As we all sort through various theories for what happened on November 4, and what it all means, Mark Schmitt of The American Prospect performs a public service by looking back at some of the predictive theories bruited about during the campaign season, and grading their eventual accuracy.
He gives his highest grade to the model advanced back in 2002 by TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira and The New Republic’s John Judis in their book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, which, as Schmitt notes, made “predictions [that] were close to an exact map of the Obama demographic.”
He gives somewhat lower but still positive grades to Tom Schaller’s signature efforts to predict a Democratic majority that ultimately did not depend on southern votes; the “economic determinist” models that predicted a Democratic victory based on macroeconomic indicators; and those such as Michael Lind who drew attention to the enduring resistance of Appalachian voters to Obama’s candidacy.
David Sirota’s “Race Chasm” theory, which projected into the general election Obama’s success in states with many or few African-American voters, gets a “C-minus.” A “D” is assigned to the “wine-track” theory that Obama would become just another Democratic candidate attractive to elites but repellant to working-class voters. And “Fs” go to the prophets of a vast “Bradley Effect,” and to those who thought disgruntled Hillary Clinton voters would swing the election to McCain.
Finally, Schmitt gives a big shout-out to Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com, whose demographics-and-polls based analysis of the entire campaign from Iowa to November 4, was spot-on, culminating with very accurate predictions of the final popular-vote margin and the state-by-state results. Since Nate’s background is in sabermetrics (the statistics-based analysis of baseball), you’d have to say that he had the kind of year that was the equivalent of winning both the Rookie of the Year and MVP awards.
In any event, Mark’s report card is good clean fun, at least for those who didn’t get assigned failing grades.

As you can see from the “Noteworthy” box at the top of our web page, TDS is cosponsoring a major post-election analysis event at the National Press Club this Friday, in conjunction with the Progressive Policy Institute. It will feature TDS Co-Editors Bill Galston and Ruy Teixeira, PPI president Will Marshall, and to provide a Republican perspective, Ross Douthat of The Atlantic. I’ll be there, too, but will let the above worthies do the talking.
The title, “Rove or Roosevelt? Prospects for a Political Realignment” suggests a look back at the election results and a look forward at how the Obama administration and Democrats generally might decide to create or solidify a realignment. The reference to Karl Rove hints at an approach that some, particularly those convinced that the November 4 victory was fragile or even ephermeral, may urge on Obama: using the levers of power to reward elements of the Democratic base while appealing very selectively to swing voter categories that might push up Democratic percentages in the future to a more comfortable margin, even without the anti-Republican atmosphere of this election year. The reference to FDR, of course, suggests a more systemic approach of governing in order to create a broad attachment to the Democratic Party among Americans grateful for genuine leadership in a time of crisis.
It should be quite a discussion. Please drop by if you are in the DC area on Friday, and we’ll try to quickly get transcripts and make some of the analysis available here next week.

As the Obama administration begins to take shape, inevitably, various interest, identity and advocacy groups are taking credit for his victory, with implicit (probably soon to be explicit) claims on a share of visible appointments, and on the right to influence the President-elect’s agenda.
At Politico, Avi Zenilman has a brisk roundup of victory statements from the National Council of La Raza, the AFL-CIO, the NEA, Rock the Vote, MoveOn.org, Women’s Voices/Women’s Votes, Sojourners, the Human Rights Campaign, the National Jewish Democratic Council, and even the Yankee Group, a technology consulting firm.
As Zenilman notes, there’s nothing new about post-election “you owe us” statements, other than, perhaps, their sheer scope this year:

Such claims are, of course, an election-year standard. Four years ago, social conservative and anti-tax groups boasted of their role in President Bush’s reelection.
Obama’s wider margin of victory this year makes it seem as though America — and the Democratic Party — may just be big enough for virtually every group to claim credit and jostle elbows as they push for their respective agendas.

That’s exactly right. There’s really not one “bullet vote” that won this election for Barack Obama. On one level, that should mean he doesn’t “owe” any particular group any particular thanks or favors, but on another level, it ensures that many will take credit, and down the road, maybe take umbrage if things don’t work out as they hope.

