One of the key lessons of the 2012 election is that it is not how much money Super-PACs spend on a campaign; it’s how the money is invested — and Dems did a damn good job of it, explains Rodell Mollineau at The Daily Beast.
…And this is also gratifying.
California may be providing an instructive lesson for advocates of moderation. Anthony York’s “Election loss has Republicans seeking common ground with Democrats” in the L.A. Times notes a new willingness of business leaders to support moderates. York argues “Democrats now hold a two-thirds supermajority in both the Assembly and Senate, meaning they can pass taxes and place proposals on the statewide ballot without any Republican support…”For the business community, there is a recognition that the best path forward for the state from a governance perspective is with moderate Democrats,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican consultant who advised the California Chamber of Commerce on a number of legislative races this year.” Put another way, the quickest road to more moderate politics lies not in converting Republicans to sweet reason, but in defeating sufficient numbers of them.
And when it comes to big state voter turnout, the west is the best. The formula, according to Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais: “In California, the triple combination of a simple, online registration process, the convenience of voting by mail and the presence on the ballot of issues that directly related to the self-interest of a significant sector of voters brought newcomers to the polls, kept the state’s turnout at a high level (even when California’s electoral vote result was a foregone conclusion) and resulted in no reports of major problems at the polls.”
For revealing critique of the arguments of the economic gurus behind the tea party ideology and perhaps a majority of the Republicans in congress, try Robert M. Solow’s New Republic review article, “Hayek, Friedman, and the Illusions of Conservative Economics” Solow reviews “The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression” by Angus Burgin.
Paul Begala’s “Denialists, Whiners, and Wackjobs” at The Daily Beast provides a useful typology of some GOP leaders.
Mike Lux makes a couple of salient points in his HuffPo post “Can Democrats Retake the House in 2014?,” including: “…Most of the groups, bloggers, money, and talent in the Democratic party and progressive movement was focused elsewhere, on keeping Romney and Republicans in the Senate from running the table and taking over every branch of government. Most people and groups had given up on winning the House months ago and were spending their time, money, and brainpower on the Presidential race and those marquee Senate races like Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin, and Sherrod Brown. We need to create a Manhattan project for retaking the House with the best thinkers, biggest groups, and most influential donors in the party involved.”
At Time Swampland Michael Scherer’s “Friended: How the Obama Campaign Connected with Young Voters” provides a good overview of a key element of Dem strategy.
At The National Review Michael Barone notes some of the eirie similarities in the ’04 and ’12 presidential elections and tries to put an optimistic spin on the numbers to encourage his fellow Republicans about the future. He adds, however, that “…Democrats have a structural advantage in the Electoral College. An extra 2.47 percent of the popular vote netted Obama 80 more electoral votes than Kerry. Obama won 58 percent or more in eleven states and the District of Columbia, with 163 electoral votes. He needed only 107 more to win.”
Sen. Saxby Chambliss, shrewd GOP pillar in the U.S. Senate, has pointedly trashed Norquist’s ‘The Pledge,’ reports Meghashyam Mali at The Hill.

James Rainey asks at the L.A.Times “Did Romney deserve the negative media coverage he received?” I guess my answer would be ‘No. He deserved more negative coverage than that.’
Gone, unfortunately, are the days when the impulse to be charitable towards defeated political adversaries was generally well-received. Partisan hack that I am, I nonetheless wish we could have better reconciliation and and a semblance of bipartisan unity after elections. Constant bickering gets tiresome and, after a hard-fought battle, it’s a commendable human impulse to let bygones fade away and begin relationships anew, using what has been learned to work together more productively for the common good.
Romney couldn’t even manage to be gracious in defeat, whining about “gifts” to pro-Obama constituencies. It’s as if the concept of being magnanimous toward one’s adversary is anathema to the masters of the universe.
Romney is not alone among his GOP brethren in a lack of graciousness towards President Obama in particular. Despite protestations to the contrary, it’s very hard to discount race as a factor in their overarching resentment of the President, so bitter is the tone of the Republican critique of the Administration. But Romney could have set an example of civility and genuine patriotism even in defeat by reaching out to President Obama and offering to help promote reconciliation. But it appears to have been completely out of the question.
Would it be so unacceptable for Romney to make a statement urging his fellow Republicans to respect the President’s 4 million vote victory and offer some bipartisan cooperation? He certainly sounded the bipartisan trumpet loudly enough in the final weeks of his campaign. Doing so now could help heal the divisions in the electorate.
Democrats have not always been exemplars of goodwill when defeated. Our left flank can get pretty acrid when we get beat. But that usually passes and is replaced by a willingness to compromise and cooperate to achieve the best that we can salvage for the common good. That seems to not be on the radar screen of the leaders of today’s GOP, and unfortunately Romney has done nothing to promote healing. He should. That’s how grown-ups resolve bitter conflicts. President Obama should invite him to the white house and give him a chance to reconsider.
it might be a good idea to start a new tradition, in which both presidential candidates do a few joint appearances after every election, focused on the goal of healing the divisions caused by their campaigns. Policy differences will remain, but the loser should always acknowledge that his/her party has an obligation to compromise to some extent.
It may be that such a gesture on Romney’s part would be greeted with cynicism by his party. But in doing so, he would at least be sending a message of reconciliation to his rank and file supporters. That would do some good and serve him well.

