Today, the Obama truth is revealed. Change has come in the form of familiarity. Some American's are embarrassed. Others embrace what, when presented by the previous Administration, they rejected. Apathy helps most Americans to avoid a sense of shame. It was announced; Obama defends Bush-era secrets. This Administration has gone further to establish government sovereignty. As a nation, the Obama White House tells citizens, our country will be better protected if details about the surveillance program are considered "Top Secret - Sensitive Compartmented Information."
Today Joe Biden ends his 36-year tenure in the U.S. Senate. While he now probably seems well-suited for the job of "backup President" not many in the progressive blogosphere would have predicted or advocated Biden as VP just a year ago. In fact, if you told me 18 months ago that Barack Obama would be elected President I would have said "good" and been unsurprised. But if you told me that Joe Biden would be Vice President I would have said "Wow!"
In the spring of 2008 there were very few pushing Biden as VP. In order to reinforce Obama's central message of "change" Chris Bowers eliminated as best candidates any who supported the invasion of Iraq including Joe Biden. Others who advocated a "balancing" approach usually failed to mention Biden as well. I heard a lot of advocacy for Powell, Hagel and Jim Webb. Over at Daily Kos Webb trounced Biden in a head-to-head match-up.
In a poll of Open Left readers in June, Biden finished as the 8th "most acceptable" candidate. Bowers in July on Biden as VP: "Yeah, that's real change." For me, it seemed odd that Obama would select as his running mate the guy who's announcement for President is remembered only because he called Obama fresh, clean and articulate.
There were some commenters who advocated Biden, such as Shul who was pushing for Biden in early June:
I can't even properly express how giddy I get just thinking about the possibility of Biden as the VP. I have no doubt that he would get up every single day and just hope that he got the call to go out and hammer McCain as hard as possible.
It seems the general voting public had similar views. MSNBC and Chuck Todd, using an NCAA-style bracket of 32 Democratic candidates for Vice President and an online vote, had Joe Biden emerge as the winner, beating Hillary Clinton in the finals. Did the Obama campaign view this as a national focus group?
With the benefit of hindsight it all makes perfect sense. Biden was one of Obama's mentors in the Senate. Obama's theme was "change" but at the same time he loves being a bridge, a uniter. The Obama team probably knew that an African-American candidate with the name Barack Hussein Obama who opposed the Iraq war from the start was about all the "change" they were going to need and then some. The Scranton-born Biden allowed them to better compete for one demographic that leaned McCain: older white men. And as a "backup President" no one doubted his credentials or ability to do the job if need be.
While there's a fair amount of denial going on in the righty blogosphere (it was the media's fault!) there are some examples of refreshing, head-not-buried-entirely-in-the-sand, honesty:
We lost because nobody in their right mind would trust us to run a government.
Why? What did you do wrong?
We've long been the Party of fiscal restraint, but when we had all three branches we went on a spending binge that would embarrass a drunken sailor...... In seven years we demonstrated to the American people that we really didn't mean what we'd said for all those years; we weren't against spending, we were against Democrat spending. We weren't against big government, we just wanted it big in the places we like. The people caught us in the lie and held us responsible for it.
But wasn't it just the media's fault?
I know, it wasn't right, wasn't fair, was a media lynching of GWB; all of that is true, but we laid ourselves open for it. When you run as the adults of the group, you don't put the former general counsel of a horsebreeding association in charge of a high profile federal agency.
Picky picky. But what should be done? From the comments:
Who pushed us into the suckosphere?
I know you don't like this question, but if we don't get rid of those who lead us here won't they just lead us back to sucking after they again gain power?
The cancer of suck isn't cured by just acknowledging the suck...I think at this point maybe a regiment of suck killing chemo might be in order. Otherwise we will just see a remission of suck until it comes back more powerful. And that would really suck.
Norm Coleman now leads Al Franken by 231 votes according to the Star Tribune which is 16 more than he started with prior to the recounting. Of course the "real" margin has been almost entirely obscured by the more than 3,600 challenges lodged by the two campaigns. Nevertheless, I am not optimistic because county-by-county results show a clear pattern: the candidate who challenges the most ballots in a county is the candidate who has gained votes in the county. Here are some examples:
County
Who Gained & How Much?
Who Challenged More Ballots?
