2008

This Truly American Moment

Miami, FL - No matter how hard I try, I'm finding it terribly difficult to put my feelings about Election Day into words.

Bittersweet? Cathartic? Humbling? I'm at a loss.

Don't get me wrong. Either certainly suffices when describing single aspects of this epic campaign, but neither adequately sums up the rollercoaster we've lived, breathed and analyzed for so long. I feel confident that what I see is historic, but I can't quite find the words to describe it.

When I first went to see Barack Obama as a potential candidate - after he had filed to form his exploratory committee - his gifts were as evident as the growing interest surrounding his possible candidacy. It wasn't as obvious then as it is now, but his candidacy was aided by converging themes (many of which NDN has taken a serious look at) that have reshaped American politics, allowing Obama to ride the moment and add serious weight to his vision for change.

Having been in South Florida for the past six weeks, I can tell you that there are some amazing things happening. As others have said here before, the lines at early voting sites were incredible and often remained hours into the night so that each voter could cast their ballot.

Echoing NDN, voters are meeting the conservative challenge. They want to finally halt the Conservative Ascendancy and usher in a new politics where one side isn't the only side.

By recognizing that sentiment in America's changing demographics and communicating it through new technologies, we now see the potential for an Electoral Map that is poised to deliver an enduring majority to Democrats. (Adam Nagourney has more on this in his piece from today's New York Times.)

Consider Florida, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, perhaps even Arizona. All of these states are being contested because of large populations of Hispanics, a continuously powerful force in our political future. Take these states alone, and with the Core Democratic States of the past four presidential cycles and you have 304 Electoral votes. Add in states like Ohio, Iowa, New Hampshire, and you have 335. (That seems to be Obama's floor.) Consider states like Virginia, North Carolina, and others and the map just gets more blue.

The map is reflecting a lot of things, many of which I heard at early voting sites, on the radio stations, and in local shops. Everyone talks about how historic this election is and how we're ready for something better.

What will stick with me, however, is not just the desire for change. It's the look of people in lines who don't complain, who don't object to waiting under the hot sun or in the rain. It's the look of a proud privacy and patience which I've seen from many, much like the family below who posed for a camera man after casting their ballot seven hours after they arrived.

Perhaps right now this is a tough feeling for some to transcribe, but you know it when you see it.

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Why Obama Has Already Won

I'm not referring to tomorrow's final contest - although we can safely estimate that this could be a landslide win for Obama.  What I'm referring to is that regardless of the outcome of the election, Barack Obama has caused a major shift in the electoral map, and the shift means a fundamental change in the politics of this country.

Barack Obama has changed the culture of politics.  He's changed the culture of politics because he's formed an entirely new "base" of supporters (millenials, Hispanics, and many independents), he's recruited record numbers of organizers and an unprecedented grass-roots structure, and he's been able to get people to participate in the democratic process at record levels, as evidenced by the results of early voting this year.  We're seeing an electoral map that could change politics for 20-30 years, with Iowa going for a Democrat, and former Republican strongholds like Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, and Florida flipping, or at least becoming battleground states. 

Barack's new political movement raised about $600 million total, and drew from 3.2 million individual donors - a record level. This campaign has transformed thousands of communities-and revolutionized the way organizing itself will be understood and practiced for at least the next generation.  Regardless who governs, Obama has created an organization at the community level that, instead of being based on X leadership roles to fill, it has created leadership roles for as many leaders as there are.  Thus creating a solid, durable, series of existing networks.  And these networks will remain, so that they can become mobilized once again, for any cause.  A note on college organizers put it best:

So we have people in charge of whatever they ARE. We are saying, ‘What's your social network?' We say, ‘OK, you're The Balcony Coordinator-your job is to go party at Balcony [a local bar] every weekend-like you do anyways-but now wear a Barack Obama button-and bring voter reg forms.

Millenials and the largest minority - Hispanics - comprise a large portion of this new coalition.  To me, that means that Latinos and Latinas are not only participating civically, but they are now volunteering and organizing for a campaign in record numbers. 

Another great success story of the 2008 campaign and a reflection of this "new culture" of politics, is the overall success of early voting.  In spite of the glitches and long lines, throughout the country, Americans have cast early votes at a pace that far eclipses past performance.

This is owed in part to the important push on the part of the Obama campaign to encourage early voting.  Barack Obama has invested far more heavily in turning out early votes than past Democratic nominees and that effort has provided results.  Nationally, Barack Obama is ahead 59%-40% among early voters.  Analysts say that 1 in 3 of all voters have voted early, up from 22.5 percent in 2004 and just 7 percent in 1992.