Craig Timberg and Amy Gardner have an encouraging read, “Democrats push to redeploy Obama’s voter database” at the Washington Post. As Michael Slaby, the Obama campaign’s ‘chief integration and innovation officer,’ put it: “Though often described as “microtargeting,” Slaby said the most important element was what he called “micro-listening.” I have a hunch Republicans are going to have trouble replicating the Dem’s edge in microtargeting and message testing, since listening well is clearly not a big part of their skill set.
As Messina says “Old-Fashioned Door Knocking Got Better Data Than Online Data Mining,” notes Elizabeth Flock of U.S. News.
At The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin assesses the prospects for filibuster reform.
Interesting: Peyton M. Craighill and Scott Clement report in their WaPo article “Can unions save the white working-class vote for Democrats?” that “At the national level, just 18 percent of voters are union members themselves or live in a house with a member. That’s down six percentage points since 2004 and the lowest level in exit polls back to 1972.” I would say that 18 percent is a pretty sizable constituency.
Wow. John McCain’s nickname should not be “Old Sour Grapes,” as a friend calls him — It should be “Vinegar,” as this revealing report, “The Unhinging of John McCain” by Geoffrey Dunn indicates.
The ratings ass-whupping commeth for Fox news too, courtesy of MSNBC.
This is kind of a knuckleheaded argument, considering that there are more than 6,000 Latino elected officials and more than 45 milion Latinos in the U.S. Also, it wasn’t all that long ago, we saw a guy go from being a lowly state senator with little money and few connections to President of the U.S. in about 5 years.
Oh, please.
The Nation’s Eric Alterman explains how the Romney campaign’s delusions of political grandeur were spoon-fed by the MSM: “Post-truth politics reached a new pinnacle this year as major MSM machers admitted to a lack of concern with the veracity of the news their institutions reported. “It’s not our job to litigate [the facts] in the paper,” New York Times national editor Sam Sifton told the paper’s public editor, Margaret Sullivan, regarding phony Republican “voter fraud” allegations. “We need to state what each side says.” “The truth? C’mon, this is a political convention” was the headline over a column by Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post “fact-checker.”…not only did many members of the MSM give Romney a pass on his serial lying; they actually endorsed his candidacy on the assumption that we need not take seriously any of those statements the candidate had felt compelled to make in order to win the nomination of his party.”
A cartoon for the still-clueless.

A lot of election commentary has focused on the formidable predicament Dems face as a result of GOP gerrymandering in the House of Representatives, resulting in fewer and fewer swing districts. The general consensus is that it has screwed us out of a decent shot at retaking a House majority and dims prospects for moving legislation forward.
Nate Silver, for example, paints a pretty bleak picture of Democratic prospects going forward in his FiveThirtyEight post, “Democrats Unlikely to Regain House in 2014,” explaining:

