing to a variety of anemic popularity at home, the potential for a strong opponent, and a track-record of previous victories on a platform that suddenly seems dated and petty even to some Republicans. Grassly is popular but Tom Vilsack is even more so and would surely remind Iowa voters of how hungry they were for change this time around, while Sam Brownback should take nothing for granted in a rock-ribbed Republican state with a spectacularly popular Democratic Governor and recent short-lister for Vice President.
Any candidate for Senate in Kentucky should be safe, as Mitch McConnell just proved, except that Mr. Bunning was so infirmed by age and incoherence that he would only agree to debate his most recent opponent if he could do so via closed-circuit and know the questions ahead of time. Burr represents a blue-trending state, Bond will face a highly energized state Democratic party with many recent victories under its belt, Thune is yesterday's news in a state exasperated with culture wars, Vitter and Murkowski will face ugly primary challenges, and Isakson may have to run against a man who's run twice for Senate in three weeks and gotten better at it both times.
If the Obama Administration is run with anything like the aplomb and discipline that marked the campaign--and if the Republicans continue to in-fight for much longer about who will lead their charge to reinvent themselves, rather than getting down to the business of how to do so--my expectation is that the Democrats could pick up at least four, and as many as seven, additional seats in the Senate (and almost certainly consolidate their hold on the House). And if that were to happen, the Republican party wouldn't necessarily be dead, but the Lee Atwater culture-war playbook almost certainly would be. And that, friends and neighbors, is a change we can believe in, even if nothing else changes for the better in the meantime. And smart money says that it will, anyway.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
First, the column you might have been forgiven for expecting, redux: The Alaska Senate race will now almost certainly go for Mr. Begich. The remaining votes to be counted in the state are from the most significantly pro-Begich areas, and not even Mr. Stevens' own party wants him to win a protracted after-battle in the courts. With respect to Minnesota, your intrepid columnist might be whistling past the raw count by anticipating a Franken victory, but my memories of logging on to the Florida Secretary of State's website and watching Mr. Gore's numbers creep closer and closer to Bush's in 2000 are just too vivid not to expect a +204 vote pickup for the Democrats in the Gopher state. My guess is that Franken defeats Coleman in both the recount and the courts, but that it will take several more weeks before that prediction is vindicated.
Georgia, in my opinion, will come down to both sides GOTV efforts, though the funnybusiness we've already seen there leaves me even less optimistic than Mr. Martin's deficit in the original contest would suggest, so I'll classify that one as "likely GOP" until convinced otherwise. As I've noted before, nobody who knows anything about these processes really gives a damn about whether the Democrats make it to 60 seats or not; my guess is that they make it to 59 including Lieberman (which, the way things are going, would suggest a final tally of 58, at least for now).
While I'm at it, a word or two about Hillary Clinton becoming Secretary of State: It's a move that makes some sense--for Brack Obama. He takes Clinton out of the Senate, where any difference of legislative opinion or agenda would be amplified by a Jennifer-v-Angelina style of feeding frenzy. Besides, such an appointment would get John Kerry off Obama's back about the same job, which just might be enough political embarrassment to get Mr. Kerry off the rest of our backs, too. As for Clinton playing nice, the last Democrat to occupy the White House certainly had a strong and independently minded woman for his Secretary of State, and the experience of that relationship might have shown the rest of us that competing internal agendas are significantly less embarrassing to a President on the foreign policy side of the ledger.
What Mrs. Clinton gains from the proposition is, as others have written far more eloquently than I, significantly less clear. If the Obama Administration is unpopular in 2012, it wouldn't actually matter because a sitting Secretary of State can't run against her own boss. By 2016, if Obama were unable to rescue his popularity, Clinton would find herself in exactly the same position most recently experienced by Senator McCain: that of convincing an exhausted American electorate that she is different enough from the incumbent to merit a third installment of rule by the same party. If, by contrast, Mr. Obama's popularity is high, Clinton will face the difficult task of either extricating herself from a popular government without seeming overly opportunistic, or campaigning for her boss' job while serving as the sitting Secretary of State--a job not well-suited to justifications for criss-crossing the state of Iowa, given that it's been rather a long time since we last needed a treaty there.