Aitkin
Coleman by 3
Coleman by 2
Anoka
Franken by 23
Franken by 30
Becker
Coleman by 39
Coleman by 37
Brown
Franken by 4
Franken by 3
Carlton
Coleman by 23
Coleman by 27
Carver
Franken by 8
Franken by 11
Dakota
Franken by 13
Franken by 10
Hennepin
Coleman by 27
Coleman by 34
Meeker
Franken by 43
Franken by 44
Stearns
Franken by 19
Franken by 15
Washington
Coleman by 12
Coleman by 8
There are exceptions to this pattern, mostly counties with a small number of challenges and very small gains or losses. Two other exceptions are Ramsey County where Franken has one more challenge but has gained 34 votes and St. Louis County where Coleman has issued a 100 more challenges but has gained only 57 votes. And Coleman has issued 80 more challenges overall compared to Franken but with 82% of the recount completed that difference alone won't net Franken enough votes.
Nate Silver's models still show Franken pulling ahead, possibly by 100 votes or more. The idea is that Coleman's challenges are negating clear Franken votes while Franken's challenges are more often to ballots ruled void (double votes, scribbles, etc.). But based on the county-by-county patterns it seems optimistic to me. Tell me I'm wrong, please.
It appears to have been a good day for Senator Norm Coleman and probably was with a lead of 180 (up from 120). We won't know for sure though until mid-December when challenged ballots are examined.
And note especially the divergence of the red and blue lines as the Coleman campaign really upped their challenge quotient today and have now challenged 1,005 ballots to 977 by the Al Franken campaign.
Nate makes the case for how it is possible that Coleman is challenging clear Franken votes while Franken is challenging votes that were ruled for neither candidate. Under such a scenario, and I've heard contrary evidence, Franken would be the big vote gainer when those ballots are examined.
This is interesting: of the 66 counties that have recounted votes, only 12 of them have a candidate gaining votes without also using the same or more challenges than the opponent. The correlation between challenge difference and gained or lost votes is a very strong .64. What this means is that, in most cases, a candidate who has gained votes in a county has also issued more challenges; their gain could be due to (temporarily) cancelling out votes for the opponent.
Senator Norm Coleman's lead over Democratic challenger Al Franken shrunk again today but not by very much. The latest figures show a deficit of 120 for Franken with 64 percent of votes recounted. At this rate when all the votes have been recounted Franken will still trail and the outcome will depend on hundreds of ballots challenged by each campaign as well as a court fight over some rejected absentee ballots.
The odd thing today is that Franken lost a lot of votes in big Democratic-leaning counties where he had been doing well. The most likely explanation: a conspiracy of the Lizard People.
Here's an update of the chart I used last night:
Part of the Minnesota Vote
Original Votes
% Recounted
Franken Gain/Loss
Still to Come?
Big pro-Franken counties
905000
58% in
+23
+17 ?
Big pro-Coleman counties
724000
61% in
+33
+21 ?
Small counties (Coleman)
793000
73% in
+39
+15 ?
Those are some big changes from last night's version. Details ahead.
The following blog item concerns blogging. That makes it "meta." If that's not your thing, scroll down.
It's taken as a given that interest in politics reaches a zenith around November of even-numbered years. Political blog traffic tends to spike, big name bloggers eat caviar and buy Mercedes and live the good life. Then on, say, November 5 traffic drops off and it's back to ramen noodles and riding the beat-up Schwinn.
Sites entirely focused on election-related number compiling and crunching are particularly susceptible to the cycle described above. Hence, Nate Silver is worried about traffic at his site and did some investigating:
This question occurred to me as I looked at some previous presidential elections. Did you know, for instance, that the Nixon-Humphrey race was very close? It was, at least in the popular vote count: 31.8 million votes for Richard Nixon, 31.3 million for Hubert Humphrey. But Nixon won the electoral college in a blowout: 301 to 191. The native Californian won that state as well as other population centers such as Illinois and Ohio while losing Texas (oh how times have changed in 40 years). But he ran up the score on Humphrey by winning a bunch of small-population states that had more electors than they "deserved" if it was based on population alone.
Barack Obama looks to be headed for 365-273173 win in the electoral college assuming John McCain takes Missouri and Obama takes that Omaha elector. Does that margin fairly represent Obama's win? If, instead of giving a state the number of electors equal to their number of Senators plus House members, we apportion 538 electors based purely on current population what happens? I did this using 2007 state population figures and found the result would be this:
Obama 374, McCain 164
So the answer to the question in the title of the post is "yes" but only a little. The reason is that in the current system both McCain and Obama win small states that are "over electored." For example, McCain wins WY, ND, SD, and AK which really deserve only one elector (by population) while Obama wins DC and Vermont which would be in the same category. McCain won more of these small population states but not enough to significantly alter the electoral outcome.
