Well, wonders never cease: in the space of just one week, there are two Michael Barone columns that transcend GOP agitprop and add real value to our understanding of the November 4 elections. The second, published by US News today, examines why Barack Obama appears to have a robust lead in PA despite signs of weakness in the Northeast and Southwest quadrants of the state.
The simple answer is that Obama’s holding an enormous lead in Southeast PA, where Gore and Kerry’s Philadelphia leads were partially offset by GOP voters in the Philly suburbs. And Obama’s strength in those suburbs, suggests Barone, is probably a function of collapsing home prices, which disproportionately affect upscale voters:

High-income, high-education voters in the suburbs of big metro areas, my hypothesis goes, are preoccupied with long-term wealth accumulation—and react sharply against the Republican Party when their wealth is suddenly sharply diminished when there is a Republican president. Modest-income, modest-education voters in less affluent surroundings, it seems judging from McCain’s relatively good showing in Pennsylvania outside the heavily populated southeast, react much less sharply, because they have never expected to accumulate all that much in the way of wealth anyhow, consider themselves reasonably well protected by the existing safety net and feel free to vote (as more affluent Philly suburbanites have done in better times) on the basis of their opinions (conservative in their case) on cultural issues.

This is the same phenomenon that afflicted George H.W. Bush in certain suburban areas (particularly California and New England) in 1992. It’s a lot more pervasive now than then.
We’ve already known for a while that Democratic gains this year appear likely to rest on winning upscale, college-educated voters, while reducing losses among non-college educated white voters. Barone offers one reason why that is happening.
To be clear, Barone partially ruins his column by concluding with a lot of deeply annoying and anachronistic comparisons of a future Obama administration to the disastrous John Lindsay tenure as mayor of New York. But as long as he limits himself to staring at numbers, he’s still occasionally worth reading.

For Democrats, one of the fun things about the runup to November 4 has been the atmosphere of “precriminations” among Republicans getting ready to spin a likely top-to-bottom defeat. Some GOPers are simply blaming the McCain campaign’s ineptitude, with the Palin choice figuring large, small, or even countervailing in their accounts of what went wrong.
But the more important intra-Republican debate is over the party’s ideology, and Ross Douthat has done a good job reporting and then rebutting the movement conservative spin, as expressed by Rush Limbaugh.
Douthat makes a lot of sense, but given the exceptional dominance of conservative opinion by people like Limbaugh, I strongly suspect that the prevailing conservative post-election spin will be that John McCain failed to campaign as a conservative, just as George W. Bush failed to govern as a conservative. In the long run, this will contribute to a state of denial that will thwart Republicans. In the short run, it helps guarantee that Republicans will fight a Barama administration like wolverines. Any GOPer who cooperates with Democrats after January 20 is going to face a lot of wrath from a conservative base who think McCain lost by running against George W. Bush from the Right.

After an extended period of exhibiting relentless optimism about Barack Obama’s prospects on November 4, I have reason to offer one note of pessimism. Having just spent a stretch of time in my home state of Georgia, there are definite signs of a racial backlash developing–against Obama himself, to be sure, but also against the heavy early voting turnout of African-Americans.
Heavy early voting has been a regular local news story in Georgia for several weeks now, and the visuals, along with much of the commentary, has made the disproportionate turnout of African-Americans a centerpiece. And among conservative white folk I’ve talked to, a sense of genuine racial panic seems to be setting in, fed, of course, by the McCain-Palin campaign’s incessant references to Obama’s scary character and ideology. While black turnout in Georgia and across the Deep South is definitely going to be up significantly over 2004, I now think it’s going to be partially offset by higher white turnout.
Now Georgia was always going to be a reach for Obama, but the same dynamics are probably in play in North Carolina, another state where heavy African-American early voting has been in the news:

More than 210,000 blacks who are registered as Democrats have cast early ballots in the Tar Heel State — compared with roughly 174,000 registered Republicans overall. Four years ago, the number of GOP early and absentee voters was more than double that of black Democrats.