Clinton no doubt believes that a foreign policy appointment would round-out her resume, but the problems with that calculation may well outweigh its benefits: Most people think her neither an expert on, nor particularly interested in, foreign policy, and so--left to scratch their heads about why she would accept such a position, they inevitably come to the conclusion that she's trying to round-out her resume, and thus already running for President in 2016. And given that Mrs. Clinton has just finished a rather protracted round of self-inflicted bruising for her unwillingness to cede the spotlight to Obama, a pre-candidacy for his replacement just isn't the sort of recovery that Mrs. Clinton needs, just at the moment.
One other consideration merits at least a word or two, here: Hillary Rodham Clinton was born on October 27th of 1947, which would make her, on election day of 2016, sixty-nine years old. This would tie her (in years) for the title of oldest person ever to win the Presidency, should she manage to do so. Now, maybe the American public will have forgotten that the "torch has been passed" by the time that distant day rolls around--goodness knows they've done so before--but this time the job of winning back the reins from the young turks will be complicated by the fact that there are numerous other, younger faces in Clinton's own party, many of whom are perceived as significantly more capable at the messy job of reaching bipartisan consensus to actually govern. At all events, hold all your cards, folks: eight years is a long time.
Two years, by contrast, is not.
And while it's typically the case that the party in power loses seats, a quick survey of the races that will be contested in the Senate in 2010 reveals the early makings of what could be yet another long and improbably rocky election night for the Republicans: Of all the Democratic senators who are up for reelection in 2010, only two--Byron Dorgan in North Dakota and Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas--represent states that voted for McCain in the election just concluded, and the Republican Party was unable even to find a candidate to run for Senate from the state of Arkansas this time, leaving Mark Pryor to win unopposed. Dorgan could be perceived as a (lone?) pickup opportunity for the Republicans, but for the small problem that North Dakotans like him--a lot--and by the time the question is put to them, they will have had two years of an Obama Administration's commitment to alternative energy like ethanol, through which to gauge just how committed to the culture wars they still really want to be. The Democrats from states that voted Obama, meanwhile, are nearly all completely safe, barring a totally unforeseen meltdown in Mr. Obama's popularity. Only Ken Salazar in Colorado and Barbara Boxer in California will face truly contested races, and that's assuming that either one finds him- or herself opposite a formidable Republican opponent.
The Republicans, by contrast, will face uphill battles to hold in a variety of races, chief among them in New Hampshire, where Judd Gregg must be looking around this morning and wondering what happened to his cushy victory in 2004. Indeed there was a time--not all that long ago, really--when New Hampshire was considered a relatively safe Republican state (owing to a quirky New England geography which managed to pile most of the Granite state's population into affluent Boston suburbs), but not anymore. Both houses of the state legislature are now controlled by comfortable Democratic majorities, and a Republican hasn't won a statewide race for office there since Mr. Gregg himself.
Arlan Specter has been for a long time now a (mostly) popular Republican Senator in an increasingly blue state, but the Democratic party in Pennsylvania is a well-oiled machine that knows how to win Senate races, and if Governor Ed Rendell were to run against Mr. Specter, the seat would be a very, very difficult one for Mr. Specter to hold. John McCain himself, whose most likely opponent in 2010 is the runaway-popular Governor there, Janet Napolitano, will have to work fast to burnish his independent image if he hopes to cling to what little Washington influence he has left. Mel Martinez of Florida will need a lot more than just a formula consisting of one part anti-Castro saber rattling, two parts security-mom fear mongering, and three parts good fortune to face a weak and ineffectual candidate who could never quite convince even some Democrats that her tenure policies at the University of South Florida hadn't amounted to a goal of harboring terrorists. Martinez, like the others, will face much stiffer opposition this time around, and the Cuban-American vote (as I just saw, first-hand) is far from reliably Republican these days. The state has several competent Democrats to offer, chief among them Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and if Mr. Obama is anything like as popular in south Florida in two years as he is right now, the Martinez campaign will have to sweat every single vote to carry the day, and indeed probably won't.
Ditto George Voinovich in Ohio, a Republican in a state that seems, even a precious few days after the election, a lot less like a battleground than it has in previous cycles. If the electoral fortunes of the two parties don't change significantly on a national scale in the intervening months, Voinovich will face a challenge from a top-tier Ohio Democrat and, I think, probably lose.