…Democrats did regain some ground in the House. Although several races remain uncalled, Democrats would wind up with 201 seats in the House if all races are assigned to the current leader in the vote count – an improvement from the 193 seats Democrats held after the 2010 midterm elections. That would leave Democrats needing to pick up 17 seats to win control of the chamber in 2014.
Although 17 seats is not an extraordinary number, both historical precedent in midterm election years and a deeper examination of this year’s results would argue strongly against Democrats being able to gain that many seats.
There is also reason to suspect that Democrats are unlikely to sustain the sort of losses in the House that they did in 2010. But odds are that the electoral climate in 2014 will be somewhere between neutral and Republican-leaning, rather than favoring Democrats.
In midterm election years since World War II, the president’s party has lost an average of 26 seats in the House, as shown in the chart below. The president’s party gained seats only twice, in 1998 and 2002.
…This year, there were only 11 House seats that Democrats lost by five or fewer percentage points. Thus, even if they had performed five points better across the board, they would still have come up six seats short of controlling the chamber.
In other words, Democrats would have to perform quite a bit better in House races in 2014 than they did in 2012 to win control of the chamber – when usually the president’s party does quite a bit worse instead.

As Rob Richie and Devin McCarthy report at Fairvote.org that “52% of Voters Wanted a Democratic House,” yet the GOP kept a comfortable majority of 54% of seats in the House despite Democratic candidates having an overall 4% advantage in voter preference over their Republican opponents.”
At The Hill, Cameron Joseph notes,

According to a recent study by the Center for Voting and Democracy, Democrats start off with 166 safe districts while Republicans start off with 195. There are only 74 true swing districts where the presidential candidates won between 46 and 54 percent of the popular vote, down from 89 before redistricting.
That means the GOP needs to win less than one-third of competitive House seats to stay in control — something that shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish, barring a huge Democratic wave. In a politically neutral year Democrats are likely to have around 203 seats, a number that’s only slightly higher than the number they’ll have once the remaining 2012 races are called.

While historical precedent has been a dependable factor to consider in predicting House election outcomes, there are exceptional elections that bust precedents. Also, the Republican party is more divided than it has been in many decades, and it could get a lot worse. Dems are more united than in a long time, and we can build our edge while Republicans work through their internecine squabbles.
Many pundits were surprised by the pivotal influence of demographic transformation on November 6th and the microtargeting prowess and intensity of Democratic GOTV. Republicans will eventually catch up on microtargeting, but there will be a learning curve of some duration for them, during which Dems can gain ground in swing districts.
One significant obstacle is that many of the most skilled Dem GOTV operatives will be deployed defending Senate seats, with a very tough map for 2014. But with adequate training for new GOTV workers and volunteers. Dems will be better prepared to leverage our informational edge.
According to CNN Politics data, Republicans won 41 of the 435 House Seats being contested with 55 percent or less of votes cast in each district. Here are 27 U.S. congressional districts that Republicans won with 53 percent or less of votes cast: CA31; CO3; FL2; FL10; IL 13; IN2; IN8; IA3; IA4; KY6; MI1; MI3; MI7; MI11; MN6; MT1; NB2; NV3; NY11; NY19; NY23; NY27; NC9; OH6; OH16; PA12; and TX14.
Advantages and disadvantages for both parties will pop up in those districts in the two years ahead. But, with our informational advantage, Dems may be better prepared to exploit new developments and incumbent blunders as they emerge. Of course, Dems will have to be equally-energetic in defending House seats they won by close margins.
Democrats ought to be able to pick up 17 Republican seats with a combination of better candidates, state-of-the-art micro-targeting and a more focused and energetic GOTV program targeting pro-Democratic constituencies in those districts – small though they may be. There should be an equally vigorous ‘front porch’ campaign to sway persuadable voters. Further, if Democrats can do as well as we have with 7.9 percent unemployment, an improving economy should boost our chances in ’14.
Too much focus on historical precedent is debilitating. History is never made by entertaining defeatist memes or those who are daunted by precedent. Indeed, all that President Obama has achieved has resulted from his determination not to be discouraged or in any way deterred by historical precedent. With a similar bold vision — and some muscle behind it, Democrats can retake a House majority in the 2014 midterms. If we decide that we aren’t going to be ruled by history in 2014, then we can make it.

