The late Mary Travers once sang a song called "Where Have All the Flowers Gone? It was a lamentation about the human cost of war and it was a popular protest song during the Vietnam era. Well it seems to me that someone could write a song, or at least ask the same question, about Libertarians. Specifically, where have all the Libertarians gone?
In the din and roar surrounding politics in America today much is made of the importance of Libertarian thinking. Some have pointed out its importance to the Tea Party Movement: "More recently, the Libertarian theme of the "tea party" began with Republican Congressman Ron Paul supporters as a fund raising event during the 2008 presidential primaries to emphasize Paul's fiscal conservatism, which laid the groundwork for the modern-day Tea Party movement." That said it's interesting to consider the following two questions: First, if Libertarian ideas are so compelling, how come Libertarians garner such a small portion of actual votes during major electoral campaigns? Secondly, if Libertarians command such low voting totals, how is it that there is such a disproportionate number of Libertarian organizations and who is putting up the money to support them?
During the 2008 election cycle, America's Libertarian's had a clear choice among those vying for the Republican nomination for president. Ron Paul was an outspoken Libertarian and had been so for many years. Paul's Libertarian bona fides were well established, widely known and beyond question. But Paul wasn't even remotely competitive within the G.O.P.'s contest for candidate in the 2008 presidential election cycle. Yet even though Paul was eliminated from the race, Libertarians still had a choice in the person of Bob Barr, the former Republican Congressman of Georgia, and the Libertarian Party's presidential pick for 2008. The irony of it all is that even though they still had a horse in the race, in an election that offered four different choices for president, the Libertarian candidate finished dead last with a paltry 523,686 votes or 0.4% of the total votes cast in 2008. With the aforementioned facts in hand, we can only conclude that Libertarians either do not vote, fail to vote for their own candidates or that there aren't very many of them in existence after all.
Well, if it's hard to discern the actual existence of Libertarians in any precise number, then how is it we have over sixty five Libertarian organizations afloat in the body politic according to Wikipedia? The Stason Organization lists 11 "Major Libertarian Organizations" and 33 "Think Tanks". But this begs the question: Why so many organizations for just over a half of a million voters, or less than one half of one percent of the voting public? It seems a bit fishy to me that we have all of these "Libertarian" organizations in a country that seems to have so few Libertarians. If we have so few Libertarians, then where does the cash that fuels all of these "Libertarian" organizations come from? After all it would be pretty hard to fund this large number of organizations out of the pockets of just 0.4% of the voting public. Could it be that these "Libertarian" organizations are propped up by those with a specific agenda and deep pockets or do these 523,686 voters just all happen to be billionaires? So can someone tell me where have all the Libertarians gone, long time passing?
According to a CNN poll, 27% of self-identified gay voters supported John McCain in the last presidential election, the highest such figure ever recorded for a GOP candidate. In actuality, the number is likely higher, given that there are presumably many gay people who do not divulge their sexuality to pollsters.
While there are indeed presumably many gay people who do not divulge their sexuality to pollsters, I'm not sure that it's fair to assume that over 27% of those who lie about their orientation when responding to a pollster are McCain voters. How does he know that? The raw numbers- not percentages- would certainly be higher if people did not lie about their orientation. But they would also be higher for Obama, too. If everyone told the truth about their orientation, it's hard to be certain about what percentage would end up being for Obama vs. McCain. Further, the numbers are based on exit polling, which is only done in certain states and only to a small percentage of voters. Extrapolating that to the LGBT universe is a bit of a stretch for me.
Although simplistic given that there are independents, etc., it becomes an interesting discussion over the ideology of closeted people (at least, those who stay in the closet when responding to pollsters). While it's conventional wisdom that there are a lot of closeted gay Republicans, I don't see why there couldn't also be a lot of closeted Democrats. It depends on where they live, workplace, etc. as well.
On election night, 2008, when the word went out that Barack Obama had been declared the winner, there was quite literally dancing in the streets. All over America, people hungry for change and fed up with eight years of George Bush running our country into the ditch were overjoyed that hope had been chosen over fear of more of the same. Young people, black people, immigrants, and all kinds of Americans who wanted a new day were out in the streets dancing and celebrating. A friend visiting from Sweden's Social Democratic Party was out on U Street in DC as throngs danced their butts off, weeping with pure joy, and he turned to a friend and said, "Are all American elections like this?" The answer is a big no; election night 2008 was different because it felt like change was coming.
