It’s now just a matter of time til the presidential election is called for Barack Obama. But I have to admit some dissapointment that Obama lost Georgia pretty decisively, and that Jim Martin lost the Senate race in that state. I fear my concerns about a racial backlash in the Peach State may have been accurate. Obama appears to have barely exceeded John Kerry’s anemic share of the white vote in GA, and the increased African-American vote, and the increased Democratic share of that vote, wasn’t enough.

Like most Democrats, I’m in a pretty good mood today, and expecting a very good evening. But I did read something this morning that set my teeth on edge, which I might as well get out of my system before the inevitable reconciliatory post-election period sets in.
In an article laying out a variety of scenarios going forward, the venerable Carl Cannon includes this one:

The nation experiences another relatively close election, its fifth in a row if you factor out the muddying presence of Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996. In the end, Barack Obama wins a clear-cut victory. The Electoral College follows the popular vote, which most likely would mean that Obama wins in the neighborhood of 52-46, with Bob Barr and Ralph Nader picking up 2 percent between them, and with at least 350 Electoral College votes going to the Democratic ticket. In a gracious concession speech, McCain does not allege that media bias defeated him, and extends a hand of friendship to Obama. During the transition, President-elect Obama reciprocates by offering McCain a cabinet position. On Inauguration Day, Sarah Palin announces her 2012 presidential bid.

What bugs me isn’t the electoral forecast, or the Palin ’12 reference, but instead, the idea that Barack Obama should make the gracious gesture of offering John McCain a cabinet post. Perhaps as a Christian and a national unifier Obama should forgive the nasty and borderline-racist tone of the McCain-Palin campaign down the stretch, but none of us should forget it. I certainly won’t.
I know that some Democrats, many pundits, and most Republicans wouldn’t agree with my assessment of McCain’s campaign, particularly the attribution of race-baiting. Maybe I’m just a race-sensitive white southerner of a certain age who always hears echoes of George Wallace in a certain kind of Republican rhetoic. But by the very end of this campaign, the racial undertones were pretty hard to ignore.
Through early September, when McCain was refusing to run ads on Jeremiah Wright, I thought maybe he really was the decent guy I’d always thought him to be on subjects other than war and peace. But then, when the financial crisis broke out, he embraced the obnoxious right-wing conspiracy theory that the whole mess was the result of an unholy combination of Wall Streeters, congressional Democrats, Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, and ACORN, all under the aegis of the Community Reinvestment Act, who were determine to give shiftless poor and minority people mortgages they couldn’t or wouldn’t pay.
Turns out that was just an appetizer. The entire Joe the Plumber minidrama–sort of a campaign within the campaign–was linked to McCain’s attacks on Obama’s “socialist” and “redistributionist” tax plan, which McCain finally began describing as “welfare” because low-income working families without income tax liability (but with payroll tax liability) would benefit, echoing a favorite tirade of Tom DeLay.
Now some people, even some Democrats, don’t think that was race-baiting, but rather some sort of rational argument about the macroeconomic effects of marginal tax rates on small business people. If that’s all it was, then it certainly didn’t make any political sense, as Matt Yglesias has pointed out:

It’s fascinating to me how McCain, who spent so much of 1999-2005 at loggerheads with elements of the conservative base, keeps forgetting the distinction between things that make the base excited and things that help his campaign. Sarah Palin is the obvious example, but Joe is in some ways a deeper and truer example. The idea behind the Joe the Plumber saga is that Barack Obama would be bad for people like Joe, a small business owner who is (putatively) prosperous enough to be hit by Obama’s tax hikes on people with over $250,000 in annual income. Of course Joe doesn’t actually earn that much. But if he had, Joe would just be the very model of a hard-core Republican. Whites are more Republican than non-whites. Men are more Republican than women. Small business owners are more Republican than any other occupational group. High-income people are more Republican than are middle-class and poor people. And among white people, those with no college degree are more Republican than those with college degrees.