As the final late votes dribble in, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner/Democracy Corps produced the most accurate national polls during the last three weeks of the presidential election, according to Nate Silver of NYT FiveThirtyEight, with “a smaller error than any national pollster – less than 1 percentage point.”
Romney appears to have learned nothing from being defeated in his bid for the presidency, bizarrely placing the blame on President Obama’s “gifts” to women, minorities and youth, which sounds like more of Mitt’s ‘moochers’ meme. But Gov. Bobby Jindal apparently has a clue. Politico’s James Hohmann and Jonathan Martin explain the emerging rift inside the GOP. However, Jindal dodged the issue of Republican-driven voter suppression. It’s not just about talking nicer — there has to be some policy behind it.
AP has an update, “Dems, GOP fight brewing over curbing filibusters.”
Carla Seaquist’s HuffPo post “This Time, Democrats Need to Keep Control of the Narrative” provides an eloquent take on the meaning of the election, a cautionary note and a prescription for moving the Democratic agenda forward. Here’s a bit of Seaquist’s view of the outcome: “…Not only was the American way of life reinforced, so in a way was our soul: In the teeth of Tea Party extremism, Obama-hatred, and off-the-wall pronouncements from Republicans about women, minorities, gays, and immigrants, the majority of the American electorate pushed back and voted for fairness, tolerance, and sanity…It’s America at its best and we got a bit of it back…”
Tim Murphy of Mother Jones has yet another peek “Under the Hood of Team Obama’s Tech Operation.”
David Moberg’s “Unions Played Major Unsung Role in Obama Victory” in In These Times has this to say: “While exit polls showed that Obama lost white voters by more than in 2008, the Hart surveys found that Obama won by 9 points among white union men without a college degree. In contrast, he lost by 47 points among white non-college men who were not union members…Romney did better with older voters overall, but union members over 65 favored Obama by 28 percentage points, while non-union voters in the same age group favored Romney by 17 percentage points. And while non-union voters making $50,000 to $100,000 a year favored Romney by 8 points, union members earning the same amount broke for Obama by a margin of 33 percent…In Ohio, the most hard-fought battleground state and one with above-average union membership, Obama won union voters by 70 to 29 percent…”
Tova Wang notes at Demos: “The right to vote is just that — a fundamental freedom at the cornerstone of American democracy. In the 2012 election, that sacred value was challenged in a way we have not seen in a couple of generations, perhaps since the civil and voting rights movements of the 1960s… The measures taken were so blatant and widespread that they served to energize coalitions of citizens to fight for voting rights harder than ever, and made many voters more determined to vote and have their vote count.” Wang follows up with the best detailed analysis of voter suppression in 2012 and successful efforts to challenge it yet published.
At ABC News/Univision Emily Deruy reports that Senators Mark Warner (D-Virginia) and Chris Coons (D-Delaware) have introduced legislation to “make voting faster and more accessible…The bill, called The Fair, Accurate, Secure and Timely (FAST) Voting Act of 2012, would award states grants based on how well they improve access to polls. That would be judged by a number of factors, including how flexible the registration process is, whether early voting is offered at least nine of the 10 days before an election, and whether absentee voting is offered.”
The Economist corrects Speaker Boehner’s assertions that the election had “no mandate” for raising taxes on the rich: “Did not! The Democrats won 50.6% of the votes for president, to 47.8% for the Republicans; 53.6% of the votes for the Senate, to 42.9% for the Republicans; and…49% of the votes for the House, to 48.2% for the Republicans (some ballots are still being counted). That’s not a vote for divided government. It’s a clean sweep…The only viable method for Democrats to reinstate the House’s democratic integrity is to win a healthy majority of state governments in 2020, threaten to gerrymander to their own advantage, and then use that leverage to extract a deal from state Republican parties for a non-partisan districting process.”
Politico’s Maggie Haberman cites a new poll by Hart Research’s Geoff Garin, conducted for Americans for Tax Fairness which indicates “Democrats have changed the landscape on an issue that has eluded them for years – taxes. The survey found that has most want the Bush-era cuts on top earners to expire, but that Republicans will shoulder blame if all of the Bush cuts, including those on the middle class, expire because a deal can’t be reached.”