African-American early votes have already been “banked,” of course, so I’m not suggesting that any backlash would exceed them in electoral power. But it could be a factor in a close race in NC (less so in Virginia, where restrictive rules on early voting have made it less dominant in campaign reporting).
The phenomenon I’m talking about isn’t, to be clear, any sort of “Bradley Factor,” wherein white voters tell pollsters they are voting for an African-American candidate, while ultimately going the other way. The voters I’m talking about are loud and proud, and sometimes openly racist, about their sentiments. But they may turn out at significantly higher-than-normal levels, as the racial polarization virus spreads.
If I’m right, is this a problem for down-ballot Democrats in GA and NC like Jim Martin and Kay Hagan? Maybe, but maybe not. I talked to several frenetic quasi-racist McCain voters in GA who nonetheless are voting for Martin. They may fear Barack Obama, but they don’t much like Republicans this year.

The latest, and perhaps last, gimmick of the McCain-Palin campaign is to “guarantee” victory. Here’s how John McCain put it on Meet the Press yesterday:

“I guarantee you that two weeks from now, you will see this has been a very close race, and I believe that I’m going to win it,” McCain told interim “Meet” moderator Tom Brokaw. “We’re going to do well in this campaign, my friend. We’re going to win it, and it’s going to be tight, and we’re going to be up late.”

This made a little more sense when Sarah Palin uttered the same guarantee last week. After all, she was in Beaver County, PA, home to Joe Namath, whose 1969 Super Bowl victory “guarantee” was an almost mandatory local reference.
Presumably, these candidates are trying to keep their supporters from despairing at the general signs (phony claims of “tightening race” notwithstanding) that Barack Obama is cruising towards a comfortable if not necessarily overwhelming win next Tuesday. Perhaps it will help build a floor under their vote levels and keep things respectable both at the top of and down the ballot. But there’s only so much that can be accomplished by enthusiasm and optimism. McCain-Palin supporters only get to vote once. And it’s likely there just aren’t enough of them to redeem McCain and Palin’s efforts at rhetorical enchantment.

Earlier this month, I did a post recounting all the reasons it was exceedingly weird to find John McCain doing a campaign appearance in Iowa.
Now, more than two weeks later, with the McCain campaign having told reporters that Iowa is already lost, and with its efforts now being focused on PA, VA, NC, IN, FL, and maybe NH, guess what? Both John McCain and Sarah Palin are going to spend time in Iowa this weekend.
The only thing that’s changed in the last couple of weeks is that the one polling outfit that failed to show Obama ahead in Iowa at any point during the entire year–the Big Ten Battleground consortium–now shows Obama up by 13 points. The RealClearPolitics average of Iowa polls for the last month has Obama up by 12.5 points, and comfortably over 50%.
The irony is that if McCain had shown anything like this sort of stubborn interest in Iowa during the Caucus seasons of 2000 and 2008, he might well be in a position to win the state.
But hey, I’m sure the one person who’s happy about this is Sarah Palin, who may be getting a head start on her 2012 Iowa Caucus campaign.

One of the small but potentially important facts about this year’s election cycle is that Georgia requires general election candidates to receive 50%-plus-one of the vote, or the two two finishers must face off in a runoff four weeks after Election Day. With polls showing incumbent GOP Senator Saxby Chambliss in a very close race with Democrat Jim Martin, there’s already speculation in the Peach State that minor-party voting (mainly the Libertarians) could deny either candidate a majority, setting up a runoff for December 2.
From past experience in Lousiana, where post-general-election runoffs are very common, a December Georgia Senate runoff would attract vast amounts of unexpended party and campaign cash, not to mention the attentions of tens of thousands of staffers and volunteers who will be undergoing campaign withdrawal as of November 5. If the fate of Georgia’s seat happens to determine whether Democrats get a filibuster-proof margin in the Senate, then you could expect the runoff to be a huge deal in national politics, sort of a condensed reprise of the entire election cycle.
Georgia’s had one general-election runoff for a Senate seat in recent years: in 1992, when Republican Paul Coverdell knocked Democratic incumbent Wyche Fowler into a runoff, and then beat him as turnout declined by nearly half (the avoid-the-runoff threshold was soon lowered to 45% by a Democratic controlled state legislature, but was then restored to 50% after GOPers took over the statehouse).
The CW has always been the Republicans have a built-in advantage in stand-alone runoffs thanks to a more affluent and motivated voting base, and usually a sizable money advantage. That may not be the case this year, even in relatively conservative Georgia; the national resources available to a Democrat in such a scenario would certainly be formidable.
Jim Martin (a candidate virtually no one expected to be competitive as recently as a month ago) could save everybody a lot of trouble by beating Saxby Chambliss on November 4 with more than 50% of the vote. Martin has certainly earned a break: two years ago he planned a well-financed and -organized campaign for Lieutenant Governor on the assumption that he’d be facing Ralph Reed, and then Ralph screwed things up by losing his primary. But if both Martin and Chambliss fall a bit short, then hordes of political activists from both parties can start planning on spending Thanksgiving Weekend in Georgia.