I'm sure you're dying to know who finished in third behind Barack Obama and John McCain. Well it's close enough we'll have to wait until all the votes are counted, but here are the rounded totals so far, according to state-by-state data from Wikipedia and added by me:
530,200 votes: Ralph Nader
519,800 votes: Bob Barr
179,900 votes: Chuck Baldwin
147,600 votes: Cynthia McKinney
30,800 votes: Alan Keyes (in CA)
28,300 votes: Write-in/other
10,500 votes: Ron Paul (in MT)
Nader! Feel the momentum. The total number of people who looked at Barack Obama and John McCain and said "nope" is approaching 1.5 million, an increase from 2004. Nader's total this year exceeds his total from 2004 which was about 464,000 but far below his 2000 showing of nearly 3 million.
Write-in votes will affect the final totals and I'm sure there are a significant number of Hillary Clinton, Ron Paul (only on the ballot in MT) and Zombie Reagan votes in there.
I'm hearing contradictory reports on this issue. Kos said last night that turnout sucked. Paul reiterated that view earlier today. Meanwhile, Politico and others are reporting that turnout percentage will set a modern era record. I don't see their evidence for this, they just say it will exceed 130 million. So far, CNN shows about 119.5 million votes for Obama and McCain combined. Presumably there's another million or two for third party candidates.
I wrote about turnout two days ago and you can see a chart of turnout percentage history here. So which is it? Historically high turnout or disappointing turnout?
The Our Vote Live website is the place to go for info about voting problems. Built with the assistance of the Electronic Freedom Foundation it documents the groundbreaking voter assistance work of the Election Protection Coalition in real time. You can report problems by calling Election Protection's toll-free hotline, 866-OUR-VOTE. They recoded over 40,000 incidents before today, and have already recorded more than 10,000 incidents today.
Highlights are recorded on their blog. Incidents can also be tracked through their map interface. They also have a versatile search interface. Here's a sample from their blog:
Okay, take a look at this graph of turnout percentage over the last half century or so:
The numbers come from here except for 2008 where the number, 64 million percent, is Gallup's estimate. The magnitude of that percentage is the reason why Gallup's two likely voters models suddenly converged; Gallup decided turnout for Obama-friendly demographics was going to be much higher than earlier estimates.
Voting in presidential elections declined for 4 straight decades with the exception of 1992 (did Perot draw in some voters who usually don't participate?) reaching a low point in 1996. Tomorrow night when everyone is adding up electoral votes, Senate and House seats I'll be watching the turnout percentage. Even if we don't hit 64 percent it seems quite likely we'll exceed 2004 levels and therefore have three straight increases in turnout percentage.
The question I have for readers is why? Is it a coincidence? Have we had, since 2000, a growing sea of discontent that is now bearing down like a tidal wave? Is the big number for 2008 entirely due to Barack Obama and his popularity?
Personally, I see an Internet activism argument in these numbers. It would no doubt be an oversimplication to attribute it entirely to the Internet but it's hard, given the perfect match of the years of voting increase with the rate of Internet adoption and use also rising not to put two and two together.
I'm really interested to get other people's takes on this. Why, over the past 12 years now, have we seen a steady rise in the percentage of people voting in presidential elections?
The final update of the poll average of seven daily trackers brings some firsts:
1. This is the first time in the months long history of the tracking poll average that Barack Obama has exceeded 51 percent. He broke through 50 percent many times, especially in the last month, but never exceeded 50.7 percent until today.
2. The number of undecided or third party voters has dipped below 5 percent for the first time ever. If John McCain converts all of them to his side he will still be behind.
3. The lead is at 7 for the first time in November (ha ha).
Significantly, while the number of undecideds has fallen in this average from 7.5 percent recently to 4.8 percent today Obama's support has actually moved upwards. McCain moved up a bit last week but as the graph above shows he appears to have hit a 44 percent ceiling. That's also the number the final Gallup poll estimates he'll finish at. Based on these last six days it appears the latest deciders may be breaking for Obama.
What do you think the final percentage gap will be?
There has been some speculation or even "concern" that the group of people who remained undecided about the presidential race might skew toward John McCain. The theory was that most of the hesitant middle folks that would ever bring themselves to vote for "that one" had already made that decision, thereby leaving the remaining pool a group of mostly conservatives who may have been less than thrilled about McCain and/or Palin but who would "come home" in the end. Here's some evidence that may not be the case. First, the average of seven daily tracking polls shows Barack Obama gaining for the third straight day with 50.7 percent of the vote to 43.9 percent for McCain. Add those two numbers together and you'll get 94.6, the highest mark in any edition of the tracking poll average whether there were 4 or 5 or 6 or (now) 7 polls in the average. Look what's happened to the undecided/third party vote over the last 12 days:
During this same period the gap between Obama and McCain has been fairly stable at about 6.9 percent (today is 6.8 percent). The evidence so far suggests a fairly even split as undecided/other move to Obama or McCain.
