Dan Ancona’s article “Power to the Edge: Obama’s California Field Operation from the Future” at Personal Democracy Forum‘s ‘techPresident’ tab contains valuable insights about the strategy and tactics that empowered Obama’s quest for the Democratic nomination. Although Obama did not get a majority of CA delegates, the tactics his campaign deployed there proved critical in his other primary victories, winning the Democratic nomination and building the coalition that elected him.
Ancona, Project Director of California VoterConnect, likens the Obama primary campaign to the British victory in the Battle of Trafalgar and Genghis Khan’s Mongol invasions, both of which involved unconventional techniques of precision targeting to overcome “a largley centralized and monolithic force.” The strategic and tactical implications for politics are far-reaching. As Ancona writes:

The Obama campaign is distributed and bottom-up in a way that is the clearest example of what a post-broadcast, distributed and participatory democracy is going to look like. The evolution in campaign tactics happening right now closely parallels what’s happening in the military, corporations, government and other large organizations. The dropping costs and increasing reliability and flexibility of information technology is having profound effects on how these organizations make things happen.
This transformation was dubbed “Power to the Edge” in 2003 by David Alberts and Richard Hayes, two Department of Defense researchers with the Command and Control Research Program. Their book is surprisingly readable and engaging, and available in its entirety on-line at that link. It may be the best written government document of the 21st century so far. The authors are unabashedly aware of their book’s broader ramifications, stating in the preface that “[T]his book explores a leap now in progress, one that will transform not only the U.S. military but all human interactions and collaborative endeavors.”
A good political analog to Alberts & Hayes is Joe Trippi’s too-often overlooked post-2004 tell-all, The Revolution Will Not be Televised, where he laid out the broad contours of the transformation from the transactional, broadcast, TV-based political era to the relational, participatory, distributed, internet-based one. Trippi’s a terrific storyteller and it’s packed with exactly the kind of inside dirt that both serious and armchair politics junkies love. But it goes beyond that, becoming something of a handy guidebook and roadmap grassroots activists working to align their local efforts into something larger. (Dean campaign veteran and TechPresident contributor Zephyr Teachout’s widely recommended new Mousepads, Shoe Leather and Hope looks like it takes up the similar line of argument.)

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So how did women candidates do on November 4? According to Linda Feldmann’s Christian Science Monitor report “Women make modest gains in Election 2008,” women candidates netted 1 US Senate seat, 3 House of Reps seats, and a .50 percent pick up in all the state legislatures combined. The NH Senate became the first state legislature in U.S. history to become majority female with 13 of 24 seats. According a report by to the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers, the net gains in state legislatures are “entirely due to an increase in Democratic women.” CAWP reports a net gain of one woman governor and 6 female secretaries of state — all Dems. No data yet on women mayors, who were 16.2 percent of all mayors of cities with more than 30K residents before the election.

Most of us have had our fill of red state/blue state electoral vote maps during the last couple of weeks. But there is just one more that merits a gander, Princeton Election Consortium‘s size-distorted EV map of the U.S. It looks a little dada, but it nonetheless provides a more realistic view of political muscle in presidential races.
Charles Franklin’s “White Vote for Obama in the States, Part II” at Pollster.com concludes his statistical wrap-up on the topic (Part I is here). It will undoubtedly be studied avidly by students of racial attitudes.
Bob Moser, one of the more optimistic analysts of southern politics, writes on “A New, Blue Dixie” in The Nation. Says Moser:

Conventional wisdom advised Democratic presidential candidates to bend over backward to look like “regular” Southern guys–tote a gun, adopt an accent, pretend to be a NASCAR freak, run around with a Holy Bible tucked under each arm and, if all else failed, campaign atop a hay bale (as Michael Dukakis once did in North Carolina). Obama, precisely the kind of Democrat who was supposed to be an impossible sell in the South, eschewed such fakery. He looked South and saw not stereotypes but — wonder of wonders — Americans.

In a related report, Tim Murphy notes at Daily Yonder, via Facing South‘s Chris Kromm, that 32 of the 111 urban counties that shifted Democrat in the presidential vote were based in the South. In another post, Kromm also shows what a powerful force young white voters were in Obama’s NC win.
Poll analyst Nate Silver inks a two book deal with Penguin worth a reported $700K.
David G. Savage’s article, “Who Would Obama Pick for the Supreme Court?” in today’s L.A. Times centers on the probability of a woman appointee and discusses some candidates for Obama’s short list. The article also notes that Obama, more of a legal scholar than perhaps all other U.S, Presidents, has made remarks indicating he may favor moderates over judicial activists.
For a 3-point race that has national implications, the reporting on the GA Senate run-off is embarrassingly weak in today’s daily rags across the state. But The Media Consortium has a “Georgia Run-Off Newsladder” that serves as a good gateway to recent reporting on the race, thanks to the research of Spencer Kent and Robert Harding. See also the Daily Kos postings on ‘GA-Sen’, especially RUKind’s article, “Saxby ‘Sugar’ Shameless” for an informative update on Chambliss’s role in the Imperial Sugar Case. And MyDD‘s demoinesdem has a list of five things you can do to help elect Jim Martin, followed by insightful comments from readers.
Peter Hart and David Gergen have some perceptive comments on “How Obama Won” in their dialogue at Rolling Stone.
Just in case you thought that impressive Democratic victories in ’06 and ’08 would lead to more equitable coverage on the telly, ‘Political Animal’ Steve Benen has a Washington Monthly post showing that the Sunday political yak shows still have a strong conservative bias in their guest lists.