The determination of Republicans to get racially-inflected themes embedded in the minds of voters in the home stretch of this presidential campaign is truly impressive. The latest example is the noise being made by the McCain campaign about Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine’s restoration of voting rights to a small number of non-violent felons.
Here’s the Washington Post‘s report on the saga:

On Thursday, the McCain campaign accused Kaine (D), a co-chairman of Obama’s campaign, of restoring voting rights for almost 1,500 felons in an effort to help Obama win Virginia’s 13 electoral votes.
“This is a question of judgment,” said Trey Walker, McCain’s mid-Atlantic regional campaign manager. “Senator Obama and Governor Kaine have assembled a felonious coalition of attempted murderers, kidnappers, rapists, armed robbers and wife beaters in order to win Virginia. This dangerous lack of judgment has no place in the White House.”

The lies here are pretty amazing by any standard. Virginia actually has the strictest standards in the nation for restoration of voting rights by non-violent felons; it’s one of just two states (the other is Kentucky) that permanently disenfranchise all felons, violent or non-violent, with action by the governor being necessary to restore rights. And note the word “non-violent” in terms of Kaine’s actions: Virginia isn’t restoring rights for “attempted murderers, kidnappers, rapists, armed robbers and wife beaters,” as McCain’s flack knows full well.
On top of everything else, all Kaine is doing is restoring the right to register to vote. Some may not exercise it, and there’s no guarantee all of them would vote for Barack Obama. If this was somehow a big part of the Obama effort in Virginia, it would obviously be a whole lot bigger, since as much as one-quarter of the state’s African-American men suffer from permanent disenfranchisement. There’s no question that a sizable percentage of these men would be automatically entitled to vote if they lived in virtually any other state. And in one state–Republican-governed Florida–that like Virginia, requires an application to the Governor, 123,000 non-violent felons have had their voting rights restored since April of last year. By my calculation, that’s about 83 times the number of restorations in Virginia this year.
The fishiest thing about this “story” is why it’s coming up in the final phases of the presidential campaign. The Washington Times published an inflammatory article on this subject three weeks ago, and the McCain campaign refused to comment on it. Now they are out there pushing it hard, as polls consistently show the Republican trailing Obama in Virginia. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

