Trust me on this. You must, without fail, watch South Park on Comedy Central tonight. Oh lord, what a hoot! Just do it. Trust me!
Posted by phidipides at November 5, 2008 09:25 PMthanks for all your hard work and insight, CA, i've been reading your daily reports nearly every day for some time, along with other polling guys ilke 538, etc, and i've enjoyed your summaries. you called it all pretty well too.
the state i was personally most surprised and glad about was indiana. and then north carolina. i've been around for a while so to see these states vote for a black democrat for president is a huge change in my lifetime....
the win for obama in new mexico and nevada was also pretty impressive. so many states flipped from 2000 and 2004 it's hard to know where to begin on assessing the significance, long term, of the changes going on. and i hope that it's more than just an electoral change too, meaning a progressive cultural change.
What I don't understand, is with the huge turnout for Obama, and all the new voters (Afro-Americans and college students) why wasn't the margin larger?
Posted by Judith at November 6, 2008 12:37 AMI worked in Appalachian Kentucky one summer, and I can tell you that there's not a lot of hope there, leaving it unreceptive to any newcomer--especially one with a foreign name-- promising change. Results do count, so if Obama delivers over the next 4 years, I will look for an uptick in those vote totals.
Posted by infoshaman at November 6, 2008 05:37 AMFew things.
First, thanks for all the great posts, CAPJ!
Second, I believe there is a vote supression effect in the results in some races. We'll know more after all the votes are counted, but it does appear that in some Republican-controlled states the margin was depressed by a few percentage points, and this may be more in evidence in the non-swing states. Clearly this is academic for this election, but it means that if a nationally standard, easy to use, secure and fraud-proof election system is deployed Democrats will gain votes next time around. Possibly by a lot if long lines can be avoided.
Third, infoshaman is correct. A lot of the McCain vote was from people who actually would like government to do the things Obama wants, but simply doesn't believe government *can* do that. If you haven't experienced, say, health care in Germany or Norway you may not believe that kind of system is possible. So, if Obama and the Democrats are successful they'll build a broader coalition.
Fourth, there are a lot more votes not counted, and no one is quite sure how many. Current tallies are just over 120M nationwide. Projections I've seen range from 124M to 136M when absentees, provisionals, etc are counted. Kos even had a post a couple days ago that he probably regrets now complaining about the low turnout -- in fact this will be at a minimum the best turnout since 1960 and at a maximum the best since 1908, percentage-wise.
Fifth, as those votes are counted Obama's margin will increase. He's already rounding to 53%, not 52%, and it could get closer to 54% depending on which projections you believe.
Posted by Anonny at November 6, 2008 06:32 AMWhat I don't understand, is with the huge turnout for Obama, and all the new voters (Afro-Americans and college students) why wasn't the margin larger?
A few things.
First, there are maps available (see Kos or TPM or even Krugman's blog) showing where Republican margin increased relative to Kerry-Bush. Except for the home-state boosts that McCain and Palin got in Arizona, the areas of increase were the Appalachians and the Ozarks.
In other words, as was discussed back in May and June, Obama did not have a national race problem, he had an Appalachia problem. As infoshaman noted above, these are people who have very tough lives but don't believe government will ever help them, so they voted on race, not policy. Fortunately, as we noted back in May/June, these areas were not going to be problems on the electoral map (in VA and NC Obama's great strength among independents in the more populated parts of the states outweighed the problems in "real" VA and NC) but they did reduce the national popular vote margin.
However, remember our talk about how Obama was ignoring the national polls and focusing on battleground states? Look at these margins:
MI 16%
PA 11% (remember all those polls showing a shrinking margin in PA?)
IA 9% (a Bush state!)
MN 10%
WI 13%
NV 12% (another Bush state)
NM 15% (yet another Bush state)
CO 7% (lots of early votes still to count, and another Bush state)
NH 10% (another Bush state)
VA 5% (another Bush state)
In other words, in most of the states targeted heavily by Obama from the beginning there were dramatic improvements in margin. He didn't do so well in NC (+1%) or GA (-5%), but those two both suffered from a lot of voting issues AND the margins were still dramatically improved from 2004.
So, in brief, the national number understates the margin of victory due to piling on of McCain votes in areas not contested by Obama.
A similar thing happened in the primary. Obama focused on delegates, not raw vote, and so gained an insurmountable lead. NV was a great illustration of this, where Obama's team knew in advance they would get less popular vote but more delegates. When the Clinton team saw they couldn't win on delegate counts they focused on generating popular vote in order to try to persuade the super-delegates to vote for her.
What I don't understand, is with the huge turnout for Obama, and all the new voters (Afro-Americans and college students) why wasn't the margin larger?
Obama's margin is quite decisive for a presidential election, and it will keep increasing over the next couple weeks as the remaining ballots (including millions from the west coast) are counted. I think the margin in Georgia will narrow significantly as well. As the results settle, I will post about the effect of new voters and African-Americans. In North Carolina, Indiana, maybe Florida, and perhaps Missouri (if it flips blue) those voters were decisive. That's 26-64 electoral votes - the tide was strong enough so Obama would have won without the extra turnout, but it definitely added to his margin.
Posted by CA Pol Junkie at November 6, 2008 08:44 AMThanks CA Pol Junkie for your many posts of daily polling.
You said:
"Arkansas is shocking: Kerry did 10 points better there than Obama"
Growing up in Northeastern Texas with Arkansas neighbors...
Uh … it is surprising he only was down twenty percentage points, it is still a fact of life in that area – the color of one’s skin is an issue.
It's official: Obama won North Carolina. He is now up to 364 electoral votes. Missouri (11 EV) and Nebraska's 2nd district are still awaiting final complete counts.
Posted by CA Pol Junkie at November 6, 2008 09:55 AMDo you think Arkansas was partly blowback from Clinton not getting the nomination? Would she have fared a lot better, even possibly carried it?
Posted by Seven of Six at November 6, 2008 10:41 AMClinton may very well have carried Arkansas and West Virginia, states where Democratic is the default party and she did extremely well in the primaries. In the current political climate, she would also have defeated McCain, but she would not have won Indiana, North Carolina, or (I suspect) Virginia.
Posted by CA Pol Junkie at November 6, 2008 10:48 AMAfter watching this play out, however, I think Hillary's management problems and her lack of ground forces would have made it a much tighter race. Plus, she would have dealt with the scum thrown at her differently, and some of it might have stuck harder. Plus, McCain wouldn't have chosen Palin, prolly, and would have put up a better fight. I was really pissed in June that she didn't make it, but now, I'm really glad Obama did. If he governs half as well as he managed his campaign, we should be all right.
Posted by iamcoyote at November 6, 2008 11:12 AMIt was only with a very well run campaign that Obama was able to defeat Clinton in the primaries, and obviously that served him well in the general. You raise a really good point about Palin - had Clinton been the nominee, it would have prevented McCain from shooting himself in the foot that way!
Posted by CA Pol Junkie at November 6, 2008 11:27 AMNot official, but Obama is favored to win Nebraska's 2nd District, the first time Nebraska has split its electoral votes and the first time a Democrat has won anything there since 1964.
Posted by CA Pol Junkie at November 6, 2008 12:55 PM