Robert David Sullivan 2

Obama's predictable victory and his squishy mandate

Election 2008 was not as dramatic, and did not have as many plot twists, as political commentators suggested at the time. So say Andrew Gelman and John Sides in the September edition of the Boston Review. Their rundown of voting returns, poll results, and journalistic memes is a good antidote to romanticized reporting: 

The Obama victory was historic, but it was not surprising; Obama shifted, but did not redraw, the electoral map; race and class mattered, but not in the way people assumed they would matter; and partisan loyalty was powerful even as partisan defections like Colin Powell’s garnered headlines. Furthermore, it is simply too soon to tell how and how much campaign tactics mattered, whether this election’s outcome constitutes a realignment in voting behavior, and whether Obama has emerged with a mandate.

A couple of quibbles, though. First, I agree that the obsession over Electoral College strategy threatens to overshadow the fact that elections are still about national trends. As Gelman and Sides write, "the economy shifted the whole terrain in the Democrats' favor and Obama took advantage of this." (You really have to go back to 1948 for an election in which both the Democratic and Republican nominees scooped up several states that had gone to the other party four years before.)

That said, every election has its quirky geographic outcomes that may or may not prove long-lasting. The prime example of 2008 was Indiana, where the Democratic percentage jumped 11 points from the last election (versus an increase of 5 points in the US as a whole). Gelman and Sides note that Obama's field operations probably pushed up his vote totals in states like Indiana and North Carolina, but it's going take another election before it's safe to dismiss the idea that that the two parties' geographic bases did, in fact, shift somewhat in 2008.

Second, Gelman and Sides's skepticism toward the idea that a presidential election results in a "mandate" should be disheartening to anyone who's not a fan of congressional gridlock. It may indeed be true that presidential election results don't necessarily carry much weight in Congress, but I don't agree with what seems to be the authors' excusal for that outcome:

We cannot assume that people voted for Obama based on detailed knowledge of his policy positions.... Instead people often choose a preferred candidate and then rationalize issue positions to fit this preference. So we cannot interpret an election outcome as a wholesale endorsement of the winner’s policy proposals (or as a wholesale rejection of the loser’s).

But even with an informed electorate, there can't be a "wholesale" (or "blanket") endorsement of all of the winning candidate's proposals. That doesn't mean that there can never be a mandate for broad proposals (like health care reform) or ideological approaches.

And there is a possible contradiction in the Boston Review piece in that Gelman and Sides also note that "Approximately 90 percent of the public identifies with or leans toward one of the two major parties, and the vast majority of partisans supports their party's presidential candidate." To me, that seems very different than the notion that more than a small number of voters "chose a preferred candidate and then rationalize issue positions to fit this preference." If a voter actually chooses a candidate on the basis of party affiliation, I don't see how rationalization (or ignorance) of that candidate's issue positions can be inferred.

I think it's premature to dismiss the idea of a mandate from 2008. Of course, if a large number of people who voted for Obama start protesting the very idea of health care reform, something I haven't yet seen documented, then I'll concede that there was no policy mandate in last year's election outcome.

73 maps that explain what happened last year in politics

The Electoral Map blog's Patrick Ottenhoff has posted an informative and amusing 73-image slideshow of some of the "greatest hits" in political geography from last year. See Rudy Guiliani's map ostensibly demonstrating his general election appeal, Dick Morris "flexing his idiocy" with an Electoral College prediction, a map of foreclosure hotspots, and a rundown of which congressmen voted against the bank bailout bill at a crucial point in last year's campaign. Of course, there are also color-coded and "bubble" maps of results in key presidential primaries and in the November race.

Worth checking out. Massachusetts, predictably, does not play much of a role in the cartographic fun.

Obama's excellent trip to the science museum

The Boston Globe's Foon Rhee finds it "curious" that President Obama jetted out to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science to sign the federal stimulus bill. (Many Globe readers instead call it "hypocritical" to use so much fuel on the way to sign a bill aimed at increasing "green" jobs.) Rhee wonders if the setting is "something of an in-your-face move to opponents of funding for the arts."

