Democrats have lost the three federal elections since November 4th: Georgia Senate, and the run-offs in Louisiana 2nd and 4th congressional districts. It is pretty easy to explain all of these losses in local ways:
Jim Martin trailed Saxby Chambliss on Election Day, despite a huge voter turnout effort from the Obama campaign. Lacking the same energy, the state reverted to its red-state form.
LA-02: William Jefferson is a famously corrupt member of Congress. Despite the D +28 partisan voting index, what happened in this district is similar to what happened in Tom Delay's old seat, TX-22, in 2006. It is possible for Republicans to win deep blue seats or Democrats to win deep red seats when the favored party is under a cloud of extreme corruption.
LA-04 was a narrow loss, as predicted by non-partisan polls, in a fairly red district. No big deal, really, even if disappointing.
These localized explanations are satisfactory. However, it is also safe to say that the constant talk about the need for bi-partisanship and a "team of rivals" coming from Democrats isn't exactly encouraging Democratic turnout these days.
All three of these elections, especially GA-Sen and LA-02, featured very low Democratic turnout. It probably didn't help that national Democratic leaders, including Barack Obama, are telling everyone, Democrats included, how great it is for Republicans to be included in the federal government. When one of the major parties is telling everyone that it is great when the opposing party wins, then the opposing party is probably going to win.
I'm starting to see a pretty easy path for Republicans to regain power. All they need is, first, for every Democratic leader to keep saying how great it is for Republicans to share power. Next, they need Democrats to keep making people like Robert Gates, instead of Dick Cheney or George Bush, the national face of the Republican Party. Those two messages will keep electing Republicans for years to come, and it will be entirely our own fault.
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%.
Part three of my continuing series on the five congressional campaigns with undecided outcomes--Georgia Senate, Minnesota Senate, California 4th, Louisiana 4th, and Ohio 15th--can be found in the extended entry. There are important updates on all five campaigns.
These numbers are a little bit different than the ones you might be seeing at most election results sites. The reason is that I am allocating the Alaska Senate race, Louisiana's 2nd congressional district, and Virginia's 5th congressional district all to Democrats. I don't consider the ongoing counting or runoffs in those districts to have any realistic chance to change the outcome.
The two remaining Senate seats in my chart are Georgia (December 2nd run-off) and Minnesota (recount starts next week). The three remaining House seats are the California 4th (still counting 35,000 provisional and absentee ballots), the Louisiana 4th (December 6th run-off) and the Ohio 15th (still counting 27,000 provisional ballots, pending lawsuit) I discuss the current state of each of those campaigns in the extended entry.
With the Alaska Senate campaign turning heavily in favor of Democrat Mark Begich, in the extended entry I provide a run-down of the five closest campaigns that have still not been called, who is likely to win each campaign, and what it means for the overall balance of power. All of that, plus election forecasting notes can be found in the extended entry.
Democrats Work and WesPAC have launched a contest to determine which Congressional district General Wes Clark is going to visit this summer.
This won't be an ordinary visit. General Clark will travel to one Congressional district where a Democratic challenger is fighting to change the direction of our country to work side-by-side with area Democrats to make a positive impact through community service. We want you to tell us where we should put our values into action.
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