if you haven’t had your fill of Obama-as-the-next-FDR articles, try George Packer’s freebie at The New Yorker “The New Liberalism: How the economic crisis can help Obama redefine the Democrats.”
Sure, Obama did well in the big cities, as expected. But he also had chops in the ‘burbs, explain Brookings Fellows William Frey and TDS Co-editor Ruy Teixeira in their article at Brookings web pages,”A Demographic Breakthrough for Democrats.”
Peter Kauffman has an article at The Politico on Dems’ inroads into military veterans as a constituency, noting Obama’s impressive 44 percent share and the thin ranks of GOP poltiical leaders coming up who are vets, in contrast to the Dems bumper crop.
Digby has a sobering reminder that, no matter how much reaching out across the aisle Obama does, bipartisan kumbaya isn’t necessarily a high priority among some Republican leaders.
Not to rain on the parade, but elections also show Dems where we are weak and need some focus. In that regard, do check out this map (click on no.s 2 and 3 ) the graphic wizards at The Grey Lady have put together. It shows a strikingly red band of counties in which McCain actually did better than Bush did in ’04. Note that TN, AR and OK counties are much worse than in other red states.
Conversely, Domenico Montenaro has a MSNBC First Read report on battleground state counties that flipped from red to blue. See also this well-illustrated post by Andrew at Red State, Blue State…, revelaing the Dems’ edge in larger counties.
In his WaPo column today, E.J. Dionne, Jr. urges Obama to emulate Reagan not by turning right, but by acting boldly from the get-go.

In a post on Friday, I mentioned the quick-developing debate between those who view Obama’s victory as signaling a realignment, and those who think it was a more fragile accomplishment in reaction to Republican misgovernment and the recent financial crisis.
In the former camp, predictably, the true ultra is the somewhat cranky polymath Michael Lind, who’s published an article for Salon heralding the Obama win as representing a third major turning point in the history of the country.
According to Lind, our history can be broken down into three “Republics” which lasted almost exactly 72 years. It all goes back to the ancient federalist-republican rivalry of Hamilton and Jefferson. In each “Republic,” our politics was dominated by Hamiltonian “nation-building” for about three-and-a-half decades, and then equally dominated by Jeffersonian “backlash” until the next cycle. Thus, in the “First Republic” an activist government built and expanded the country before giving way, under Jackson and his successors, to the centrifugal forces that eventually culiminated in the Civil War. In the “Second Republic,” the Reconstruction Era created a powerful federal government and strong constitutional rights, which were gradually whittled away during and after the Progressive Era. And in the “Third Republic,” the New Deal and Great Society gave way to the conservative movement and the neoliberals, culminating in the disaster of the Bush 43 administration. With Obama begins the “Fourth Republic.”
As always, Lind is both brilliant and annoying. There’s a rough and insightful accuracy to everything he writes. But his quasi-Hegelian obsession with his System causes him to ignore inconvenient nuances (e.g., the difficulty of teaming up agrian populists and urban reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as “Jeffersonians”). And he wastes a lot of space in arguing that the Third Republic actually ended in 2004, presumably so that it can span the prescribed 72 years.
The bigger problem is that Lind gives no real idea what might characterize the Fourth Republic, or its first president, Barack Obama, other than to say that accomodation to new energy sources and new technologies have accompanied previous big shifts, whatever their subjective features. But he assures us that the Fourth Republic is likely to last until, oh, 2076.
Aside from its utility as historical and political analysis, Mike Lind’s theoretical Big Bertha (or outline of same, since you can definitely feel a book coming) illustrates the distinctive American taste for what is called in theology Dispensationalism–the division of history into large and predictable phases. It’s the impulse that has led so very many evangelical Protestants in recent years to engage in the previously esoteric practice (largely limited to adventist sects) of poring over the Book of Revelation to figure out what’s going to happen in the immediate future.
Among its many perils, Dispensationalism in religion or in history tends to produce a sense of fatalism about human control over human destiny. Flattered as Barack Obama might be to see himself depicted as a epochal figure comparable to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR (his fellow Republic-Launchers), let’s hope he doesn’t wait around for large historical forces to shape his administration.

On October 12th, our TDS commentator James Vega made three predictions about how Conservatives would respond to an Obama victory. He predicted that they would argue:

1. “the American people don’t really support Barack Obama (they were tricked)…”
2 “true conservatism was not really rejected by the American people (just the overly timid and bumbling John McCain)…”
3. “The Obama administration will be described as basically “illegitimate” and conservatives will assert that they therefore have no obligation to support it”

Now here are some quotes from conservative leader Brent Bozell, interviewed by Fox News after he emerged from a major meeting of top conservatives today in Virginia:

1. “The American people are fiscally conservative, and the fascinating thing, Bill, is that Barack Obama ran as a Reaganite and won over the public as a fiscal conservative.”
2. “Conservatives didn’t play a role in this campaign. This was a moderate Republican against a liberal — a left-wing Democrat, and the left-wing Democrat beat the moderate Republican.”
3. “Barack Obama does not have the mandate to enact the left-wing agenda he wants to enact…”
Interviewer: what if some of these Senate races that still hang in the balance go the Democratic way? …Would you consider that a mandate?
BOZELL: — There’s no question of the power that they now have in Washington. The point is that the American people are still on our side.

Geez, maybe we oughta see about getting some royalties here.