We Dems have had our fun blasting away at Karl Rove’s ineffectual Super-Pac ad strategy. But, here and there one sees a dicey generalization extrapolated along the lines of, “See, ads don’t matter. It’s all about ground game.”
On one level, it seems true enough for this election. There is no doubt that the Obama’s campaign’s cutting edge, soup-to-nuts GOTV operation was an instrumental, perhaps the pivotal factor in securing the margin of victory. But it would be folly to ignore the importance of ads deployed by the Obama campaign early on in defining Romney, as an out-of-touch, flip-flopping, tax-dodging errand-boy for the super rich. The impact of those early ads in the Obama campaign has been noted in articles and on political talk shows, but rarely well as Michael Hirsch puts it in his National Journal article “Mitt Romney Had Every Chance to Win–But He Blew It“:

For all of the fretting about how $5 billion in campaign spending left the nation with something close to the status quo ante–a Democratic president and Senate, a GOP House–perhaps the most successful chunk of advertising money ever spent in modern American political history was the initial $50 million or so the Obama team devoted last spring to defining Romney as an exploitative, job-exporting Wall Street plutocrat.
In a dynamic that played out much like 2004, when Democratic challenger John Kerry failed to respond to the Republicans’ “Swift Boat” attacks, Romney never responded effectively to the fat-cat charges. And he never overcame that image, as a blanket of Obama ads kept up the attack through Nov. 6 in the battleground states. “I think they were very smart in defining him early. The early ads paid off,” says GOP strategist Rick Tyler, who helped Newt Gingrich defeat Romney in the South Carolina primary by portraying him similarly. “I don’t think he ever really recovered.”

In addition to the early ad campaign another Obama ad called “Stage” has been cited as a powerful attitude changer, most recently on MSNBC’s ‘Hardball’ program:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Jane Mayer has an article about the ad in the current issue of the New Yorker (subscriber only link). But she had this to say about the low-budget ad on Chris Matthew’s Hardball show:

…They did some internal studies that showed that the trustworthiness of Romney was 11 points behind that of Obama in places where the ad was shown. In places where it didn’t show, he was just 5 points behind…It made people who watched it think he was profiting from laying people off and breaking promises to fund peoples’ pensions and health care plans…It was a killer ad.

Not surprisingly, one of the makers of the low-budget ad was an ardent fan of the late Frank Capra, who was a wizard at depicting stories of working people overcoming corporate greed. It is a powerful ad, and it may be that forcing the workers to build the stage for announcing their firings was especially galling in its unbridled, sadistic, in-your-face arrogance. Perhaps the take-away is that early ads that define the adversary’s character defects effectively do matter, and really great ads work anytime. The rest…maybe not so much.
It would be Capra-esque, karmic justice if Mike Earnest (yes, really), the worker who lost his job to the Romnoids in the ad, not only put an end to Romney’s political ambitions, but also saved America from a hideous right turn with his heartfelt account.

In every presidential election, many different causes are cited as tipping the scale in one direction or the other. There is certainly no shortage of reasons for President Obama’s re-election being bandied about.
One of the more interesting notions that has popped up in election post-mortems is that better-than-usual coverage of GOP-driven voter suppression was instrumental in energizing African and Latino Americans, and to some extent, even white moderates, as well as progressives. There are some interesting statistics to support the argument, although available data is not conclusive. For example, in “How the GOP’s War on Voting Backfired ,” The Nation’s Ari Berman explains,

Take a look at Ohio, where Ohio Republicans limited early voting hours as a way to decrease the African-American vote, which made up a majority of early voters in cities like Cleveland and Dayton. Early voting did fall relative to 2008 as a result of Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s cutbacks in early voting days and hours, but the overall share of the black electorate increased from 11 percent in 2008 to 15 percent in 2012. More than anything else, that explains why Barack Obama once again carried the state…According to CBS News: “More African-Americans voted in Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida than in 2008.”
The same thing happened with the Latino vote, which increased as a share of the electorate (from 9 percent in 2008 to 10 percent in 2012) and broke even stronger for Obama than in 2008 (from 67-31 in 2008 to 71-27 in 2012, according to CNN exit polling). The share of the Latino vote increased in swing states like Nevada (up 4 percent), Florida (up 3 percent) and Colorado (up 1 percent). Increased turnout and increased support for Obama among Latinos exceeded the margin of victory for the president in these three swing states.
We’re still waiting on the data to confirm this theory, but a backlash against voter suppression laws could help explain why minority voter turnout increased in 2012. “That’s an extremely reasonable theory to be operating from,” says Matt Barreto, co-founder of Latino Decisions, a Latino-focused polling and research firm. “There were huge organizing efforts in the black, Hispanic and Asian community, more than there would’ve been, as a direct result of the voter suppression efforts.” Groups like the NAACP, National Council of La Raza, National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, and the Asian-American Legal Defense Fund worked overtime to make sure their constituencies knew their voting rights.
…Racial minorities made up 28 percent of the electorate in 2012, up from 26 percent in 2008, and voted 80 percent for Obama. “Romney matched the best performance among white voters ever for a Republican challenger–and yet he lost decisively in the Electoral College,” wrote Ron Brownstein of National Journal. Minorities also accounted for 45 percent of Obama’s total vote. That means that in the not-so-distant-future, a Democrat will be able to win the presidency without needing a majority of white votes in his or her own coalition. In a country with growing diversity, if one party is committed to expanding the right to vote and the other party is committed to restricting the right to vote, it’s not hard to figure out which one will ultimately be more successful.