Democrats and Republicans voted in roughly equal numbers. That, however, represents a departure from 2004, when many more Republicans than Democrats cast ballots before election day.  Republicans won the battle for absentee votes, but Democrats won among those voting in person.

Florida is a striking example of this. Republicans were voting at a heavier pace in the absentee ballots, but the number of in-person votes cast exceeded the number of absentees.  38% of all Florida voters have cast ballots - 4.2-million votes - and 331,274 more Democrats voted early than Republicans.  Another 710,066 independents have voted.

In Colorado, the number of early votes cast equals slightly more than half of the total number of votes cast -- early and on Election Day - in 2004.

In Nevada, Democrats have cast 225,670 of the 438,129 ballots (51.5%) in the two most populous counties, Las Vegas's Clark County and Reno's Washoe.  Republicans cast 31.3% with the remainder cast by Independents.  Those two counties account for about 90% of the state's turnout.  Early voting is expected to make up 60% of the Silver State's 2008 ballots. Andres was quoted in the Wall Street Journal, pointing out:

John McCain will need to nab between 75% to 80% of the Independent vote, a tall order given that Nevada polling shows nothing like that level of support. He also would need about 12% to 15% of the Democratic vote, perhaps an easier prospect.

In North Carolina, 2,573,206, or about 41% of the state's 6,232,230 registered voters have voted early, and the vote breaks down as a little over 51% Democrats and about 30% Republicans.  The rest were unaffiliated or libertarian.

In Georgia, more than one million people have voted, a big jump from the less than 500,000 people who voted early four years ago. 

Early voting actually makes it harder for attempts to disenfranchise voters to stop eligible voters from casting ballots.  Dirty tricks are also harder to pull off.  If political operatives want to jam get-out-the-vote telephone lines, as they did on Election Day in New Hampshire in 2002, it would be harder to do if people voted over two weeks.  Early voting also reduces the burden on election systems that are often stretched near to the breaking point.  In 2004, voters waited in lines as long as 10 hours. And there is every indication that lines on Tuesday, in some places and at some times, will again be extraordinarily long.  The more people who vote early, the fewer who will be lined up at the polls on Election Day.

With evident success of early-voting, the states that have not adopted it - including New York - should do so.  Congress should also mandate early voting for federal elections - ideally as part of a larger federal bill that would fix the wide array of problems with the electoral system. Today, the idea that all voting must occur in a 15-hour window, or less, on a single day is as outdated as the punch-card voting machine.

Poll Closing Times

To help you plan an evening of clutching the edge of your seat and watching with rapt attention as Wolf Blitzer drones on your screen, here are the times that the last polls close in each state. All times Eastern.

If you are a voter, don't use this as a guide!  In many states, some polls close earlier than others.  Instead, go here to find out where and when you can cast your ballot.

7pm: GA, IN, KY, SC, VA, VT
7:30pm
: OH, WV
8:00pm
: AL, CT, DC, DE, FL, IL, MA, MD, ME, MO, MS, NH, NJ, OK, PA, TN

>>(Earliest time at which the race could be called)

8:30pm: AR, NC
9:00pm
: AZ, CO, KS, LA, MI, MN, NE, NM, NY, RI, SD, TX, WI, WY
10:00pm
: IA, MT, NV, UT
11:00pm
: CA, HI, ID, ND, OR, WA
1:00am
: AK

My guess? The networks call the election at around 9:30 or 10:00pm.  But if you're a true political junkie, you'll be up late to see who wins the close Senate race in Alaska...

Check here for the details and fine print of our arcane democratic process. Below is a map-- worthy of USA Today-- that gives you the above information in a colorful, fun-to-digest form.

Poll Closings

 

Quick New Tools Update

NDN's newest fellows, Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, offer some excellent analysis today of the important role Millennials will play in tomorrow's election. They posit that "this year, the sheer size and overwhelming unity of Millennials is likely to provide Barack Obama with a much larger advantage" than John Kerry enjoyed among this group in 2004.

I'd just like to offer a quick piece of anecdotal evidence to back this up. I was on Facebook just now (for work purposes of course), and noticed that more than half a million people have now signed up to have their status automatically updated to display a GOTV message. Users can choose whether the message says to get out and vote for Obama, McCain, or just to get out and vote, and then pass the word on to up to 40 friends at a time. Here are what people have chosen so far:

Facebook

So far, Facebook users are breaking more than four to one for Obama. That's what we Millennials might call "PWNAGE."

10:45 PM UPDATE: More than 840,000 people have now signed up (!)