And these, you understand, are just the first flight of potential Democratic pickups. There are numerous other Republican Senators--John Thune (SD), Richard Burr (NC), Jim Bunning (KY), David Vitter (LA), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Kit Bond (MO), Johnny Isakson (GA), Sam Brownback (KS), and Chuck Grassly (IA), could all conceivably lose their seats--owing to a variety of anemic popularity at home, the potential for a strong opponent, and a track-record of previous victories on a platform that suddenly seems dated and petty even to some Republicans. Grassly is popular but Tom Vilsack is even more so and would surely remind Iowa voters of how hungry they were for change this time around, while Sam Brownback should take nothing for granted in a rock-ribbed Republican state with a spectacularly popular Democratic Governor and recent short-lister for Vice President.
Any candidate for Senate in Kentucky should be safe, as Mitch McConnell just proved, except that Mr. Bunning was so infirmed by age and incoherence that he would only agree to debate his most recent opponent if he could do so via closed-circuit and know the questions ahead of time. Burr represents a blue-trending state, Bond will face a highly energized state Democratic party with many recent victories under its belt, Thune is yesterday's news in a state exasperated with culture wars, Vitter and Murkowski will face ugly primary challenges, and Isakson may have to run against a man who's run twice for Senate in three weeks and gotten better at it both times.
If the Obama Administration is run with anything like the aplomb and discipline that marked the campaign--and if the Republicans continue to in-fight for much longer about who will lead their charge to reinvent themselves, rather than getting down to the business of how to do so--my expectation is that the Democrats could pick up at least four, and as many as seven, additional seats in the Senate (and almost certainly consolidate their hold on the House). And if that were to happen, the Republican party wouldn't necessarily be dead, but the Lee Atwater culture-war playbook almost certainly would be. And that, friends and neighbors, is a change we can believe in, even if nothing else changes for the better in the meantime. And smart money says that it will, anyway.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Friday, November 14, 2008
So Delicious, It Has to be Fattening
I don't know if you've seen Sarah Palin's three minute press conference at the Republican Governor's Association yesterday, but if you haven't I'd advise against drinking any milk while you do--at least without a hankie.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Begich Now Leads Stevens!!!
It's now Begich 132,196 to Stevens 131,382 -- and even the Republican pollsters in Alaska are predicting that, with the remaining uncounted votes coming mostly from Anchorage, the lead is likely to hold.
I'll be going (semi?) dark for a few days, but the final tally in Begich v. Stevens isn't expected until next Wednesday anyway.
Cheers!
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
I'll be going (semi?) dark for a few days, but the final tally in Begich v. Stevens isn't expected until next Wednesday anyway.
Cheers!
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
How Purple Is It, Rowan?
As I get older (a topic that's been much on my mind of late), I seem to be more and more acutely aware of other peoples' tendency to present as clever an idea that turns out later to be either a parlor trick, a tautology, a conclusion based on false assumptions, or some combination of all three. I believe the clinical term for this heightened sensitivity to pretentiousness is, "turning into a cranky old man," but I'll have to check my clinical literature and get back to you.
I mention all of this because of a new web site, uploaded by a certain Robert Vanderbei of Princeton University, intended to prove to us that we in this country are all really just one big amalgam of cheerfully cohabiting Republicans and Democrats, all of whom are capable of changing our vote on a four-year dime. It's an intrinsically appealing supposition, made even more appealing by the fact that Dr. Vanderbei chooses to make it visually--using an animated GIF of the past twelve Presidential elections, with the national map shaded county-by-county in various gradients of purple to reflect the proportion of votes received by the Republican and the Democrat each time. "Hey," we're supposed to think, "look at how purple the map is!" Then, after a few more of the slides have loaded, we're supposed to think, "Hey, look at how purple it always is!" And indeed to that extent Dr. Vanderbei is inarguably correct: Just how different is the map of 1976 from that of 1980, by this metric? The short answer is, not much.
Unfortunately, the maps in question (while fascinating to look at for any number of reasons) fail rather spectacularly to support Dr. Vanderbei's implicit assertion that the whole country is a mixed aggregate of more-or-less uniformly distributed partisans and independents. I hate to be the person to rain on such a sexy parade, but the maps simply don't suggest what they are implied to suggest, to even the tiniest degree.