If, on the other hand, you think the Joe the Plumber gambit was not really about economics, but about race, it makes a lot of sense, as appealing to the ancient fear of a certain type of white (and usually male) working-class voter that Democrats want to tax them to give “welfare” to “those people.” At a time when virtually everyone figured McCain’s strategy was to peel off the kind of white working-class voter who famously spurned Obama in the Democratic primaries, with race clearly being a factor, it’s amazing to me that more observers didn’t make the obvious connection, particularly when McCain did the full monty of racial appeals by caterwauling about imaginary “voter fraud” threats.
Now maybe it’s all a coincidence, and John McCain happened to be simultaneously concerned about poor and minority people getting mortgages they didn’t deserve, poor and minority people getting “welfare” through the tax system, and poor and minority people stealing elections–all at the expense of the hard-working white man from the swing state of Ohio, Joe the Plumber. McCain never even mentioned race, after all. But for those of you old enough to remember the heydey of racial politics, that means nothing. George Wallace used to rant about “bureaucrats” forcing businesses to “hire a certain number of Chinese.” Everybody understood he wasn’t talking about Chinese.
So for my money, count me out on support of any immediate post-election love for John McCain, Sarah Palin (who went down this road before McCain, possibly encouraging him to follow), the McCain-Palin campaign staff, and the conservative commentators who encouraged the worst innuendoes of the Joe the Plumber theatrics. There are plenty of decent and honorable Republicans and conservatives in this country; let Obama and Democrats reach out to them first.

Another good election night resource is a guide published yesterday by The American Prospect. Among its virtues is a section on ballot initiatives written by Dana Goldstein.
As Dana notes, there are two ballot initiatives on the subject of abortion. One, in CO, is so extreme an abortion ban that even cultural conservatives are divided on it; it won’t pass. But another, in SD, is a revised version of the abortion ban statute overturned by a ballot intiative two years ago. It incorporates some of the exceptions whose absence was the centerpiece of the successful campaign to repeal the earlier ban. And polls show a very close vote is likely. It’s mainly symbolic until such time, if ever, that Roe v. Wade is overturned. But it could be a dress rehearsal for what we’ll see across the nation if Roe ever does succumb to a slightly more conservative Supreme Court.
Other ballot initiatives include two (in CO and NE) representing Ward Conerly’s endless franchise operation aimed at banning affirmative action programs. And there are even, believe it or not, some progressive ballot initiatives, including a clean energy mandate in MO, and an animal cruelty ban in CA.
But as always in recent years, the biggest ballot initiative topic is on gay marriage. In AZ, in a parallel development to the abortion ban in SD, conservatives lost a ballot initiative in 2006 because its gay marriage ban would have also denied domestic partnership rights for gay and straight couples alike. Today’s initiative sticks to gay marriage, and may well pass. And in FL, a ban on both gay marriage and domestic partnerships appears to have majority support, but may well fail since the state constitution requires a 60% vote.
The huge ballot initiative fight, of course, is over California’s Proposition 8, aimed at reversing the state supreme court decision that legalized gay marriage in that state. Richard Kim has a good summary of that fight in The Nation today. Here’s a sample:

Right now, polls show the measure as a toss-up. The money is dead even too. When all is said and done, both sides will have raised more than $35 million each–more than $70 million in all–making it the second most expensive race of 2008, second only to the presidency. A sizable minority of this money has come from out of state: from gay activists, celebrities and business leaders on the No side; and from the holy alliance of Mormons, Catholics (the Knights of Columbus) and Christian evangelicals (Focus on the Family, American Family Association, Concerned Women for America and Elsa Prince, mother of Blackwater founder Erik Prince) for the Yes team. As California goes, so goes the nation.

We’ll see about that, but in any event, if the presidential race is called early, and you get bored with congressional results, keep a sleepy eye on the Prop. 8 results.

Over at Swing State Project, DavidNYC has posted an extremely useful map and chart of poll closing times correlated with key House, Senate and state legislative races.
It also shows how early we could see decisive results in the presidential race. Polls close at 7:00 EST in Indiana (6:00 in the eastern time zone portion of the state) and Virginia, and at 7:30 in Ohio and North Carolina. Florida, Pennsylvania and Missouri close at 8:00 EST. If the networks call any of these states for Barack Obama, it will be very difficult for John McCain to win.

