I’ve got a short piece up at the Progessive Policy Institute site that runs through the election results and tries to answer the question: what really “changed” in the “change election?”
At the conclusion of this piece, I discussed the two emerging “big theories” about Obama’s victory: realignment or “reaction.” The first theory suggests that Obama consolidated a new Democratic coalition that’s been in the works, in fits and starts, for a while, along the lines of the hypothesis developed by TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira and The New Republic’s John Judis, in their 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority. And as it happens, the second theory, which is that Obama’s win was primarily an immediate reaction to Republican misgovernment and the financial crisis, was first and best expressed by former TDS Managing Editor Scott Winship in a TNR piece yesterday.
This debate will surely continue until such time as future events make it moot.

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.

Democrats who want to better understand President-elect Obama’s impressive victories in the southeast should spend some time at Facing South, where Chris Kromm provides an insightful discussion of the role of demographic change and strategy in the NC victory. Facing South was first to claim an Obama victory in NC, and provides much of the best reporting on southern politics found anywhere. Kromm will write an expanded analysis in the near future, so I’ll just clip some of his key points in this article:

How did Obama turn North Carolina blue? A number of factors gave him this victory:
*…Obama mobilized his core base in North Carolina in record numbers. At the forefront were African-American voters, who added over 300,000 registrations in 2008 and went to Obama by 95%. Obama also won over young voters by large numbers: 74% of those under 30 went Obama.
* …Obama won 66% of voters in the state’s growing urban areas — 64% in the Raleigh-Durham area alone). According to Public Policy Polling, urban areas made up 303,000 of the 436,000 votes Obama needed to gain relative to John Kerry’s performance in 2004.
*…Similar to national trends, 54% of those who were “very worried” about the economy in N.C. voted Obama; he also won 57% of those making less than $50,000 a year. The more the percentage of people worried about the economy went up, so did Obama’s numbers.
* De-mobilized Republicans:…The lack of excitement is reflected in the GOP’s lackluster registration numbers in 2008. Of the 629,000 new voters registered in North Carolina between January and November, 54% were Democrats, 34% Independents — and just 12% Republicans.
* Election Reforms:…Advocates successfully pushed for same-day voter registration and voting at early voting sites — and more than 185,000 North Carolinians took advantage of the law, especially newly-engaged voters who broke to Obama. Through aggressive publicity and education, the state also lowered the number of presidential votes “lost” due to the state’s confusing straight-ticket ballot, adding thousands of presidential votes.
* Obama Fought For It: Last but not least, Democrats won North Carolina because they fought for it. The Obama campaign was smart enough to realize that the above factors and others had made N.C. a battleground opportunity…Obama had more than 50 field offices fanned throughout the state, deploying an army of 21,000 some staff and volunteers that knocked on doors, made calls and mobilized massive chunks of the electorate. Obama had spent $5 million on TV ads in N.C. by early October. Obama and his surrogates made dozens of campaign stops in the state, including Obama himself coming to Charlotte on the last day before November 4. By the time McCain fought back to defend the state for Republicans, it was too late…Obama ignored the pundits and invested the time, resources and energy needed to clinch the deal — ensuring not only his own victory, but wins for Democrats all the way down the ballot and a chance to make history in North Carolina.

There you have it — an outline for the Dems’ southern playbook. Granted candidates with the skillset of Obama don’t come along very often. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from his campaign.
Kromm takes a poke at Thomas Schaller, who wrote in The New York Times On July 1 that “Obama can write off Georgia and North Carolina.” To be fair, I believe Schaller did change his position later on to include the possibility of an NC upset. But Obama’s success in NC, VA and FL pretty much lays to rest the blanket assumption that the southeast is arid territory for Democratic presidential candidates.
In another Facing South post, Sue Sturgis points out that Dems success in the NC Senate race was not about money:

In North Carolina’s U.S. Senate contest, Democratic challenger Kay Hagan spent just over $6 million to defeat incumbent Republican Elizabeth Dole, who spent more than $15.7 million. Dole was hurt by the strong turnout for presidential candidate Barack Obama and by a decision to run a controversial ad late in the campaign implying that Hagan — a former Sunday school teacher — is an atheist. Hagan has filed a defamation lawsuit over the ad, which Dole refused to pull despite widespread criticism.

If anyone ever puts together a “Hall of Shame” for stupid, self-defeating political ads, I nominate Dole’s “Godless” ad for exhibit “A.”
Dems also had a particularly sweet pick-up in NC-8. As Sturgis explains,

In North Carolina’s 8th Congressional District east of Charlotte, incumbent Republican Robin Hayes spent more than $2.5 million only to lose to challenger Larry Kissell, who spent just shy of $1.1 million. A former textile plant manager turned social studies teacher, Kissell focused on trade issues in a district that’s been hit hard by textile job losses, hammering multimillionaire textile heir Hayes for reversing stated positions to cast key votes in favor of the Central American Free Trade Agreement and the Trade Act of 2002. Hayes also created trouble for himself by declaring at a heated McCain rally that “liberals hate real Americans that work and achieve and believe in God.”