To begin with there is the small problem of how our brains process color. I don't know about you, but the mid-point shade of purple (the one that would represent 50% Republican and 50% Democratic support in a particular county) looks an awful lot bluer to me than it looks red. Purple is, in my subjective assessment at least--and probably a lot of other peoples' as well--much more accurately described as a shade of blue than as a shade of red, not least because its position in the color prism is adjacent to blue and at the opposite end from red. For this reason, each four-year cycle's map will appear uniformly bluer than it really is. (And if you hesitate to agree, watch the movie again and make special note of 1980 and 1984, when the Democratic candidates for President were getting clobbered coast-to-coast, but whose maps appear not particularly redder than any of the others in the loop.)
The problem that this color-processing misdirect presents for vetting the underlying argument would be acute enough, but in fact there is a significantly bigger problem with the maps being advocated by Dr. Vanderbei: the counties don't decide the President, the states do. And the reason this is such a fatal flaw in the visual argument is that the dispersion of voters isn't uniform across the various counties in a state. Have a look at the border areas of Texas and ask yourself if you'd have expected to see anything like their shade, anywhere near Texas. It's tempting to presume that we all share in the power of our government, but the bitter reality that Dr. Vanderbei is apparently unwilling to face is that the blue-hued voters along the Rio Grande are routinely disenfranchised by the will of the more densely concentrated Republicans in the redder counties of their state.
The upshot of all of this is, in a plurality-take-all model of electoral votes, the notion that individual counties can tell us anything by their shading is no less misguided than the idea that the popular vote can tell us anything, either. It's just plainly and simply not the way we pick our Presidents--and, accordingly, not a particularly compelling visual. As long as more people vote for George Bush than John Kerry in the state of Florida, the map of Florida can look as purple as it wants to, and the outcome will be the same.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
I mention all of this because of a new web site, uploaded by a certain Robert Vanderbei of Princeton University, intended to prove to us that we in this country are all really just one big amalgam of cheerfully cohabiting Republicans and Democrats, all of whom are capable of changing our vote on a four-year dime. It's an intrinsically appealing supposition, made even more appealing by the fact that Dr. Vanderbei chooses to make it visually--using an animated GIF of the past twelve Presidential elections, with the national map shaded county-by-county in various gradients of purple to reflect the proportion of votes received by the Republican and the Democrat each time. "Hey," we're supposed to think, "look at how purple the map is!" Then, after a few more of the slides have loaded, we're supposed to think, "Hey, look at how purple it always is!" And indeed to that extent Dr. Vanderbei is inarguably correct: Just how different is the map of 1976 from that of 1980, by this metric? The short answer is, not much.
Unfortunately, the maps in question (while fascinating to look at for any number of reasons) fail rather spectacularly to support Dr. Vanderbei's implicit assertion that the whole country is a mixed aggregate of more-or-less uniformly distributed partisans and independents. I hate to be the person to rain on such a sexy parade, but the maps simply don't suggest what they are implied to suggest, to even the tiniest degree.
To begin with there is the small problem of how our brains process color. I don't know about you, but the mid-point shade of purple (the one that would represent 50% Republican and 50% Democratic support in a particular county) looks an awful lot bluer to me than it looks red. Purple is, in my subjective assessment at least--and probably a lot of other peoples' as well--much more accurately described as a shade of blue than as a shade of red, not least because its position in the color prism is adjacent to blue and at the opposite end from red. For this reason, each four-year cycle's map will appear uniformly bluer than it really is. (And if you hesitate to agree, watch the movie again and make special note of 1980 and 1984, when the Democratic candidates for President were getting clobbered coast-to-coast, but whose maps appear not particularly redder than any of the others in the loop.)
The problem that this color-processing misdirect presents for vetting the underlying argument would be acute enough, but in fact there is a significantly bigger problem with the maps being advocated by Dr. Vanderbei: the counties don't decide the President, the states do. And the reason this is such a fatal flaw in the visual argument is that the dispersion of voters isn't uniform across the various counties in a state. Have a look at the border areas of Texas and ask yourself if you'd have expected to see anything like their shade, anywhere near Texas. It's tempting to presume that we all share in the power of our government, but the bitter reality that Dr. Vanderbei is apparently unwilling to face is that the blue-hued voters along the Rio Grande are routinely disenfranchised by the will of the more densely concentrated Republicans in the redder counties of their state.
The upshot of all of this is, in a plurality-take-all model of electoral votes, the notion that individual counties can tell us anything by their shading is no less misguided than the idea that the popular vote can tell us anything, either. It's just plainly and simply not the way we pick our Presidents--and, accordingly, not a particularly compelling visual. As long as more people vote for George Bush than John Kerry in the state of Florida, the map of Florida can look as purple as it wants to, and the outcome will be the same.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Was it a Fifty-State Strategy (or Just the Opposite)?
