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.
Following the break is a complete roundup and ranking of Ohio races for the U.S. House of Representatives. I have separated them into Republican-held and Democratic-held seats and divided each into tiers. Within each tier they are ranked in order of likelihood of changing parties.
Democrats were very successful in 2006 in winning a U.S. Senate seat, four out of five statewide offices, and a net gain of seven seats in the Ohio House of Representatives, but the U.S. House races were a relative disappointment. The party gained only one seat and watched two promising races end in narrow losses after recounts. In this cycle Ohio has three open GOP seats and perhaps four or five races altogether that already look very promising, with another two or three that could be added to that list. The DCCC has already added three races to their "Red to Blue" program and is likely to take an interest in at least two more. In other words, Ohio is once again a critical congressional battleground.
As reported by Joe Hallett in the Columbus Dispatch and noted on Ohio 15th and Plunderbund this morning, State Sen. Steve Stivers (R-Upper Arlington) of the 16th Ohio Senate District has changed his mind and will jump into the contest to replace retiring Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-Upper Arlington) in the 15th Ohio Congressional District. Stivers is an Iraq War vet and a state senator for five years. In short, he is a relatively high-profile adversary for Franklin County Commissioner and well-funded repeat candidate Mary Jo Kilroy (D-Columbus).
Republican Deborah Pryce is retiring in Ohio's fifteenth district, leaving the seat open for the taking by Mary Jo Kilroy. Pryce is leaving because she is an ally of Hastert, who is also retiring, and she doesn't want to go through a grueling reelection to sit in a minority irrelevant position in the House. The district split between Bush and Kerry, but I would expect it to move aggressively to the Democratic side this cycle after Democrats romped in Ohio in 2006.
Generically, no politician likes being in the minority, so a lot of Republicans will choose to retire over the next few years. That's what happened after the 1994 election, when a bunch of Democrats either retired or outright switched parties. Hastert went, now Pryce, and Virginia Senator John Warner's another one who looks likely to retire. There are more where that came from.