A couple million people showed up for the inauguration, shattering all previous records. In early 2009, one of DC's big progressive groups, the Campaign for America's Future, announced their annual conference, for years entitled Take Back America, was changing its name (to America's Future Now) because, well, America had been taken back from the right wingers who had been governing it. I had just written a book (The Progressive Revolution: How The Best In America Came To Be) about how progressives had every so often in our country's history been able to create a big change moment, and I was on my book tour telling audiences that we had a chance at creating another one.
A year later, it all feels a lot different, doesn't it? A version of health care reform is still alive, but struggling mightily and so weakened by concessions to insurers and drug companies that there's a palpable sense of disappointment by the progressives who have been fighting for it. Climate change legislation is stalled in the Senate after barely getting through the House in highly compromised fashion. There's been no action on labor law reform. The Obama administration has deported more undocumented immigrants than Bush did in 2008, and there's still no movement on long promised immigration reform. The war in Afghanistan has been escalated twice by President Obama. Almost 20% of Americans are unemployed or under-employed. Financial reform is on the verge of being watered down to almost nothing, and the big banks on Wall Street are still running roughshod over the rest of us- economically and politically.
It's time for a different kind of dancing (and marching and chanting and raising hell) in the streets - the kind where regular folks tell the politicians and the special interests we aren't going to sit around let them ruin our country.
More on that, and two event announcements, in the extended entry.
Check out this video of AMERICABlog's Joe Sudbay at our Maine fundraiser on Saturday night. Joe's a Maine native, and he just got back from the state this past week. He hits on some of the latest details from on the ground.
The part that really gets me is that last year, while we were winning across-the-board in Congress and Obama won the White House, we lost California. It was a bittersweet victory. When someone at the party asks Joe "why does this matter to the other 49 states", Joe rightly replies, "because we've never won one." He's right. We have to break that streak, and we have to do it in Maine.
I remember in California, a lot of celebrities woke up at the very last minute to the notion that we might lose. They even held this big swanky fundraiser at Ron Burkle's mansion less than two weeks, where Melissa Etheridge got up on stage and offered to play any song for a $50,000 donation. There was an awkward silence for quite some time when no one volunteered. It was kind of sad that it had come to that.
That's why giving before October 15th- the day early in-person voting starts and the campaign finance deadline occurs- is so critical. So the campaign, unlike Prop 8, has the resources it needs when it needs them.
Click helow to chip in and take us across the finish line. We're at just $1,866 on the OpenLeft/Better Dems page. Let's take it well past $2K today.
It is a truism in politics that there are more swing voters in the middle of the electorate--self-identified moderates and Independents--than at the edges. However, exit polls indicates that is not necessarily the case. In fact, from 2004 to 2008, Democrats appear to have gained more votes from self-identified liberals than from any other ideological group.
In 2004, according to exit polls, 17.85% of the electorate were self-identified liberals who voted for Kerry
In 2008, according to exit polls, 19.58% of the electorate were self-identified liberals who voted for Obama.
From 2004 to 2008, exit polls estimate that the Democratic Presidential nominee improved his overall vote percentage by 1.73% entirely through self-identified liberals.
By way of comparison:
In 2004, according to exit polls, 24.84% of the electorate were self-identified moderates who voted for Kerry.
In 2008, according to exit polls, 26.40% of the electorate were self-identified moderates who voted for Obama.
From 2004 to 2008, the Democratic Presidential nominee improved his overall vote percentage by 1.56% entirely among self-identified moderates.
So, according to exit polls, Democrats actually gained more from 2004 to 2008 among self-identified liberals than among self-identified moderates. Conservatives were not far behind, either:
In 2004, according to exit polls, 5.44% of the electorate were self-identified conservatives who voted for Kerry.
In 2008, according to exit polls, 6.80% of the electorate were self-identified conservatives who voted for Obama.
From 2004 to 2008, the Democratic Presidential nominee improved his overall vote percentage by 1.36% entirely among self-identified conservatives.
Swing voters from 2004 to 2008 were spread fairly evenly across the ideological spectrum, with liberals, moderates and conservatives all making up significant portions. Although it is within the margin for rounding error, exit polling actually suggests that liberals were the largest swing voting block of all.
If elected officials primarily consider themselves accountable to voters who can potentially change their voting habits, and thus change the results of elections, it would be unwise to focus solely on the middle of the electorate. Roughly one-third of the swing voters that put Democrats in office are liberals, and as such Democrats need to keep those voters happy. Further, even apart from votes, the partisan and ideological base drives resources--donations, volunteers, positive messaging to family, friends and co-workers--which can in turn be used to acquire votes from non-base groups.