Now that Barack Obama is President-elect and Howard Dean has announced that he will step aside as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, the floodgate of electoral postmortems has been blown wide open with effusive feel-good's on the subject of the Obama (Dean) philosophy of map-widening. Stories abound on the subject of exactly how Barack Obama won, in many of which space is saved among the references to Bush's low approval ratings and Steve Schmidt's insistence on Sarah Palin and McCain's "fundamentals are strong" gaffe, to pay homage to what was originally Dean's mantra of fifty-state competitiveness for the Democratic party. The reason the Democrats had lost in 2000 and 2004, Dean argued when he took the reins of the DNC, was that they had concentrated all of their resources into trying to consolidate a handful of plum electoral prizes with blue hues--mostly on the two coasts--and then slugging it out to the death over an even smaller assortment of "winnable" purple states like Ohio and/or Florida. With such a narrow playing field, Dean suggested, the Republicans could leverage their funding advantage in those purple states and eke out victory every time.
As brilliant as Mr. Dean (and his more recent counterparts at the top of the Obama campaign) now appear, it is worth considering the extent to which the fortunes of the two parties were shifting during Dean's post-scream administrative ascendancy: In the midterm elections of 2006, when Dean was receiving his first wave of kudos for having expanded the map, most of the television-viewing country was buried up to its neck in nightly news reports about Iraq that were so bloody and so terrible that in many households the youngest children were forbidden from watching the six o'clock evening news. The President's approval ratings had begun tanking in the summer of that year, and by the end of the election cycle the Democrats had overtaken the GOP in fundraising for the first time in memory. Dean's hand-picked candidate for Mayor of Salt Lake City won, but his hand-picked candidate for Senator from Tennessee lost, as did his hand-picked candidate to succeed Joe Lieberman in Connecticut.
Fast forward to 2008 -- particularly the last few days and weeks -- and the mantra from a slothful (if not actually credulous) mainstream press is that Obama won by expanding the map into places like Nevada and Virginia and North Carolina, forcing the Republicans to play out the entire game on their own side of the field. This much is indubitably true: George W. Bush never had to worry about making campaign stops in North Carolina or Virginia and, while he did make stops in Nevada, never really fretted any of the aforementioned states in either one of 2000 or 2004. Indeed the shift in the electoral map from 2004 to 2008 has been so significant and so unmistakable that to title a column such as this one in a contrarian tone is to invite ridicule: How can anyone argue that Obama's expanded map was the secret of his success, when an un-expanded map would've gotten him 252 electoral votes?
But the issue isn't really whether Dean and Obama were smart enough to pull off a widening of the map at all--no, it's rather the opposite: Dean and Obama were too smart to waste resources where they would have done no good, and to that extent they were too smart to miss the downright Machiavellian opportunity that the term "fifty-state strategy" presented for strategic deception of the other side, beginning all the way back in '06: To win by conceding any realistic hope of competitiveness in a small, comparatively dry assortment of states--without sounding weak and defensive in the process.
Try to imagine Barack Obama standing before a lectern, on a chilly evening in late November of 2007, telling a small gathering of pool reporters that he plans never to visit Tennessee a single time in the upcoming general election campaign. Try to imagine him saying out loud that he won't compete for Arkansas, won't share a single stage with Bruce Lunsford in Kentucky, considers West Virginia like a lost cause and Missouri a bonus prize. The press would've portrayed him as a mealy-mouthed stooge who can't muster the courage to give a speech to an unsupportive crowd, and he'd have lost. The key to Democratic victory in Presidential elections, after all, was always supposed to be the interior south. That's how we got Bill Clinton in the first place.
Four years ago, John Kerry's selection of John Edwards was based at least in part on his desire to bring the heart of Dixie into electoral play, and John Kerry lost because it didn't work. It was he, John Kerry, who'd walked the walk of the fifty-state strategy--to the extent that his comparatively meager finances would allow--and because of it he went down in flames. Indeed I still remember the night of the Democratic primary in South Carolina in 2004, when all the reporters were scrambling to make sense of Mr. Edwards' victory, and one lowly reporter had been dispatched to the White House for a comment from the other team. "South Carolina is Bush Country," had come the terse reply from the West Wing. They couldn't have given a mouse's fart whether Kerry or Edwards won the primary there; they didn't have to.