While most of the national attention has been focused on the presidential election, with some on the Democratic drive to make major gains in the Senate, a dramatic shift in the House looks increasingly likely as well. A rare second straight “wave” election for Democrats is now probable, and gains could possibly match or exceed the 31 seats picked up in 2006.
Four months ago I was on a panel with Cook Political Report House editor David Wasserman, and he was then projecting relatively modest Democratic gains in the neighborhood of 10 seats or so. As of his latest update, Wasserman’s now predicting Democratic gains between 24-30 seats. Just as interestingly, the Cookies’ analysis of battleground districts shows the extent to which the House map is being played out on Republican turf. Of 58 competitive races (defined as those that are leaning D or R, or are tossups), 42 are in Republican districts, and only 16 in Democratic districts. Even more astoundingly, 30 of 35 tossup races are in Republican-held districts.
As Democracy Corps has been showing all year in its polling of relatively vulnerable Republican districts, Democrats have maintained and then expanded an advantage in the top tier of 20 battleground seats, and are highly competitive in a second and third tier. Despite constant GOP efforts to identify House Democrats with the status quo, voters continue to perceive Republicans as the party resisting needed change.
What’s most shocking about the likely outcome of House races tomorrow is that as recently as four years ago, the conventional wisdom in Washington held that gerrymandering virtually guaranteed a Republican majority in the House until the next redistricting round after 2010. Even taking the low end of Wasserman’s projections for Democratic gains, we’d have Democrats holding a 259-175 margin in the House. That’s a hair under 60%. Amazing.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

In the counting-chickens-before-they-hatch department today, Politico’s Mike Allen has the first of what will soon be many comprehensive reports on the early buzz about key cabinet and staff appointments in an Obama Administration.
Get used to ignoring these things, for a while at least. Team Obama’s famously leak-proof character means there’s unlikely to be any hard information on their staffing plans until they are just about ready to be publicly disclosed. It also means that most “predictions” will be the result of uninformed if rational speculation, or worse yet, of self-promotion by candidates for high office who seek to offset their lack of influence with Obama by stimulating Beltway buzz.
Looking over Allen’s list, I see several that just leap off the page as laughably improbable. Within Obama’s campaign and transition operations, there are certainly plenty of veterans of the Clinton administration who remember the damage self-inflicted in late 1992 by public jockeying for jobs among Democrats. I seriously doubt we see anything like that if Barack Obama wins the presidency tomorrow.

While channel surfing very early this morning, I dwelled for a moment at Fox, and heard the usual cawing about the presidential race tightening. But unless I’m mistaken, the pre-spin there seemed half-hearted, as did the talk about an obscure Obama relative living in the country illegally.
We’re now finally at the point where polls have told us everything they have to say, and here’s Nate Silver’s assessment as of 3:00 a.m. today:

McCain’s clock has simply run out. While there is arguable evidence of a small tightening, there is no evidence of a dramatic tightening of the sort he would need to make Tuesday night interesting.
Related to this is the fact that there are now very, very few true undecideds left in this race. After accounting for a third-party vote, which looks as though it will come in at an aggregate of 2 percent or so…I am showing only about 2.7 percent of the electorate left to allocate between the two major-party candidates. Even if John McCain were to win 70 perecnt of the remaining undecideds (which I don’t think is likely), that would only be worth a net of about a point for him. Frankly, McCain’s winning scenarios mainly involve the polls having been wrong in the first place — because of a Bradley Effect or something else. It is unlikely that the polls will “tighten” substantially further — especially when Obama already has over 50 percent of the vote.

When it comes to the state-by-state contests, the situation is even clearer. All of the states that seem to be close at the end of this campaign–FL, MO, OH, NV, NC, IN and VA–are states that John McCain must carry. But even if he carries them all, he still loses.
To sum it all up, if McCain somehow wins, it will produce the largest demolition of the public opinion research profession since Dewey and Truman 60 years ago–perhaps even larger, since the two national pollsters of that era didn’t bother to test opinion during the last week in 1948.

One of the theories behind the proliferation of liberalized early voting is that it will reduce the risk of overwhelmed voting systems on Election Day itself. But this year early voting is being plagued by inadequate numbers of voting places and poll workers, long lines, and system breakdowns. Here’s a disturbing assessment from Evan Perez in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

Millions of voters are braving long lines, delays of two to four hours and sometimes confusing rules to cast their ballots ahead of Tuesday’s election….
At polling stations near Miami, residents have endured waits up to four hours in relatively cold 50-degree weather. Florida and North Carolina have extended polling hours to accommodate large crowds. In Georgia, officials report that more than a quarter of all voters have already cast ballots, despite scattered voting-machine malfunctions that at one station kept people waiting in line until after midnight.