The constant campaign of innuendo suggesting that Barack Obama is some sort of Muslim is well known, and only credible to, well, the extremely credulous. But the other smear-word being aimed at Obama is right out in the open, launched by all sorts of respectable conservatives, and is just as crazy from any objective point of view as the suggestion that the Democratic nominee secretly prays five times a day while facing Mecca: Obama is a socialist!
Google “Obama socialist” and you get 3.6 million links. Blogsearch the same term for a much smaller universe and you get 13,000 links in the last week, and more than two thousand in the last day. Both John McCain and Sarah Palin have used the word “socialism” to describe Obama’s fiscal policies, albeit through fond references to the assessments of their buddy Joe (sic!) the Plumber (sic!).
I’ve been around a while, and can’t recall any other Democratic presidential nominee being tarred with the S-word very often, outside the truly far-right fever swamps. “Liberal,” sure. “Ultra-liberal,” sure. Even “leftist,” sure. But unlike those L-words, “socialism” connotes a pretty specific set of views, mainly involving public ownership of the means of production.
What has Obama said to merit this sudden and massive effusion of red-baiting? His fiscal proposals, the main occasion for all the S-word slinging, basically amount to returning top tax rates to where they were during the Clinton administration. Nobody much called the Big Dog a “socialist,” as opposed to all the others terms of abuse he endured. And the top tax rates proposed by Obama would be a lot lower than they were during the administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford. Yes, the John Birch Society called Ike a communist, but that wasn’t a very common view (conservative intellectual Russell Kirk said: “Ike’s not a communist. He’s a golfer.”).
How’s about Obama’s “socialized medicine” health care proposal? Does that earn him the S-word? C’mon. Surely any socialist worth his salt would propose, as an absolute minimum, a government-run single-payer health care system like that operating in Canada and (in one form or another) Europe. Not Barack Obama, who insists on maintaining private health insurance and consumer choice as the backbone of his plan for universal health coverage.
Since Obama hasn’t proposed nationalizing any major (or minor) industries, and is relying on a resolutely centrist economic policy team, the “socialist” label is, well, simply bizarre, unless the word has no real meaning.
But if there’s anything more incredible than calling Obama a “Muslim” or a “socialist,” it’s calling him a “Muslim socialist,” as a local Republican leader in New Mexico did this week. (It’s not an unusual charge; it was recently hurled directly at Obama by voters in North Carolina, who probably didn’t come up with it by themselves).
It doesn’t take an advanced degree in religion or Middle Eastern Affairs to become at least dimly aware that Islam and socialism are not terribly compatible. And this is particularly true of Jihadist strains of Islam. Al-Qaeda, you may recall, was basically born in the struggle of jihadist against “atheistic communists” in Afghanistan. The Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas, were all developed in violent opposition to secular-leaning socialists in the Muslim world, particularly in Egypt and Palestine. There are rich traditions of Christian socialism and of Jewish socialism, to be sure. But not so much Islamic socialism.
So make up your minds, Obama-haters. There’s not any real evidence to support any of your smears, but if you must use them, pick one and stick with it.

Well, here we are twelve days from the general elections, and only now is the political world focusing on the high likelihood of voter supression shananigans. It would have been nice if the persistence of these tactics had led to national legislation to deal with the national problem of wildly varying, arbitrary, and partisan election administration.
A New York Times editorial on voter-list purges and other voter suppression tactics starkly exposed the situation:

Congress and the states need to develop clear and accurate rules for purges and new-voter verification that ensure that eligible voters remain on the rolls — and make it much harder for partisans to game the system. These rules should be public, and voters who are disqualified should be notified and given ample time before Election Day to reverse the decision.
For this election, voters need to be prepared to fight for their right to cast a ballot. They should try to confirm before Nov. 4 that they are on the rolls — something that in many states can be done on a secretary of state or board of elections Web site. If their state permits it, they should vote early. Any voter who finds that their name has disappeared from the rolls will then have time to challenge mistakes.

Americans shouldn’t have to “fight for their right to cast a ballot.” And we can only hope that after this election, finally, the next president and Congress get serious about election reform.

I’m happy to report that for the first time in quite a few years, I’ve read a piece by Michael Barone that wasn’t ruined by his Republican bias.
It’s a pretty basic article for non-junkies on polling, and it covers issues ranging from the Bradley Effect to exit polls with a brisk competence. The only false note was his suggestion that Barack Obama’s lead in the polls is roughly the same lead Thomas Dewey enjoyed at this point in 1948.
For political people over a certain age, Barone’s devolution into Republican talking points distribution has been a sad development. As co-founder of the Almanac of American Politics, Barone once was (and still could be, if he wanted to) the preeminent objective numbers-cruncher of them all. And indeed, the Almanac itself remained relatively free of Barone’s Republican proclivities until pretty recently (I did a review of the 2006 edition noting the growing starboard tilt of that onetime Bible of Politics).
So it’s nice to find a brief moment when the old Barone–the better Barone–reappears. We’ve missed him.