The genius of the Dean/Obama vision was that instead of expanding the playing field, they reversed it--which is far from being the same thing. There was no point, in the end, to competing for Arkansas and Tennessee and Kentucky, if the group of people who voted in this swathe of the country would never embrace a Democratic agenda for the country anyway. Instead the demographics in places like Virginia (with its bursting DC suburbs) and North Carolina (with its exploding bank sector--in both senses of the term), were surgically targeted by a campaign that knew all too well how weak it would make them look to openly invite the support of the gun-rack ownin' Dixiecrats in the uplands. Mr. Obama and Mr. Axlerod and Mr. Plouffe recognized, if Mr. Dean perhaps did not, that Democrats could win by conceding the states that, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, had been their wheelhouse.
As the country moves forward, more states will come demographically into play for the Democrats (though the next census will continue to ameliorate their advantages in the northeast and along the Pacific coast, too). Nevada and Montana and Colorado and New Mexico are all tending blue, not because of any genius move by Howard Dean but for the simple fact of the Californian diaspora, which makes the Yankee diaspora of a generation ago look vague and indecisive by comparison. With the ubiquitousness of modern information technologies, there's simply no longer any good reason to sit for an hour and a half in each direction on the one-ten. (And in case you missed it, Obama positively clobbered McCain in Nevada--by a twelve-point margin that was so far astray from even last-hour polling numbers that it would've been the second-lead in the November 5th news coverage, had the press been paying that kind of studious attention to anything other than the topline numbers from the night before.) Virginia and North Carolina may both be slipping from the Republicans in a relatively structural way, as well, while Indiana is probably a fluke of Mr. Obama's omnipresence in the Chicago media market.
The mistake for the Democrats now would be to convince themselves that the expression "fifty-state strategy" was ever more than a rope-a-dope, and to plow further blood and treasure into the lost causes along the southern Appalachians and across the lower Mississippi into the southern plains. As the last two elections have shown, making a more appealing case in places like South Carolina will not win you the White House, and making a less appealing case there won't lose it for you either. The good news is that, far from deserving less credit than they're getting, the Obama team is more than clever enough to see all of this before any of the rest of us had even noticed.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
As brilliant as Mr. Dean (and his more recent counterparts at the top of the Obama campaign) now appear, it is worth considering the extent to which the fortunes of the two parties were shifting during Dean's post-scream administrative ascendancy: In the midterm elections of 2006, when Dean was receiving his first wave of kudos for having expanded the map, most of the television-viewing country was buried up to its neck in nightly news reports about Iraq that were so bloody and so terrible that in many households the youngest children were forbidden from watching the six o'clock evening news. The President's approval ratings had begun tanking in the summer of that year, and by the end of the election cycle the Democrats had overtaken the GOP in fundraising for the first time in memory. Dean's hand-picked candidate for Mayor of Salt Lake City won, but his hand-picked candidate for Senator from Tennessee lost, as did his hand-picked candidate to succeed Joe Lieberman in Connecticut.
Fast forward to 2008 -- particularly the last few days and weeks -- and the mantra from a slothful (if not actually credulous) mainstream press is that Obama won by expanding the map into places like Nevada and Virginia and North Carolina, forcing the Republicans to play out the entire game on their own side of the field. This much is indubitably true: George W. Bush never had to worry about making campaign stops in North Carolina or Virginia and, while he did make stops in Nevada, never really fretted any of the aforementioned states in either one of 2000 or 2004. Indeed the shift in the electoral map from 2004 to 2008 has been so significant and so unmistakable that to title a column such as this one in a contrarian tone is to invite ridicule: How can anyone argue that Obama's expanded map was the secret of his success, when an un-expanded map would've gotten him 252 electoral votes?
But the issue isn't really whether Dean and Obama were smart enough to pull off a widening of the map at all--no, it's rather the opposite: Dean and Obama were too smart to waste resources where they would have done no good, and to that extent they were too smart to miss the downright Machiavellian opportunity that the term "fifty-state strategy" presented for strategic deception of the other side, beginning all the way back in '06: To win by conceding any realistic hope of competitiveness in a small, comparatively dry assortment of states--without sounding weak and defensive in the process.