The undecide-voters-are-conservatives theory was dubious to begin with but pushed hard by the Republican side since it was one of the few plausible stories they could tell that ended in victory. It was dubious because you would expect that someone as historically unique as Barack Obama would require, for some voters, a good deal of "getting used to" before they could tell a pollster "I'm voting for Amoeba, Osama, Obama!" Now you might think they had lots of time, too much time, for that but this type of voter is probably the opposite of many blog readers when it comes to attention to politics and so their decision comes at the very end.
You guys are poll obsessed! Anyway, I have a new theory: the more random flucuation seen in a given poll the more comments it will generate. But in order to test this we'll need to know which polls are stable and which are less stable. One approach is to compute the standard deviation of a tracking polls released numbers (which are typically based on 3-day rolling averages but ignore that issue for now). Here are the results for the 7 daily tracking polls over the last few weeks (which excludes Battleground):
Here's the Halloween edition of the tracking poll average, now with seven daily trackers: Zogby, R2Kos, Rasmussen, Hotline, Gallup LVE (using expanded to offset more conservative LV models in other trackers), TIPP and ABC. See Quick Hits for individual poll results. Bottom line: the gentle "tightening" appears to be over.
Really, even over the 12 days shown here, things have been very stable. Barack Obama's support only varied within one point from 49.7 to 50.7 while John McCain's support fluctuated a bit more, between 42.5 and 44.2. Over this period the average Obama lead has been 6.9 percent and today it is 6.7 percent.
Things have narrowed in Pennsylvania but Obama leads there and in most of the battleground states by significantly more than he does nationally.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain and running mate Sarah Palin are seeing dividends of their recent heavy campaign rotation in the state of Pennsylvania. Yesterday Palin completed event number 13 in the Keystone state while John McCain has had 10 events there in the last two weeks.
It's working. The McCain campaign is chipping away at the huge lead formerly held by "The One." McCain-Palin now trails Obama-Biden by about 11 points, down from about 13 a couple weeks ago. As a result, we are moving McCain's position in the state from "Being Slaughtered" to "Embarassing Deficit."
The McCain campaign's strategy calls for more appearances in PA in the remaining days with hopes of keeping their loss in the state to single digits and an improved final classification of "Beaten Like a Drum."
I've taken a look at the gender breakdown in a couple of the early voting states and was 1) not surprised to see more women voting than men and 2) shocked to see by how much they are out-voting men.
It's in the hundreds of thousands of votes in states like North Carolina and Georgia. In Georgia, of the 1.6 million votes cast so far, approximately 58 percent of voters are women. In North Carolina the percentage of women is about 57. In both cases that works out to at least a quarter million more female voters than male.
Those of you tracking early voting in other states take a look at the gender breakdown (if it is available) and put it in comments. I also wonder just how unusual this is. I think women outnumbering men in voting is fairly normal but the gap is so wide this year I was quite surprised. Since Barack Obama is far ahead of John McCain among women in national polling this is obviously great news for John McCain Barack Obama.
By "young man" I mean Barack Obama. By "West" I was originally meaning Alaska and Arizona. As a final campaign coup de grace I have been thinking for weeks he should hit these two states, the home territory of John McCain and Sarah Palin. The Alaska rationale included:
1. The only state Obama has not campaigned in
2. Help push Begich past Stevens in the Senate race
Now that Stevens has taken care of the "help Begich" part I'm not sure this aspect of the coup de grace is necessary. But there's still the Arizona part, a state that looks to be in play according to October polling. In five polls this month Obama trails by an average of four points. And now there is word the campaign may make a late push there:
That may include ramping up TV advertising, on-the-ground staff or even deploying the candidate to stop there. Obama is scheduled to make a Western swing late this week, making an Arizona visit possible.
And Republicans aren't taking Arizona for granted either according to this story which says anti-Obama robocalls are being made into the state.
So, let's see if the 50-state strategy includes the home turf of the opposition candidates.
Today Joe Biden ends his 36-year tenure in the U.S. Senate. While he now probably seems well-suited for the job of "backup President" not many in the progressive blogosphere would have predicted or advocated Biden as VP just a year ago. In fact, if you told me 18 months ago that Barack Obama would be elected President I would have said "good" and been unsurprised. But if you told me that Joe Biden would be Vice President I would have said "Wow!" 