As such, while some Democrats may think there are no repercussions for using the partisan and ideological base as either a foil or a corner in a triangulation scheme, there are good reasons to think that that dissing the base is an extremely dangerous electoral strategy. While the 2000 election should have already made this obvious, these numbers further show the liberal vote is not static. The liberal vote can change in ways that can result in Democrats winning, or losing, elections.
Last October, Representative Michele "Crazy as Steve King" Bachmann (MN-06) disgraced herself on "Hardball" and sparked a ridiculously successful fundraising drive for her Democratic opponent, El Tinklenberg. I was impressed by the enthusiasm and kicked in a few bucks for Tinklenberg myself, but I was dismayed to see bloggers continue to help him raise money even after he'd raised more than $750,000 and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had promised to spend an additional $1 million in his district. Within a few days of Bachmann's notorious comments, Tinklenberg had more money than he needed to run a solid media and GOTV campaign during the final two weeks before the election.
A fellow Iowa blogger sent me this piece from CQ Politics about how Tinklenberg's campaign committee was the largest donor to the DCCC in March, giving a total of $250,000:
You may recall that his Republican opponent was Rep. Michele Bachmann, whose mid-October comment that Obama "may have anti-American views" angered Democrats nationwide and spawned an avalanche of contributions to Tinklenberg in the waning days of a campaign that Bachmann won by 46 percent to 43 percent, with a third-party candidate taking 10 percent.
Apparently the money was coming in too fast for Tinklenberg to spend completely: he raised $3 million for his campaign, of which $1.9 million came in after October 15, and had $453,000 in leftover campaign funds at the end of 2008 and $184,000 at the end of March.
I couldn't quite turn any of these numbers into an article of their own, but they still deserve more attention:
According to the most recent poll on the subject, 81% of the country believes that people who are openly homosexual should be allowed to serve in the military. This is higher than the percentage of Americans who self-identify as Christian, which has dropped to 77%. It is kind of surprising that allowing homosexuals to openly serve in the military is now a more commonly held belief than the divinity of Jesus.
According to new data released by the Cook Political Report, only one congressional district in the country voted for John Kerry and John McCain: the Pennsylvania 12th, represented by John Murtha. Either that district just really likes people named "John," or perhaps Western Pennsylvania isn't as representative of the country as we were told last year during the Pennsylvania primary.
Over the past thirty years, real income for the top 1% of all households has increased 3-4 times over, which dwarfs the meager gains by the bottom 80%:
This graph is reflective of many things, including who controls governmental policy.
Republicans have become even less popular, if you can believe it. According to the most recent polls from CBS, Fox, NBC and CNN, the percentage of Americans who view the Republican Party as "favorable," has declined by at least 4% since late October. Outside of these four, no other polling firm with October trendlines has taken a "favorable / unfavorable" poll of the Republican Party in 2009.
Like the end of a Saturday Night Live sketch, it is difficult to figure out a way to end this article.
Two days, ago, I compared the average rate of error from final predictions to final election results for Pollster.com, fivethirtyeight.com, and my own predictions. Looking at 65 elections on November 4th, 2008, where all three sites made public final predictions / estimates, it turned out that Pollster.com and fivethirtyeight.com were equally accurate, and that I lagged about 8-10% behind.
While I was a bit further behind, I still wanted to see where I was less accurate. It turns out that when blowouts (final margin over 20%) and rarely polled elections (only one poll in the final eight days) are removed, my simple, rudimentary methodology was actually the equal of Pollster and 538. As long as there were at least two polls in the final eight days, simple poll averaging was just as good at predicting election outcomes as any other methodology around. Data in the extended entry.
Now that all of the counting is finally done for the 2008 elections, it is possible to compare how different election forecasters fared. The three I have long been most interested in comparing are:
My method, which takes the simple mean of all non-campaign funded, telephone polls that were conducted entirely within the final eight days of a campaign. My rationale for this method is described here: No Special Sauce Needed For Electoral Projections. This is an intentionally rudimentary "election forecasting for dummies" method that anyone can reproduce.
Pollster.com, which uses all polls ever conducted in a state, and creates a regression line based on those polls. This is the ultimate "don't cherry pick polls and don't argue with polls" method. It was developed by a professional pollster and a political scientist, and is explained here.
Fivethirtyeight.com, whose complicated methodology is essentially the opposite of Pollster.com's: adjust every poll based on demographics, previous house effects, and previous error rate.
How did these three distinct prediction methods fare against each other? Results in the extended entry.
This is a lot more expensive than it was two years ago. In 2006, when I ran roughly 45 of these ads in some key congressional districts order to monitor the poorly named Googlebomb the Elections campaign, there were more twice as many impressions and clicks for only about 15% the cost. So, it appears that 2006 might have been the "golden age" for individual grassroots activists to create in campaigns such as these. From now on, the increasing cost of these campaigns will probably force individual activists to focus on individual campaigns, and not throw a net as large as this.
