Nate Silver explains a much discussed topic, “Which Polls Fared Best (and Worst) in the 2012 Presidential Race”
At the Tampa Bay Times, Mary Ellen Klas addresses a question on the minds of many in FL and elsewhere, “Could Democrats tap Charlie Crist to unseat Gov. Rick Scott in 2014?” It’s not only Scott’s status as poster-boy for voter suppression and blame for long lines at Florida polls. It’s also “The decision to cancel the high speed rail: “$2.4 billion, tens of thousands of jobs in a struggling economy;” The governor’s failure to accept federal stimulus money: “we are a donor state; it was morally right to take that money;” The pending standoff over health care reform: “defies common sense.”
To get a sense of the importance of gerrymandering in the Republicans’ maintaining their House of Reps majority, note that Democratic House candidates got more popular votes than their Republican opponents, according to Aaron Blake at The Fix.
Also at The Fix, Chris Cillizza and Jon Cohen have some interesting stats about Obama and white voters: Obama’s 39 percent showing among white voters matched the percentage that Bill Clinton received in 1992 — albeit it in a competitive three-way race — and exceeded the percentage of the white vote earned by Walter Mondale in 1984, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George McGovern in 1972….In fact, the white vote as a percentage of the overall electorate has declined in every election since 1992.
Alan Fram has a good update at HuffPo on prospects for filibuster reform.
Despite the Republicans’ thinly-veiled meme that President Obama’s campaign dissed whites, WaPo columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. makes the point that Obama’s victory coalition was a model of diversity: “Yes, he won African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans overwhelmingly. But the exit poll also shows that 32 percent of Obama’s voters were white women and 24 percent of them were white men, while 23 percent were African-American men and women, and 14 percent were Latinos. This is a genuinely diverse alliance. ”
Much buzz about the epic failure of Romney’s ‘Project Orca’ voter monitoring and GOTV app.
Krugman makes a solid case for ignoring, no, booting the ‘deficit scolds.’ It’s like this: “…deficits are actually a good thing when the economy is deeply depressed, so deficit reduction should wait until the economy is stronger. As John Maynard Keynes said three-quarters of a century ago, “The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity…the deficit scolds, while posing as the nation’s noble fiscal defenders, have in practice shown themselves both hypocritical and incoherent. They don’t deserve to have a central role in policy discussion; they really don’t even deserve a seat at the table. And they certainly don’t deserve to have one of their own appointed as Treasury secretary. ”
As much as we enjoy watching Karl Rove hem, haw and squirm about the hundreds of millions of dollars squandered on Romney and failed senatorial candidates, Chris Kromm’s “Did Big Money really lose this election? Hardly” at Facing South makes the sobering point that big money was quite effective further down-ballot.
For a final schadenfreude wallow before you get to work building the future, check out Lauren Kelley’s Alternet post, “5 Very Bad Things That Happened to Karl Rove in Just 2 Days.”