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.

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.

On Election Night, I noted that Barack Obama’s was winning the highest percentage of the popular vote for any Democrat since 1964.
But if you put aside LBJ’s historic landslide, you have to go back another twenty years to find another Democratic candidate who won as much as Obama’s 53% of the popular vote: FDR in 1944, who won 53.4% of the vote.

It’s obvious that John McCain tried to make Barack Obama’s tax policies the decisive issue–with large undertones of racial politics at or just under the surface–down the homestretch of the campaign. So what do the exit polls tell us about the impact of his argument that Obama wanted to raise taxes on many if not most middle-class Americans?
Well, asked if “your taxes will go up if Obama wins,” 71% of voters said “yes,” even though Obama argued that only 5% of Americans would be exposed to a tax increase under his plan. So McCain succeeded brilliantly on this issue, right? Well, not so much, since 61% of voters said their taxes would go up if the Republican won. And among those expecting a tax increase under an Obama administration, McCain only won by a relatively modest 53-44 margin.
There are all sorts of ways to interpret these findings. Maybe McCain got purchase with his claims that Obama had supported tax increases on the middle class in some obscure budget resolution vote. Maybe Obama’s hammering of McCain for wanting to tax employer-provider health care benefits had a big effect. Maybe voters cynically believed that all politicians secretly want to raise their taxes. Or maybe they thought conditions in the country would require tax increases.
But in any event, it’s reasonably clear that the tax issue, and all the racially loaded Joe the Plumber folderol that accompanied it, was not any sort of potential, much less actual, game-changer for the McCain-Palin ticket. Many millions of Americans bought the supposedly toxic idea that their taxes might go up if Obama won, and either didn’t care, or figured it wasn’t really a distinguishing issue between the two candidates.

We will all obviously be affected by the election results on November 4, some more directly than others. But it’s hard to argue that much of anyone will be so immediately and emotionally affected as the thousands of gay couples who got married in California since same-sex ceremonies became legal on June 17–and who now face official nullification of their marital bonds via the narrowly passed initiative Proposition 8.
Lawsuits have already been launched in California courts to overturn Prop 8 on the highly complex grounds that it represents a “revision” rather than an “amendment” of the state constitution (loose translation: constitutional initiatives must be specific enough so as not to represent a broad-based assault on fundamental rights or judicial prerogatives).
Eugene Volokh has posted a pretty thorough discussion of this challenge, and predicts it will fail based on earlier precedents. In a separate post, he also discusses and rejects the theory that Prop 8 will be held not to apply to existing marriages, either because that would abrogate existing contracts, or because some Prop 8 supporters claimed they had not intention of having that effect. Since the plain language of Prop 8 prohibits “recognition” of same-sex marriages, that seems a reasonable conclusion. (Volokh also suggests that married gay couples will probably be automatically recognized as domestic partners, a status unaffected by the initiative).
How many people are we talking about here? According to one estimate, as of September 17, three months after gay marriages became legal in California, 11,000 couples had tied the knot. You’d have to figure the numbers stayed pretty high in the six weeks between September 17 and election day, if only because couples knew the door to their nuptials might soon slam shut.

Once everyone’s through with slicing and dicing the election returns and pondering the meaning of Barack Obama’s victory, a major topic for the chattering classes will be the ideological complexion of the Democratic congressional caucuses. This is especially true of the House, where more leftbent progressives have been preoccupied for some time with efforts to curb the influence of party moderates and the moderate-to-conservative Blue Dog Coalition.
It will take some time to figure this all out, but one leading indicator involves candidates endorsed by the more ideologically inclined groups on both sides of the intraparty argument.
According to Chris Bowers of OpenLeft, five members of ActBlue’s BetterDemocrats list of reliably progressive House candidates were among those who won Republican seats last night: Alan Grayson of FL, Eric Massa of NY, Joshua Segall of AL, Tom Perriello of VA, and Gary Peters of MI. Two others, Darcy Burner of WA and Charlie Brown of CA, are in very close races that haven’t yet been decided.
Meanwhile, according to an email from Blue Dog Coalition communications director Kristen Hawn, they’re claiming Bobby Bright of AL and Walt Minnick of ID, who won Republican seats, plus Frank Kradovil of MD, who’s in an undecided race. But of the four incumbent Democrats who lost, two (Nick Lampson of TX and Tim Mahoney of FL) were officially Blue Dogs, while the other two (Nancy Boyda of KS and Don Cazayoux of LA) were closely aligned with the Blue Dogs.
With Democrats making–so far–a net gain of 21 seats, this accounting-by-endorsement method leaves a majority of new Members unaccounted for. Many of them, I would guess from limited knowledge of anything other than their districts, are probably standard-brand Democrats who will largely follow the leadership and aren’t factional by nature. But it does cast some doubt on the widespread assumption than an expanded Caucus would necessarily involve a tilt to the center or right.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

I’m still staring at exit polls, but an old friend who’s a bit ahead of me, TIME’s Amy Sullivan, has an interesting piece out about the white evangelical vote. The bottom line is that while Obama didn’t do terribly well in this voting demographic, his numbers were significantly higher in battleground states such as CO, IN and MI where his campaign had a serious outreach effort to evangelicals.
The personal touch helps, particularly among folk who might otherwise think your candidate is the Antichrist.