I prefer to think it has something to do with this:

"While we were working to eliminate these pork barrel earmarks, he voted for nearly $1 billion in pork barrel earmark projects including $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago," [John] McCain said during the second of three presidential debates, blasting what became an unsuccessful effort to rebuild the 40-year-old Zeiss Optical Skyshow projector at the Adler Planetarium.

Where was Obama's surge in 2008?

Last summer I posted on the counties that contributed to George W. Bush's "surge" from 2000 to 2004. Now it's time to look at the biggest swings toward the Democrats from 2004 to 2008 (click below to embiggen). For thousands of other fascinating maps and tables, go to Dave Leip's Atlas of US Presidential Elections, at which I verified much of the data below.

 

BIGGEST % INCREASES FOR DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE, 2004-2008

1. Maverick, Texas. Total vote: 10,939. Obama percentage: 78.2%, up 18.9 points.
This is an amusing No. 1, given John McCain's attempts to own the label "maverick," but it's not a shock by historical standards. The county is on the Mexican border, is about 95 percent Latino, and hasn't voted for a Republican since Herbert Hoover in 1928. George W. Bush kept Democrat John Kerry slightly below 60% here in 2004, probably because of Bush's Texan roots. In last year's Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton beat Obama here by almost 3-to-1, part of a pattern in which he lost badly in mostly Latino counties. To the great disappointment of the GOP, Obama had no problem winning over Latino voters by November.

Pledging allegiance to Obama

Marbury pretty effectively demolishes "Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher's Pledge Video", in which various celebrities promise to end slavery, drink less bottled water, and the like:

I'm not quite as annoyed by the mix of socially conscious and ridiculously self-absorbed goals, but I can see his point here:

It ends with a harangue. "What's your pledge? What's your pledge? I know you got a pledge, what's your pledge? What's your pledge?" The participants chant a quasi-Maoist mantra in unison as the screen splits into checkers: "Together we can together we are and together we will be the change that we seek." Then they all dissolve into the face of Chairman Obama. Now, as readers of this blog will testify, I'm generally quite sympathetic to the new president and would count myself as an admirer. But this truly is the kind of cult of personality stuff that his critics are always carping about. Watching these celebrities resolve into the president's face, like so many pores resuming their places, makes me very queasy. If they had to use an effect like this, why not dissolve into an American flag?

I can see that silly/creepy Obama worship is partly a reaction to a vacuum. After the past 15 years or so of Washington derangement, Americans are wary of identifying with a political party, an ideology, or a rigid theology. And after the Bush administration's heavy-handed treatment of domestic and foreign adversaries, blind allegiance to the American flag isn't going to fly right now.

Enthusiastic loyalty to a "post-partisan" president is an appealing alternative, but it can quickly get out of hand. Maybe Obama won't take advantage of the hero worship to expand the powers of his office. But the Obama-nauts could smother all of this policy proposals by tying them to his personal popularity. He won't get anywhere in Congress if everything he does seems to be geared toward keeping his army happy and ready to do battle again in 2012.

Kentucky posts some "real" election numbers

We're getting closer to a final count on this year's presidential election, as Kentucky has just posted the "official" results in that state.

Perhaps the US Justice Department should investigate the significance of those quote marks. Have the real results been tampered with? Or is some kind of irony intended here? Perhaps the author of this seemingly official document is making a comment on the unknowability of truth, or man's inability to accurately count votes beyond the number of digits on his hands and feet.

Most likely, the state of Kentucky merely merits a mention on The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quote Marks.

West Virginia: Wrong for America

Ballot Box's Josh Goodman calls Utah the "ultimate anti-bellwether" state, thanks to its habit of voting anywhere from 16 to 41 points more Republican than the US as a whole.