Despite the expense, it was still cost-effective. It is hard for me to imagine that $3,300 of television ads would have been seen by 305,000 people, and resulted in 2,104 taking the initiative to find out more information on the content of the ad. This was probably even more cost effective than phonebanking or canvassing (although Natasha and I did canvass our neighborhood, too). How long would it have taken us to get on the phone or knock on the door of 2,104 people who were receptive to our message and wanted to hear more? I seriously doubt we could have pulled that off from Labor Day through Election Day, even if we made it our full-time jobs.
House campaigns are still largely untapped. The vast majority of the cost of this campaign came from the three Senate campaigns--Chambliss, Coleman and Gordon--plus the two McCain ads. The House campaigns (the other six listed here), overall, were less expensive per click and had a higher click-through rate. In the future, a focus on the House might be more appropriate for the budget-activist.
All in all, I am pretty happy with how this went. How did your campaigns go?
The Obama campaign is organizing "Change is Coming" house parties around the country next weekend to try and help decide what to do with its large, grassroots network in the future. Already, Tom Daschle is holding conference calls with over 1,000 campaign activists who listed health care as their top priority. For more information, Tech President has been the place to be for discussions on the future of the "Obama movement."
Obama's lead grows to 52.92%--45.71% on wikipedia, and 52.63%--45.42% if you include the undervotes. Another 400,000 or so votes will be added to the wikipedia total before all is said and done, possibly pushing Obama's lead out to 7.3%.
At the wishes of the Republican candidate, the entirely Republican Ohio Supreme court tosses 1,000 ballots in the OH-15 campaign. The remaining votes--about 14,000, I believe--will take between 10 to 16 days to count. Republican Stivers leads by 594 votes, but the uncounted votes come from areas where Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy won by 5%. Flip a coin--it is going to be very, very close.
The hand recount is over in the Minnesota Senate campaign. Franken claims a 4 vote lead in the recount, assuming that the lost ballots are found, and the opinions of local elections officials on challenged ballots are upheld. The next phase of the recount will be the state canvassing board individually examining the 5,400 challenged ballots, starting on December 16th.
(Side note: Given the way all of these recounts are going, I'm pretty sure that if McCain had won Indiana, I would have won the Daily Kos election contest. Assuming Democratic victories in OH-15, LA-04 and MN-Sen, my total error would have been only 4. Damn you, Indiana! If you hadn't turned blue, I'd have a Mac Book. :)
Scholars and Rouges takes a preliminary look at the reapportionment and redistricting that will follow the 2010 census and elections. The outlook is actually fairly pessimistic for Democrats. If I am reading the estimates correctly, if the 2008 election were held according to likely 2012 Electoral Vote numbers, Obama's 365-173 victory would be reduced to 351-187. As far as House redistricting goes, much will rest on state legislators. The real prize is Texas, which will add four new House seats next decade.
Although it is hard to believe, votes are still being counted for the 2008 presidential election. Obama's lead has reached 7.01% according to wikipedia, 52.81%--45.80%. However, both fivethirtyeight.com and the United States Election Project indicate that wikipedia is currently behind on their count by several hundred thousand votes. In fact, the United States Election Project shows wikipedia behind by over 1.3 million votes, fully 1% of the total, so Obama's margin of victory will continue to increase.
Here are some fun facts and figures:
Large Obama mandate: Obama received votes from the second highest percentage of the American population ever. With another million or so votes to count, currently 22.62% of the population voted for Obama. The all-time leader was Reagan in 1984, when he received the vote of 23.09% of the population. With up to another million votes to be added, Obama might still pass that total.
Huge turnout: Despite losing by over 7.00%, McCain actually didn't perform that badly. For example, he actually received more votes than John Kerry, and will probably pass the 60,000,000 threshold. In this light, Obama succeeded by pulling off the holy grail of Democratic election strategies: turning out huge numbers of unlikely voters. When the final totals are made, there will have been 26 million more votes in 2008 than 2000. That increase is in excess of 100% of the nation's population increase during the last eight years. Overall, more than 131 million people voted, or 61.6% of the voting eligible population. All in all, probably about 63% of the voting eligible population attempted to vote, considering spoiled ballots. That is the highest voter turnout since the voting age was lowered to 18.
