About a third of the entire construction crane capacity in North America is between Bellevue and Seattle.
I've been traveling around over the past few days throughout the unbelievably beautiful and ridiculously wet Northwest, and I'm struck by the commitment of this new generation of organizers, both on the Obama campaign and the campaigns of both Darcy Burner and Jeff Merkley. Merkley's race in particular has really heated up in the last few weeks, concurrently with the financial meltdown. They are progressive, they work extremely hard, and they are dedicated to a new way of doing politics. It's fascinating and inspiring.
Both Washington and Oregon are going for Obama, and the big question is whether there will be a substantial undervote. How many Obama-Reichert voters or Obama-Smith voters are there? How can you pull them over to go for the whole Democratic ticket?
Those are some of the questions I'm asking. Still, I'm struck by a particular piece from this wonderful profile of Nate Silver (of FiveThirtyEight). Nearly all electoral forecasters used polls in the primaries to make predictions, what Silver did was use straight demographics and predict forward how people would vote based on their demographic identity. His model worked.
One interesting consequence of this theory about voting behavior is that much of politics is simply out of the hands of campaigns. You can't persuade someone to be black or a woman or a young person, and you can't make a strategic call to have the financial system melt down. You can register voters, handle policy ideas, communicate clearly or badly, but much of 'the political strategy' is just about being ready when an opportunity emerges. Political strategists should be focused on long-term demographic impacts of policy, voter registration, and pulling various levers of the economy. That's what the right does; Fed chairs love raising rates before elections when Democrats are the incumbents, but put the pedal to the metal when it's a Republican. Bush actually withheld military spending in 2007 and juiced it in 2008.
A month and a half ago, Merkley probably wasn't going to win, the conventional wisdom has changed 180 degrees. The difference? The financial crisis. I know activists complain when a campaign is behind in the polls, talk about how the energy just isn't there, or argue that the candidate is bad or doesn't fit with the district. Obviously, as I'm sitting in Bellevue right now in WA-08, one of the only races that has not seen the Democratic surge resonant all over the country, this is weighing on my mind. But realize that almost everything that happens in the overall environment is uncontrollable, and how skilled a candidate is may not come in to play. Obama wasn't any more skilled a six weeks ago than he is today, McCain hasn't lost capacity. The world simply changed.
Seattle, Portland, and North Carolina are doing really well economically because high tech sectors have located sustainable energy industries here. In fact, Bellevue isn't so much a city right now as it is a massive large construction project. There's no controlling for that. All we can do as activists is register voters, volunteer, give money, and work to tell the truth as we see it. Will any of our candidates win? Yes, of course. But let's fear, not losing, but hubris. Given an opportunity to govern, Democrats must govern well, or else this could shift as quickly as it has in the last six weeks.
As for Darcy, I think she's going to win, because ultimately this financial crisis is going to scare people here and a lot of the Obama voters are probably going to pull the lever for Darhercy. How can I be sure? Well, I can't. As Pink Martini performed (really really well, I might add) last night at a Merkley event, Que sera, sera.
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