As J.P. Green noted here a few days ago, much of this situation is attributable to Republican-administered election systems, and is disporportionately affecting minority voters. And even if it’s not directly attributable to conscious voter suppression, the only alternative explanation is incompetence born of indifference, or of cynical assumptions about the civic engagment of minority citizens.
It’s also a situation that begs for a national solution, if not this year, then as soon as is possible. In a Washington Post op-ed last week, Christopher Edley Jr. made a simple but elegant case for action:

In 2001, former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford led a commission, of which I was a member, to dissect the previous year’s voting fiasco in Florida. Many of our recommendations found their way into the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Disappointingly, Congress failed to create an explicit and easily enforceable prohibition against grossly disproportionate resource allocations between polling places in the same state or even the same county — the level of government at which, preposterously, we typically finance and administer elections. This localism means that the infrastructure of democracy vies for resources with potholes, parks, sheriffs and firefighting. It also means that locally powerful communities get better service on something that — above all else — is supposed to be scrupulously equal in this country.
Even without a new statute, there are enough plausible legal theories on this to boggle the mind. Voting is a fundamental right, but as I saw on the Carter-Ford commission and again as a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Election Day resource disparities have enormously different racial and class impacts that are based on the dynamics of power and poverty. In election cycle after cycle, registrars act surprised when problems crop up disproportionately in poor neighborhoods. If there isn’t enough money to run decent elections everywhere, Americans should share the pain equally.
We have the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution, with a rich history of helpful Supreme Court rulings, including even Bush v. Gore’s solicitude in 2000 for Florida voters being treated differently and arbitrarily in the administration of elections. We have the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Individual states have their own constitutional provisions guaranteeing “equal protection” and “due process,” so state attorneys general can and should add pressure.

I’m all for lawyering up on Election Day if the absurd and discriminatory inadequacy of voting administration matches what we’ve seen both in the past, and in some of the early voting sites. But without question, if despite the best efforts of the GOP we wind up with a Democratic president and a strongly Democratic Congress next Tuesday, true election reform at the national level finally needs to happen.

Four days out from Election Day, there’s not a lot of drama to the presidential race. The national tracking polls are relatively stable, with maybe a slight drift towards McCain. Only outliers (yesterday, “traditional” Gallup and Zogby, and today, Fox) have the race close to the margin of error. The state polls consistently show Obama with a comfortable electoral vote lead. Among conservative opinion-leaders, the mood is subtly shifting from the desparate search for evidence that McCain’s steadily closing the gap, to self-consolation that he’s kept the race relatively close despite all his disadvantages.
But as Ezra Klein noted yesterday, there’s a feeling of anxiety among many Democratic gabbers and activists right now that something could go terribly wrong next Tuesday. Ezra suggests there’s not much evidence to support such fears, and that even if McCain winds up doing exceptionally well among undecided voters, he’s probably too far behind to close the deal.
I’d argue that aside from congenital and well-earned Democratic pessimism based on past close elections, there may be two factor underlying this anxiety. The first is obvious enough: race. With the McCain campaign heavily relying on submerged and not-so-submerged racial appeals, old fears about the willingness of white Americans to elect an African-American president have bubbled up.
The second factor is more subtle: personal emotional investment in Obama. Some Democrats have long considered Obama a phenomenal, once-in-a-generation leader who can be “transformational;” others have reached this conclusion more recently. Still others simply think it’s imperative, in an unprecedented way, that the GOP lock on the White House is terminated this year, for reasons ranging from Supreme Court appointments to foreign policy.
That hasn’t always been the case. I can say from personal experience that I’ve only had a strong emotional, as opposed to professional or ideological, investment in the outcome of two presidential elections: 1992 and 2004. And those two Election Nights represented the ultimate highs and lows.
In 1992, I had the ineffable joy of sitting in Atlanta’s premier political watering hole, Manuel’s Tavern, surrounded by members of a class I was teaching, as Georgia was called for Bill Clinton about two minutes after the polls closed. In 2004, the bad news came to me in the form of a wee-hours conversation with a friend of mine who was working for John Kerry in Florida, and told me: “We’re done in Florida, and we’re done nationally,” finally dashing the illusions born of faulty exit polls.
Other Democrats have had similar experiences, more negative than positive, usually. Many were more wrenched by the endless and ultimately maddening drama of 2000 than with the near-miss of 2004. But virtually all of us seem transfixed by this year’s election, and what it might portend. That can produce anxiety, which will only be relieved when all the votes are in, and we–that’s how most of us feel about it–have prevailed.