I’ve got a short piece up at the Progessive Policy Institute site that runs through the election results and tries to answer the question: what really “changed” in the “change election?”
At the conclusion of this piece, I discussed the two emerging “big theories” about Obama’s victory: realignment or “reaction.” The first theory suggests that Obama consolidated a new Democratic coalition that’s been in the works, in fits and starts, for a while, along the lines of the hypothesis developed by TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira and The New Republic’s John Judis, in their 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority. And as it happens, the second theory, which is that Obama’s win was primarily an immediate reaction to Republican misgovernment and the financial crisis, was first and best expressed by former TDS Managing Editor Scott Winship in a TNR piece yesterday.
This debate will surely continue until such time as future events make it moot.

As we all luxuriate for a few more days in the post-election analysis phase of the campaign cycle, it’s important to note a couple of simple math principles that often get forgotten. The most important is that percentages of votes don’t win elections; raw votes do.
It’s the most natural thing in the world to troll through the exit polls, comparing Obama’s percentage performance in this or that group to, say, John Kerry’s, and look for the big numbers. And there is real value in knowing, for example, that Obama improved the Democratic percentage of the Latino vote by 13 points. But this shouldn’t be confused with an analysis of why Obama won and Kerry lost. Small percentage changes in large groups of voters often have more electoral value than large percentage changes in smaller groups. Thus, for example, Obama’s 5% improvement over Kerry among Protestants, who make up 54% of the electorate, had more value than his 7% improvement among Catholics, who are half that size. It’s all basic arithmetic once you think abuot it.
A different kind of “percentage” error is sometimes made in assessments of voter turnout. On Election Day, I heard some county election official down in Georgia whining about “surprisingly low turnout,” which he was measuring as the percentage of registered voters showing up at the polls. He didn’t mention the fact that more than 400,000 new voters registered this year in GA, which means the same “turnout” percentage yielded a lot more votes. In reality, the only relevant baseline for measuring turnout isn’t percentage of registered voters, but percentage of the voting-age population (VAP), a number provided by the census, or the more refined voting-eligible population (VEP), which excludes non-citizens and disenfranchised felons.
Keeping the numbers straight can help avoid a lot of confusion when it comes to figuring on what happened in this and every other election.

Democrats who want to better understand President-elect Obama’s impressive victories in the southeast should spend some time at Facing South, where Chris Kromm provides an insightful discussion of the role of demographic change and strategy in the NC victory. Facing South was first to claim an Obama victory in NC, and provides much of the best reporting on southern politics found anywhere. Kromm will write an expanded analysis in the near future, so I’ll just clip some of his key points in this article:

How did Obama turn North Carolina blue? A number of factors gave him this victory:
*…Obama mobilized his core base in North Carolina in record numbers. At the forefront were African-American voters, who added over 300,000 registrations in 2008 and went to Obama by 95%. Obama also won over young voters by large numbers: 74% of those under 30 went Obama.
* …Obama won 66% of voters in the state’s growing urban areas — 64% in the Raleigh-Durham area alone). According to Public Policy Polling, urban areas made up 303,000 of the 436,000 votes Obama needed to gain relative to John Kerry’s performance in 2004.
*…Similar to national trends, 54% of those who were “very worried” about the economy in N.C. voted Obama; he also won 57% of those making less than $50,000 a year. The more the percentage of people worried about the economy went up, so did Obama’s numbers.
* De-mobilized Republicans:…The lack of excitement is reflected in the GOP’s lackluster registration numbers in 2008. Of the 629,000 new voters registered in North Carolina between January and November, 54% were Democrats, 34% Independents — and just 12% Republicans.
* Election Reforms:…Advocates successfully pushed for same-day voter registration and voting at early voting sites — and more than 185,000 North Carolinians took advantage of the law, especially newly-engaged voters who broke to Obama. Through aggressive publicity and education, the state also lowered the number of presidential votes “lost” due to the state’s confusing straight-ticket ballot, adding thousands of presidential votes.
* Obama Fought For It: Last but not least, Democrats won North Carolina because they fought for it. The Obama campaign was smart enough to realize that the above factors and others had made N.C. a battleground opportunity…Obama had more than 50 field offices fanned throughout the state, deploying an army of 21,000 some staff and volunteers that knocked on doors, made calls and mobilized massive chunks of the electorate. Obama had spent $5 million on TV ads in N.C. by early October. Obama and his surrogates made dozens of campaign stops in the state, including Obama himself coming to Charlotte on the last day before November 4. By the time McCain fought back to defend the state for Republicans, it was too late…Obama ignored the pundits and invested the time, resources and energy needed to clinch the deal — ensuring not only his own victory, but wins for Democrats all the way down the ballot and a chance to make history in North Carolina.