My quibble is that a perfect bellwether picks up on shifts from one election to the next -- meaning that moves from one party to the other and back again, in much the same fashion that the entire nation does. The reverse would be a place that shifts from one party to another in the opposite direction from the nation as a whole. Utah doesn't really qualify because it's always an outlier on one side of the partisan divide.

My candidate is West Virginia, which is the only state to have voted for losers from different parties during the past six elections: Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988 and Republican John McCain in 2008. In contrast to neighboring Ohio, which has backed every successful presidential nominee since 1960, West Virginia has been a deceiver. If you had planted yourself there during the past few decades and never left the state, you would have thought that the first George Bush and the only Barack Obama had no chance of becoming president.

Runner-up is Georgia, the only state to vote for different-party losers during the past eight elections: Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1980, Republicans Bob Dole in 1996 and McCain in 2008.

Blame it on Mendocino County

Life must be nice and slow in Willits, California. There's certainly no hurry to count votes, as we find out in today's edition of the Willits News:

"We only have a few steps to complete," says Mendocino County Clerk and Registrar of Voters Susan Ranochak. While she is hoping to finish counting the 16,962 uncounted votes cast in Mendocino County in the November 4 election by Friday she says, "We will definitely be done by Thanksgiving." Ranochak has until December 2 to complete and certify the November 4 election results for the county...

In the days following the election Mendocino County's had the highest percentage of uncounted votes (42.6 percent) of any county in the state, with Sutter County a distant second at 33.9 percent and third place Riverside County at 33.3 percent.

Hurry it up, guys. When I have complete results, I'll post lists of the counties with the biggest swings toward Obama or McCain, the biggest increases in turnout, etc. Right now I've got Mendocino tagged as having the fourth-sharpest drop in voter participation in the nation (down 40 percent), and I knew that couldn't be right, as that county wasn't wiped out by Hurricane Katrina.

Will the Democrats hold on to the youth vote?

Stateline.org's Louis Jacobson poses the question.

According to exit poll figures from CNN, Barack Obama won the 18- to 29-year-old vote in 38 of the 47 states from which data is available. He won the youth vote in 13 states that he lost overall, a fact that may put some of those states in play in 2012 assuming that Obama has a reasonably successful presidency. (This year Obama lost Missouri by four-tenths of a percentage point, but he won 59 percent of the youth vote there; he lost Montana by 3 points but won 61 percent of the youth vote.) In 16 states and the District of Columba -- which account for 214 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House -- Obama won the youth vote by more than 2 to 1.

On the surface, it seems like good news for the Democrats that Obama did so well among the voters most likely to still be alive in 2012. But that's assuming a steady voter turnout among younger people; it's also assuming that younger voters weren't simply reacting to George W. Bush's unpopularity and terrible economic news, and that they actually identify with the Democratic Party.

What about the white vote?

Slate.com's Timothy Noah has a good analysis of the white vote in presidential elections. Exit polls suggest that Barack Obama lost this group by 12 points, and that no Democrat since Lyndon Johnson has won in this category:

... when the Democrats go nearly a half-century without winning a majority of white votes in any presidential election, it's necessary to ask why, even after we've passed the remarkable milestone of electing our first black president.

As Noah points out, there all kinds of factors that influence a person's vote, so it's simplistic to say that the Democratic Party has a "white problem." (Just as it's simplistic to say that Obama "won back" the Catholic vote. Yes, exit polls on CNN.com show that Obama won 54 percent of the Catholic vote after Kerry narrowly lost it in 2004, but they also show that McCain won 52 percent of the "white Catholic vote." So the big shift to Obama may have come from Hispanic voters, not necessarily from Irish- and Italian-American parishioners.) 

Noah says that it's also not quite right to say that "white resistance to voting Democratic [is] an entirely Southern phenomenon" that skews the national numbers. He points to a chart showing that Obama (narrowly) lost the white vote in several Northern states that he carried, including New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.