National polls were pretty darn accurate: Assuming that Obama will win by 7.1%, the Pollster.com regression line of all national polls was only off by only 0.5%. The same can be said for the simple mean of national polls performed by Real Clear Politics. The lesson here is that when there are a high number of public polls, election forecasters are not very useful. Even a schmo like me can just conduct a simple mean of all the polls, and come pretty close to the final result. That old myth that combining different polls will not produce accurate results--because different polls have different methodologies--is just wrong. Clearly, you can combine polls to produce more accurate results.
Repudiation of 1994 "revolution": If Democrats win both of the outstanding House seats, and squeak out one of the remaining Senate seats, then there will be exactly the same number of Democrats in the House and Senate combined--316--as there were in 1993-1994 (note: this number includes Sanders as a Democrat on both occasions, and Lieberman as a Democrat on this occasion).So, this is effectively a repudiation of the 1994 Republican "revolution," although the location of Democrats did shift away from the south and toward the rest of the country.
Cool stuff. Although, given how long it takes to count these votes, it is a relief that the election wasn't closer. Given what a mess our election system is, I can only imagine what a disaster it would be if two candidates were separated by less than 1%.
Four year ago, as we Democrats were on the short end of a Republican trifecta, we had to engage in soul-searching similar to what Republicans face now. The conclusion Democrats arrived at was that our problems were mainly non-ideological and related to strategy and infrastructure. This conclusion could be seen with the DNC's election of Howard Dean on a fifty-state strategy platform, in the papers produced by NDN with their New Politics Institute, and also in the netroots as perhaps best exemplified with Crashing the Gate. The Democratic soul-searching conclusion of late 2004 and early 2005 was not that our ideas were either wrong or unpopular, but rather that we faced organizing and structural deficiencies that allowed Republicans to eke out 50% +1 victories through fundraising, media, grassroots activist, message packaging, and strategic resource deployment advantages.
Republicans seem to be reaching similar conclusions now. The post-election Pew survey shows they think they should move in a more conservative direction by a large 60%-35% margin. Further, according to Democracy Corps, two-thirds of Republicans think that McCain and their congressional candidates lost because of the media, and the same number think that McCain wasn't aggressive enough in his attacks on Obama. (This latter conclusion strikes me as particularly difficult to justify, given that McCain and the RNC went 100% negative with paid media during the final five weeks of the campaign.) Further, in their description of how to rebuild the Republican Party, The Next Right seems to be repeating what Democratic netroots activists said back in 2004: run a fifty-state strategy and build up media and grassroots infrastructure. The over-riding Republican conclusion seems to be not that their ideas are wrong or unpopular, but that they need to improve their organizing, get more aggressive with Democrats, become more conservative, and destroy the mainstream media.
So, Republicans seem to be reaching the same conclusions Democrats did four years ago: we are neither wrong nor unpopular, simply out-organized, out-strategized, and facing structural deficits. While the Democratic conclusion was quickly proven correct as Bush's approval rating dropped below 50% and then suffered a long, slow decline over the next four years, the Republican conclusion seems largely untenable. This is because, as I describe in the extended entry, the Republican deficit is much larger than the one Democrats faced four years ago. Further, it arose out of a more damaging source: Republicans have become highly unpopular in 2008 because of how they governed, while Democrats were unpopular four years ago because of their image.
Since the election, quite a few comments on Open Left have been some variation on the following:
Can't we just be happy and enjoy this victory for a while?
In another episode of simple answers to simple questions, let me field this one: No.
After eight long years of waiting, this is our chance to pass good legislation. And no, we can't wait a little while longer to ask for it. I have waited eight years to ask for it, and I don't want to wait any longer We have to ask now. I have no intention of just running oppositional campaigns during this administration, but I also have no intention of just supporting Obama's legislative priorities without pursuing others in which I am interested. Nothing you want will pass unless you first ask for it, and then try for it. And this, after eight years of waiting, is our first chance to do so. As our first chance presents itself, there are people seriously telling us to keep waiting? What the frak ever. I ain't waiting anymore.
I gotta say, even though I know I am going to be frustrated and disappointed in the Democratic trifecta at least some, and possibly even most, of the time these coming two years, I really like looking at this map:
And I like looking over the top of these maps, and seeing that we won over 52% of the vote for the second election in a row (we won over 52% in the House this year, too). In fact, 2006 and 2008 were the highest election totals for any party in any national election since 1990.
I have been looking at political maps since I was 13 years old back in 1987. The amps that were recent back then, just like the maps that were recent before this election, helped reinforce a sinking notion that most of the country just disagreed with you. Now that I can compare the feelings, it easily feels a lot better to think that most of the country agrees with you.
Winning is pretty cool. No matter what else happens, this feels good.
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