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.

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.

With all of the day before the election polls in, Pollster.com’s Steve Lombardo is hanging tough with a 311 EV projection for Obama (270 wins), with 227 for McCain. Lombardo is also forecasting a 6 point popular vote edge for Obama, nationwide, close enough to the 7-point lead predicted by Nate Silver and the final Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll of LV’s (GQR believes it could be +9 points by tomorrow). Lombardo’s forecast is less optimistic than Bowers’ 338 EV’s, but all of the data points to a comfortable Democratic margin of victory.
It’s hard to imagine the emotional roller coaster the Obama family is experiencing with the sad news today of the death of his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who was so important in shaping his character. But she died knowing she raised, not only a future president, but a leader who has given hope and inspiration to millions.

Poll analyst Mark Blumenthal posted an early update this morning on 15 polls he has been tracking, and he cites a “very slight narrowing” of Obama’s lead in “key battleground states.” As of about 7:00 a.m., his forecast of 311 electoral votes for Obama vs. 142 for McCain, with 85 ev’s still a “toss-up” remained unchanged. Blumenthal will post another update this evening reflecting polls coming in today.

One day out, Chris Bowers, who has followed Senate race polls closely at Open Left, is predicting a solid 7-seat pick-up for Dems. In his analysis, based on poll averages, he explains:

Polling shows that we are going to win Alaska, Colorado, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia. Polling, plus huge early voting numbers, shows that we are going to win North Carolina and Oregon, too. Given that we aren’t going to lose any seats, that makes seven pickups. Overall, that gives Democrats 57 seats (with Sanders), plus maybe Lieberman, plus Biden as a tie-breaker. That will be enough to pass Obama’s agenda.

Bowers sees MN as “a real toss-up,” but has doubts about Martin winning a run-off in GA. (But hey, what if Obama and Sam Nunn campaign hard for him?)

Avi Zenilman’s Politico article. “Dems’ Firewall: Secretary of State Offices,” reports on a largely overlooked story of campaign ’08. As Zenilman explains it,

In anticipation of a photo-finish presidential election, Democrats have built an administrative firewall designed to protect their electoral interests in five of the most important battleground states.
The bulwark consists of control of secretary of state offices in five key states — Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio — where the difference between victory and defeat in the 2004 presidential election was no more than 120,000 votes in any one of them.

Dem secretaries of state in battleground states are now “better positioned” to prioritize voter registration and increase turnout and perhaps more importantly, to interpret and administer election law, adds Zenilman. His article spotlights the big difference Ohio Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has made in making it hard for Republicans to steal votes this year, and Seyward Darby has more on Brunner’s efforts in his New Republic article , “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.”
Zenilman credits an independent 527 group, The Secretary of State (“SOS”) Project for raising $500,000 that helped win ’06 secretary of state races for Democrats, along with ActBlue, which contributed $24,000 to help elect Democrat Mary Herrera to the SOS post in NM. The Project sees a good chance to elect Dem SOS candidates tomorrow in MO, MT, OR and WV.

TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and Democracy Corps has a very interesting response to a memo by McCain’s lead pollster, Bill McInturff, which made a case that McCain is on track for an upset win on Tuesday. Greenberg’s letter follows:
Dear Bill,
I very much enjoyed your spirited note on the state of the race and Barack Obama’s “ballot position.” It reminds me how much I miss our times working together on the bipartisan polls for NPR and for many of our corporate clients. I miss in particular the banter before those meetings when your Republican colleagues fretted over their teenage children going off to Obama rallies.
Using your last four days of tracking polls in your battleground states and your underlying analysis you conclude that “this is a hard election to predict” because of the unprecedented interest and likely turnout, and that “all signs say we are headed to an election that may easily be too close to call by next Tuesday.” You get there by underscoring a number of emerging patterns – “what we know for sure.” First, “The McCain campaign has made impressive strides over the last week of tracking.” Second, that the campaign is “functionally tied across the battleground states.” Third, “the key number in our mind is Senator Obama’s level of support,” which is dropping below 50 percent, with good reason to believe that Obama “gets what he gets in the tracking” – with few prospects of more votes from the undecided, African Americans or turnout patterns. Fourth, that Obama’s margin over McCain is “beginning to approach margin of error with a week left.” Fifth, McCain is achieving breakthroughs with “soft Democrats,” “Wal-Mart women” and an “impressive pop” with independents. And finally, that “Joe the Plumber” has astounding recognition and changed the debate on taxes and the economy.
All of us Greenberg Quinlan Rosner were in awe of the boldness of these assertions, as they, we are sure, honestly reflect the data, show a nuanced use of language and topics, and weave a story that almost gets to the conclusions that this race is opening up, unpredictable, and closing, without formally saying those things. What is interesting is that some of the findings match ours, but with a fuller picture, take us to a different close.
We wanted to take this opportunity to discuss the “things we know for sure”

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