There you have it — an outline for the Dems’ southern playbook. Granted candidates with the skillset of Obama don’t come along very often. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from his campaign.
Kromm takes a poke at Thomas Schaller, who wrote in The New York Times On July 1 that “Obama can write off Georgia and North Carolina.” To be fair, I believe Schaller did change his position later on to include the possibility of an NC upset. But Obama’s success in NC, VA and FL pretty much lays to rest the blanket assumption that the southeast is arid territory for Democratic presidential candidates.
In another Facing South post, Sue Sturgis points out that Dems success in the NC Senate race was not about money:

In North Carolina’s U.S. Senate contest, Democratic challenger Kay Hagan spent just over $6 million to defeat incumbent Republican Elizabeth Dole, who spent more than $15.7 million. Dole was hurt by the strong turnout for presidential candidate Barack Obama and by a decision to run a controversial ad late in the campaign implying that Hagan — a former Sunday school teacher — is an atheist. Hagan has filed a defamation lawsuit over the ad, which Dole refused to pull despite widespread criticism.

If anyone ever puts together a “Hall of Shame” for stupid, self-defeating political ads, I nominate Dole’s “Godless” ad for exhibit “A.”
Dems also had a particularly sweet pick-up in NC-8. As Sturgis explains,

In North Carolina’s 8th Congressional District east of Charlotte, incumbent Republican Robin Hayes spent more than $2.5 million only to lose to challenger Larry Kissell, who spent just shy of $1.1 million. A former textile plant manager turned social studies teacher, Kissell focused on trade issues in a district that’s been hit hard by textile job losses, hammering multimillionaire textile heir Hayes for reversing stated positions to cast key votes in favor of the Central American Free Trade Agreement and the Trade Act of 2002. Hayes also created trouble for himself by declaring at a heated McCain rally that “liberals hate real Americans that work and achieve and believe in God.”

It appears that religious McCarthyism is all the rage in some NC GOP circles.
And the capper: NC also elected its first female governor, Beverly Perdue — a Democrat.

I’ve been thinking off and on today about James Vega’s warning last night about the dangerously alienated and paranoid folk who bought into the more extreme right-wing rhetoric about Barack Obama.
He’s right, but at least the people he is talking about will probably calm down once it’s apparent that an Obama administration isn’t coming to take away their liberties or even their guns, or institute compulsory Muslim prayers.
I’m personally a bit more concerned about a different group of conservatives who will never be reconciled to an Obama administration, and are probably very freaked out right now: the hard-core anti-abortion movement.
These are people who hoped in this election that they were finally in sight of the promised land: an overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court, and a return to guerilla warfare at the state level over abortion policy.
Yes, most of them understood how hard it would be for a President McCain to get that crucial fifth vote for a serious restriction or abolition of the right to choose through a Democratic Senate. But there was also hope for a “stealth” Justice that Democrats couldn’t or wouldn’t block, or big Republican gains in 2010. And with Sarah Palin riding shotgun, a McCain White House would have to do everything within its power to redeem its promises to “the base” on abortion.
All those hopes are dashed now, for at least four years: four years in which three of the five pro-choice Justices could well be replaced by younger counterparts who will block the overturning of Roe for a long, long time. The window of opportunity for eliminating constitutional abortion rights may have closed during the Bush administration, or in retrospect, during the Reagan and G.H.W. Bush administrations, when three critical Court appointments went to Justices who turned out to be unreliable on this subject from a conservative point of view.
I know some religious progressives, with encouragement from Barack Obama, are working hard to find common ground with anti-choicers on efforts to reduce the demand for abortion. But so long as such efforts rely, as they always will, on aggressive promotion of birth control, you have to recognize that many if not most self-conscious right-to-life activists regard the most popular and effective forms of birth control as abortifacients, not contraceptives.
Progressives need to understand that we are talking about people who sincerely think that every abortion is an act of homicide, representing an ongoing Holocaust of about one million victims a year. They use the Holocaust analogy very deliberately, because they believe they are living in a latter-day Nazi Germany, wherein the rest of us are as complicit in evil as the “good Germans” of the Third Reich. And they are not going away. There’s good reason to believe that homophobia will fade due to generational changes and the steady exposure of more and more Americans to gays and lesbians. But if anything, young conservatives (who often call themselves “abortion survivors” and spend time thinking about their “murdered” co-generationists) are more adamant in their anti-abortion views than their parents and grandparents.
I honestly don’t know where this movement is going next. Most right-to-lifers are peaceable enough, and the official movement has tried hard to eschew violent tactics (though non-violent efforts to harrass and intimidate abortion providers and the women who seek their services remain strong as ever). But progressives need to have a clear-eyed understanding of hard-core anti-abortionists and their worldview, and become less naive about prospects for compromise, or for changing the debate to other issues. There’s really not much you can debate with people who look at the friendly neighborhood OB/GYN or pharmacist and see death camp administrators. We’ll have to live in uneasy coexistence, and one side or the other will have to decisively win the less committed elements of the population.