It appears that religious McCarthyism is all the rage in some NC GOP circles.
And the capper: NC also elected its first female governor, Beverly Perdue — a Democrat.

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.

Now that NBC has called NC for Obama, as well as the New York Times, we can say that three of the four largest southeastern states, FL, VA and NC voted for an African American presidential candidate, and he only lost by five points in GA, where reports of vote suppression may account for much of the margin.
Please don’t tell me that FL, VA and NC are not really southern states because of their fancy suburbs, snowbird refugees and high tech blah blah. That’s part of the new south. Get used to it. Yes, Dixie still thrives in parts of the southeast, as evidenced by Obama’s much weaker showing in MS, AL, AR, TN and SC. But even in the most conservative areas Dems are often competitive in the state legislatures and even statewide races, as indicated by the impressive numbers of Democratic office holders. Southern states are contributing two of the U.S. Senate pick-ups and four House of Reps. seats to the Dems’ net gain.
The “skip the south” strategy had merit in 2000 and 2004, in part because the Dem presidential nominees weren’t well-suited for the southeast. But now the demographic transformation has reached the point where the largest southeastern states are highly competitive for even liberal Democrats who know how to campaign. Smart Democratic candidates will find the southeast even more hospitable in 2012.

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.

After the 1992 election, it took over a year for the first signs of significant right-wing populist activity to appear in America – signs like the quasi-military “militia” movement in Michigan and elsewhere, the appearance of bunkered apocalyptic religious communities – Waco, etc, and the carefully nurtured paranoid rumors of “Black Helicopters”, UN invasion forces and the “cocaine/mafia hit men” working for Bill and Hillary Clinton.
This time very genuinely disturbing trends are starting to appear even before Obama takes office.
The reason, of course, is obvious. The insidious smears directed at Obama by McCain’s media operation, the right-wing media and third-party internet rumors directly identified him with violent political terrorism, Moslem extremism and thuggery and intimidation by Black militants. Nothing remotely this inflammatory was leveled at Clinton during the 1992 campaign.
Republicans will now try to dismiss this as just the natural excesses of a “hard-fought campaign” and more politically sophisticated Republicans will now ratchet down the rhetoric and concede that none of the charges were literally or even remotely true.
But this uniquely vile propaganda offensive has left a huge toxic residue. There are now millions of Americans who quite sincerely believe that all the accusations noted above about Obama are in large part or in complete measure true. They are particularly concentrated in working class and small town America, where informal “word of mouth” channels of communication are trusted more than national media. The core group that accepts this view are long time hard-right conservatives but their influence extends outward in concentric circles of person-to-person communication.
Many Obama supporters do not directly sense the extraordinary degree of cultural disenfranchisement and political isolation these people are feeling at this moment because they do not ordinarily socialize with this sector of America. But the sense of genuine shock and – yes – fear is very, very real.
Read the following digest of a call-in to G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show, reported by Media Matters:

On the November 4 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio program, G. Gordon Liddy spoke to a caller who stated: “I’m ready to go to the concentration camp, that [Sen. Barack] Obama’s police force — he will round me up. Because I — I’m a white American.” Liddy then said, “Well, listen to this,” and aired an edited clip of Obama [talking about the America Corps program] saying in a July 2 speech in Colorado Springs: “We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.” Liddy then stated: “Shades of the Gestapo. The Geheime Staatspolizei,”

This kind of paranoid discourse could previously be assumed to be confined to a relatively small fringe of the conservative right. But, as the crowds at Sarah Palin’s speeches indicated, it has recently metastasised well beyond its traditional boundaries. This new and larger group is composed of basically decent people, but they are genuinely afraid.
As a result, Democrats must seriously anticipate that the increasingly extreme right-wing attitudes and social movements that developed over a three-four year period during Clinton’s first term may start to appear within a matter of a few months rather than years.
What can Dems do? First, while not compromising on needed programs and policies, they must maintain a sincere stance and attitude of inclusiveness – as Obama himself is doing. The basic fact is that these Americans are not our enemies. They are, in Obama’s excellent formulation, potential supporters we have yet to convince.
Second, Democrats at all levels should aggressively insist that the more sophisticated Republican advocates in the media and elsewhere who helped promulgate the vilest of the smears should not be “forgiven” for what they did until they make real and substantial efforts to remediate the toxic legacy of this campaign.
They poisoned people’s minds. That’s not “hardball” politics; that’s just disgusting. They have an obligation to help repair the damage they did to the United States of America.

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