Try to imagine Barack Obama standing before a lectern, on a chilly evening in late November of 2007, telling a small gathering of pool reporters that he plans never to visit Tennessee a single time in the upcoming general election campaign. Try to imagine him saying out loud that he won't compete for Arkansas, won't share a single stage with Bruce Lunsford in Kentucky, considers West Virginia like a lost cause and Missouri a bonus prize. The press would've portrayed him as a mealy-mouthed stooge who can't muster the courage to give a speech to an unsupportive crowd, and he'd have lost. The key to Democratic victory in Presidential elections, after all, was always supposed to be the interior south. That's how we got Bill Clinton in the first place.
Four years ago, John Kerry's selection of John Edwards was based at least in part on his desire to bring the heart of Dixie into electoral play, and John Kerry lost because it didn't work. It was he, John Kerry, who'd walked the walk of the fifty-state strategy--to the extent that his comparatively meager finances would allow--and because of it he went down in flames. Indeed I still remember the night of the Democratic primary in South Carolina in 2004, when all the reporters were scrambling to make sense of Mr. Edwards' victory, and one lowly reporter had been dispatched to the White House for a comment from the other team. "South Carolina is Bush Country," had come the terse reply from the West Wing. They couldn't have given a mouse's fart whether Kerry or Edwards won the primary there; they didn't have to.
The genius of the Dean/Obama vision was that instead of expanding the playing field, they reversed it--which is far from being the same thing. There was no point, in the end, to competing for Arkansas and Tennessee and Kentucky, if the group of people who voted in this swathe of the country would never embrace a Democratic agenda for the country anyway. Instead the demographics in places like Virginia (with its bursting DC suburbs) and North Carolina (with its exploding bank sector--in both senses of the term), were surgically targeted by a campaign that knew all too well how weak it would make them look to openly invite the support of the gun-rack ownin' Dixiecrats in the uplands. Mr. Obama and Mr. Axlerod and Mr. Plouffe recognized, if Mr. Dean perhaps did not, that Democrats could win by conceding the states that, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, had been their wheelhouse.
As the country moves forward, more states will come demographically into play for the Democrats (though the next census will continue to ameliorate their advantages in the northeast and along the Pacific coast, too). Nevada and Montana and Colorado and New Mexico are all tending blue, not because of any genius move by Howard Dean but for the simple fact of the Californian diaspora, which makes the Yankee diaspora of a generation ago look vague and indecisive by comparison. With the ubiquitousness of modern information technologies, there's simply no longer any good reason to sit for an hour and a half in each direction on the one-ten. (And in case you missed it, Obama positively clobbered McCain in Nevada--by a twelve-point margin that was so far astray from even last-hour polling numbers that it would've been the second-lead in the November 5th news coverage, had the press been paying that kind of studious attention to anything other than the topline numbers from the night before.) Virginia and North Carolina may both be slipping from the Republicans in a relatively structural way, as well, while Indiana is probably a fluke of Mr. Obama's omnipresence in the Chicago media market.
The mistake for the Democrats now would be to convince themselves that the expression "fifty-state strategy" was ever more than a rope-a-dope, and to plow further blood and treasure into the lost causes along the southern Appalachians and across the lower Mississippi into the southern plains. As the last two elections have shown, making a more appealing case in places like South Carolina will not win you the White House, and making a less appealing case there won't lose it for you either. The good news is that, far from deserving less credit than they're getting, the Obama team is more than clever enough to see all of this before any of the rest of us had even noticed.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Monday, November 10, 2008
In the Senate, A Week Without End
As the sun set this evening on the first full week of the Obama era in the United States, three individuals who can't (yet) share in the jubilation are Jim Martin, Al Franken, and Mark Begich--though a more sober columnist than I would have to make at least a passing reference to the differing chances they each face in ever feeling as though they can. In Georgia, where electoral funny business still seems the most plausible explanation for President-elect Obama's poor relative showing on election day, Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss nearly reached the 50% threshold the first go 'round against Democratic challenger Jim Martin, and will now enjoy the undiluted attentions of what's left of the Republican all-stars in campaigning for a runoff. All of which has led one notable pundit to recall a certain prominent Republican's scathing criticism of Chambliss' 2002 campaign:
...And who said this, exactly? The same John McCain who is now scheduled to speak on Senator Chambliss' behalf, during the runoff. And just for the record, you know that you're clinging irrationally to self-destructive behavior patterns when you start getting shown-up in the graciousness department by George W. Bush. At all events, the smart money is on Chambliss and his Republican benefactors in the runoff, since it's a virtual certainty that the cool-headed Obama will resist the urge to weaken himself by wading into a Senate fight in Georgia.