Of course the reason for the increase in the share of the electorate held by people of color could be that lots of white voters did not cast ballots on election day because they liked neither Romney or Obama. We will need the final white turnout as a percentage of the eligible white voter figures, and then compare them to ’08 to make a credible guestimate.
Joy-Anne Reid adds at The Griot:

Florida’s reduced early voting period actually galvanized black churches, who took full advantage of the one remaining Sunday to conduct a two-day “souls to the polls” marathon. And even as Election Day turned into a late Election Night, and with the race in Ohio, and thus for the 270 votes needed to win the presidency, called by 11 p.m., black voters remained in line in Miami-Dade and Broward, two heavily Democratic counties in Florida, where black voters broke turnout records even compared to 2008…
“Republicans thought that they could suppress the vote, but these efforts actually motivated people to get registered and cast a ballot,” Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner said. “It’s no surprise that the communities targeted by these policies came out to the polls in a big way–they saw this not just as an affront to their rights, but as a call to action.”
“From the tours we did in 22 states, it became clear to us that many blacks that were apathetic and indifferent became outraged and energized when they realized that [Republicans] were changing the rules in the middle of the game, in terms of voter ID laws, ending ‘souls to the polls,'” said Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network, who also hosts MSNBC’s Politics Nation. “So what was just another election, even though it dealt with the re-election of the first black president, took on a new dimension when they realized that they were implementing the disenfranchisement of black voters.”

Read more…

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.”

We know you’re sick of politics and you would like to give it a rest for a while. But Michael Tomasky’s post, “The Obama Coalition in the Off Years” at The Daily Beast has one of the best ideas yet for the mid-term elections, and you should check it out before it fades off the political radar screen. Noting that 2012 voter turnout was near 60 percent, Tomasky explains:

Some rich liberals need to fund a public-education group that will work full-time to make sure the liberal blocs and constituencies come out and vote in off-year elections…And off-year turnout is down around 40 percent. The 20 percent who leave the system are almost entirely Democrats. This has been true all my life. It’s basically because old people always vote, and I guess old white people vote more than other old people, and old white people tend to be Republican. So even when white American isn’t enraged as it was in 2010, midterms often benefit Republicans.

Conceding the exceptions of ’98 and ’06, Tomasky continues,

As long as this is true, the country’s progressive coalition will spend forever taking one step forward in presidential years, and one step back in off years. But imagine if the Obama coalition had voted, even in decent numbers, in 2010. The Democrats might still well have the House.
If liberal blocs can be conditioned in a generation’s time to vote in every federal election, well, combine that with what we know to be the coming demographic changes, and the electoral pressure on Republicans would be constant and enormous. The Republican white voting pool has limits, so the GOP would have to compete even harder for brown and black votes, which would pull our politics even more to the left.
A long-term project along these lines would be $20 million (or whatever) very well spent for some rich liberal who cares about changing the country.

Tomasky’s idea has added appeal, considering that in 2014 an unusually high number of Democratic senators will be up for re-election in red and swing states (6 for each). As for the House, Cameron Joseph notes at The Hill:

On the House side, while Democrats will have some opportunities at districts they missed out on in California and elsewhere, heavily gerrymandered GOP maps in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin and North Carolina will continue to limit their opportunities.
Democrats tend to live in more urban areas, concentrating their votes into fewer congressional districts, and legally required “majority-minority” districts further pack Democrats into a few districts and make nearby districts more safely Republican.
According to a recent study by the Center for Voting and Democracy, Democrats start off with 166 safe districts while Republicans start off with 195. There are only 74 true swing districts where the presidential candidates won between 46 and 54 percent of the popular vote, down from 89 before redistricting.
That means the GOP needs to win less than one-third of competitive House seats to stay in control — something that shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish, barring a huge Democratic wave. In a politically neutral year Democrats are likely to have around 203 seats, a number that’s only slightly higher than the number they’ll have once the remaining 2012 races are called.