Now that Indiana has been called for Barack Obama, that makes two states–the other being Virginia–which went Democratic for the first time since 1964. And speaking of 1964, Obama’s 52% of the national popular vote is the highest any Democrat has won since 1964. Mention that to the next GOPer you hear arguing that Obama didn’t really do all that well.

As the final results begin to dribble in, we are learning anew about crucial state and even local variations in how certain ballots are counted. This is particularly true of early/absentee ballots, which some places count first, some last, and some mixed in with Election Day votes.
In my home state of Georgia, big sacks of uncounted early votes seem to be turning up around metro Atlanta. In the one precise account we have, Fulton County (Atlanta) officials are acknowledging that they sent “exhausted” election workers home last night with about 12,000 early votes still untabulated. This news surfaced at about the same time that Republican Senator Saxby Chambless’ vote totals slipped just under the 50% necessary to avoid a runoff in Georgia’s strange system (creating an extra hangover for GOPers who prematurely celebrated a Chambliss win last night).
There are unconfirmed rumors of uncounted early votes elsewhere in metro Atlanta. But unless offset, the Fulton County ballots should guarantee a runoff, given the heavy African-American tilt of early voting in that county. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, this would be a major boon to newly unemployed campaign workers from both parties, who will flood the Peach State for the next four weeks. The CW is that Republicans always win these sort of stand-alone runoffs (that’s exactly what happened in the last statewide general election runoff in Georgia, in 1992), but it’s hard to say what will happen if Barack Obama campaigns personally for Jim Martin and Democrats outspend Republicans as heavily as they probably can.

Democrats had a very good, though not sensational, election night below the presidential level. The hope that a decisive presidential win would push Democrats over the edge in every close race was not realized, but the fact remains that the Donkey Party now has impressive majorities in the Senate, the House, the governorships, and state legislative chambers.
As expected, Dems picked up Senate seats in NH, VA, NM and CO without breaking a sweat. Kay Hagan’s big win in NC was a bit less predictable. The race everyone considered a true tossup, MN, ended that way; last time I looked, Norm Coleman led Al Franken by 700 votes with scattered precincts still out, and there will definitely be an automatic recount.
With significant votes still out, Gordon Smith of Oregon is hanging onto a narrow lead in a race most expected him to lose. In a true shocker, convicted felon Ted Stevens of Alaska holds a tiny lead over Mark Begich with a small but unknown number of votes remaining to be counted. And there’s one other shoe that could fall: in GA, Saxby Chambliss’ totals are hovering just above 50% amidst confused reports that a lot of early voting ballots haven’t been counted. If he slips below 50%, he could face a December 2 runoff against Democrat Jim Martin.
If Republicans win all the nail-biters, Democrats would still have a net gain of five Senate seats, and most obviously, will no longer need Joe Lieberman’s vote to control the chamber.
There are still eleven House seats undecided, but at present, Democrats have a net gain of 20 seats, and will probably wind up at the low end of what most experts predicted. Republicans contained their losses in part by knocking off four Democratic incumbents, including three (in TX, KS and LA) representing districts that went heavily for McCain. There were some very satisfying Democratic wins over long-time targets, such as Chris Shayes of CT (the sole remaining GOP House member in New England), Robin Hayes of NC, and Marilyn Musgrave of CO. VA produced the biggest single-state gains, with Dems winning an open seat in NoVa and beating incumbents in Hampton Roads and central/southside VA.
Democrats won a net gain of one governorship, winning the two closest races in WA (Christine Gregoire) and NC (Beverly Perdue).
And according to our buddy Matt Compton at the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, Democrats won control of five new legislative chambers: Delaware House, Ohio House, Wisconsin Assembly, New York Senate, and the Nevada Senate. This means Dems control 60 of the nation’s 98 partisan state legislative chambers.
In ballot initiatives, it was a bad night for marriage equality. Though votes are still out, it appears California’s Proposition 8 won by about three percentage votes, in one of three states where gay marriage is currently legal. Gay marriage bans also passed in AZ and in FL.
In better news, abortion bans lost in CO and most notably in SD. A parental notification restriction lost in CA. Also in CA, a rather weak redistricting reform initiative narrowly won, as did a ban on inhumane treatment of farm animals.