Things are more encouraging in Alaska, depending a lot on how one looks at it. The good news is that about 80,000 votes have still not been counted in the state--classified as either "early," "absentee" or "questionable"--and that it is likely (based on what we know about the geography of these ballots) that a full accounting for them would more than negate Stevens' roughly 3,000-vote lead. The bad news is that if these ballots haven't yet been counted, the odds of them ever being counted must surely get slimmer every day that the story of the election recedes further and further from the collective media consciousness. Suffice it to say, if Begich becomes the next Senator from Alaska, it won't be because the rest of us sat back and allowed the State of Alaska's elections officials to decide how seriously to take the remaining canvass.
Paradoxically, the most encouraging of the three unresolved Senate races is also the only one in which a recount is the only thing standing between the good guys and defeat: Minnesota. Here the Republican incumbent Norm Coleman continues to lead, though his lead is shrinking almost by the hour and a significant pool of undervotes for the Senate race in blue-leaning precincts have led to speculation that Franken will surpass Coleman when the undervotes have been resolved. The path to a continued sense of productive engagement in all three of these races is to press the media--particularly, this time, the largest and most respected media sources within each of these three states--to continue digging into the question of how (if not actually whether) the remaining votes in each state have been counted. In Minnesota this journalistic standard-bearer would be the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. In Georgia it would be the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and in Alaksa it would be the Anchorage Daily News.
Many left-leaning columnists wasted no time admonishing their readers that the lea of Obama's historic victory was no shelter from the job of keeping vigilant and fighting for every inch of ground in the fight to win a progressive agenda for the country. Some even began suggesting that election night was a beginning, rather than an end. They may not have realized, in committing such sentiments to writing, that the notion of a beginning and not an end would apply on the evening of November 4th to the outcome of the election itself.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
"I'd never seen anything like that ad. Putting pictures of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden next to the picture of a man who left three limbs on the battlefield -- it's worse than disgraceful. It's reprehensible."
...And who said this, exactly? The same John McCain who is now scheduled to speak on Senator Chambliss' behalf, during the runoff. And just for the record, you know that you're clinging irrationally to self-destructive behavior patterns when you start getting shown-up in the graciousness department by George W. Bush. At all events, the smart money is on Chambliss and his Republican benefactors in the runoff, since it's a virtual certainty that the cool-headed Obama will resist the urge to weaken himself by wading into a Senate fight in Georgia.
Things are more encouraging in Alaska, depending a lot on how one looks at it. The good news is that about 80,000 votes have still not been counted in the state--classified as either "early," "absentee" or "questionable"--and that it is likely (based on what we know about the geography of these ballots) that a full accounting for them would more than negate Stevens' roughly 3,000-vote lead. The bad news is that if these ballots haven't yet been counted, the odds of them ever being counted must surely get slimmer every day that the story of the election recedes further and further from the collective media consciousness. Suffice it to say, if Begich becomes the next Senator from Alaska, it won't be because the rest of us sat back and allowed the State of Alaska's elections officials to decide how seriously to take the remaining canvass.
Paradoxically, the most encouraging of the three unresolved Senate races is also the only one in which a recount is the only thing standing between the good guys and defeat: Minnesota. Here the Republican incumbent Norm Coleman continues to lead, though his lead is shrinking almost by the hour and a significant pool of undervotes for the Senate race in blue-leaning precincts have led to speculation that Franken will surpass Coleman when the undervotes have been resolved. The path to a continued sense of productive engagement in all three of these races is to press the media--particularly, this time, the largest and most respected media sources within each of these three states--to continue digging into the question of how (if not actually whether) the remaining votes in each state have been counted. In Minnesota this journalistic standard-bearer would be the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. In Georgia it would be the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and in Alaksa it would be the Anchorage Daily News.
Many left-leaning columnists wasted no time admonishing their readers that the lea of Obama's historic victory was no shelter from the job of keeping vigilant and fighting for every inch of ground in the fight to win a progressive agenda for the country. Some even began suggesting that election night was a beginning, rather than an end. They may not have realized, in committing such sentiments to writing, that the notion of a beginning and not an end would apply on the evening of November 4th to the outcome of the election itself.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
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