In addition, it’s just possible that some of the creative GOTV techniques Dems deployed so successfully this year could be transferable to the 2014 mid-terms. In any case, meeting the challenge of making the next mid-term electorate resemble this year’s general election demographics could help insure that progressive change replaces continued gridlock and stagnation.

Lots of buzz about Nate Silver accurately predicting the electoral vote allocation of all nine battleground states, as well as the other 41 states. At the moment he also is on target for the popular vote percentage spread, which may change a little when all of the votes are finally tallied.
Mark Blumenthal has a compelling wrap up explaining how the serious pollsters and poll analysts way outperformed the poll skeptics, including the confident but clueless Peggy Noonan, who wrote on Monday, “While everyone is looking at the polls and the storm, Romney’s slipping into the presidency. …I suspect both Romney and Obama have a sense of what’s coming, and it’s part of why Romney looks so peaceful and Obama so roiled.”
Noam N. Levey has an encouraging L.A. Times post explaining that “Obama’s win means his healthcare law will insure all Americans.” Levy says “Starting in 2014, millions of Americans should be able to get health insurance for the first time. Millions more who don’t get coverage through work should be able to buy a health plan that meets new basic standards. Critical GOP state leaders “must decide in days whether to implement it or have the federal government do it for them.”
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, on Tuesday Dems gained upcoming control of five state legislatures (CO, MN, NY, OR and ME), while the GOP gained control of three (AK, WI and AR), with NH not yet decided. Republicans will have control (both/all houses) of 23 state legislatures, while Dems will control both houses in 14 states, with 12 split. Reuters reports: “Heading into the election, Republicans filled almost 55 percent of all partisan legislative seats and controlled 59 legislative chambers, while Democrats controlled 36 chambers and three were tied.” Most of the governorships, lieutenant governorships, secretaries of state and half of the nation’s attorneys general are still held by Republicans.
It will be interesting to see what California Democrats can do with a supermajority (two-thirds) in the state senate, while nearing the two-thirds threshold in the state assembly. CA may once again become a model for progressive government, however tempered by formidable economic and immigration problems. As AP’s Don Thompson writes, “If Democrats win two-thirds majorities in both chambers, it would be the first time since 1933 that one party held simultaneous supermajorities.”
An AP/Edison Research exit poll in VA shows half of state voters favoring tax hikes on those earning $250K+ and two-thirds “favored keeping abortion legal in most or all cases.”
At PBS NewsHour, Judy Woodruff has a revealing interview about the presidential campaign strategy and tactics with WaPo’s Phillip Rucker, WSJ’s Carol Lee and Slate.com’s Sasha Issenberg, author of the much-buzzed “The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns.”
At the National Journal, Beth Reinhard’s post-mortem credits President Obama with doing an excellent job of making the election more about Romney’s character than Obama’s track record. “President Obama won his first term by being the right guy at the right time. He won his second term making Mitt Romney the wrong guy…Obama turned what could have been a stinging referendum on his economic stewardship into a pass-fail test on Romney’s character.” It was a potent meme, but Romney (and most of the pundits also underestimated the nation’s demographic transition since ’08.
Kyle Scott opines at the Houston Chronicle that “Obama won by saying yes to more Americans.” Says Scott: “President Barack Obama’s victory was secured by a politics of yes. Telling voters yes is essential to victory since most voters do not like to be told no. The key to political victory is figuring out how to tell the most people yes and the fewest people no. The president secured a second term by successfully employing this strategy.” It’s an appealing notion, but it doesn’t help to explain the collective outcome of the House races — unless Dems just didn’t have enough strong “yes” candidates.
The “Ya Think?” award for headline writing should probably go to the Washington Post for “Long voting lines suggest a need for reform.” It’s a good editorial, though.