Coming Soon to Decide an Election Near You…the Millennials

The Millennial Generation is poised to play a decisive role in the election of Barack Obama on November 4. An October 30 ABC News/Washington Post national poll gave Barack Obama an eight-point advantage over John McCain (52% vs. 44%). Among young voters in the ABC sample Obama continued to enjoy the nearly 2:1 advantage he has held throughout the campaign (64% vs. 33%). Among all older voters, the race is far closer (50% vs. 46% in favor of Obama).

Just how big an advantage this proves to be for the Obama campaign depends on how many Millennials actually cast their ballots in the election. In 2004, about half of eligible young people turned out to vote; they favored John Kerry by a relatively narrow 55% vs. 45% margin. This gave Kerry about a 1.7 million vote plurality among young voters, a lead that was more than wiped out by George W. Bush's lead among older generations -- Silents like John McCain and Joe Biden, Baby Boomers like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and Gen Xers like Sarah Palin. This year, the sheer size and overwhelming unity of Millennials is likely to provide Barack Obama with a much larger advantage.

Even if Millennials vote at only the same rate that young people did in 2004, Obama will receive about a six million vote plurality from them. Given the political interest and high voter turnout that Millennials showed in the presidential primaries earlier this year, it seems likely that their turnout on Tuesday will be higher than that of young voters four years ago. If 55 percent of Millennials go to the polls, Obama's plurality among them will grow to about seven million. And, if Millennials vote at the same 60 percent rate that older generations do, Obama's national plurality from young voters will be almost eight million. Given that George W. Bush beat John Kerry by only a little more than three million votes, the Millennial margins Obama is likely to enjoy should prove to be the decisive factor in this year’s election.

While it was painful for Democrats to experience at the time, the inter-generational contest between Barack Obama, with his solid support among Millennials, and Hillary Clinton, with her dedicated cadre of Boomer women, proved to be a great advantage to the Democratic ticket in the general election. Once Senator Clinton graciously and enthusiastically endorsed Obama at the convention, the stage was set for a campaign that could unite the generations in November. By contrast, John McCain’s nomination of Sarah Palin, a classic Gen X candidate for Vice President, did irreparable damage to his candidacy among Millennials. Like her generation, Palin’s risk-taking style is confrontational and entrepreneurial with little tolerance for government activism. By contrast, Millennials are focused on solutions that involve the whole group and use government as an instrument to bring people together on behalf of the greater good. Millennials were the first generation to register their disapproval of Palin, and her negatives among this key constituency have continued to climb throughout the campaign. Millennials are a generation of "liberal interventionists" in the economy, "activist multilateralists" in foreign affairs, and "tolerant non-meddlers" on social issues -- all things the McCain/Palin ticket is not.

But, as we forecast in our book, Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics, what the Millennials do on November 4, 2008 is going to be only one important step in what this generation will accomplish over the next four decades. The Millennial Generation is a civic generation and, like their GI Generation great grandparents, America's last civic generation, Millennials will lead a makeover of American politics. This realignment will make the Democratic Party the dominant force in U.S. politics and will turn the country away from the divisive social issues and gridlock of the past forty years to a win-win approach that confronts and actually resolves fundamental economic and foreign policy matters. Welcome to the Millennial Era.

 

*** Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais, Fellows at NDN, are co-authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics (Rutgers University Press: 2008).

Could This Be A Ten Point Race?

For the past year I've been saying that the Presidential wanted to be a 8-10 point Democrat win.  If you look at the structure underneath the candidates, the spread of the generic polls (D vs R) have been consistently 8-10 points, as has Party ID.  For the last several weeks a variety of factors seemed to be keeping the race closer to 5-7 points, and on Friday I made my official prediction we would end up 53-46. Throughout the Fall I've been saying that McCain would just to have to end up at 45-46 - it was just too hard to imagine Obama winning the race by more than 10 points in a 2 way race.  

But as I wrote over the weekend there is now evidence that in fact the election rather than tightening is breaking towards Obama, and that McCain is still - incredibly - not consistently polling in the mid 40s.   Yesterday's Gallup track found the generic Presidential number now at 53-41 - 12 points! - now similar to their spread among likely voters.   The question from the day Obama won the nomination was would this skinny bi-racial kid with a funny name whom few knew even two years ago be able to realize the structural potential of this race?

Increasingly it appears that yes indeed Senator Obama is seizing this historic moment, and in the process is ushering what may very well be a new and very 21st century Democratic era.

Frank Rich on This Election and Race

Frank Rich is a remarkable writer.  His work this year has been especially powerful.  I excerpt a passage from his column today that I have been thinking about all day:

Early in the campaign, the black commentator Tavis Smiley took a lot of heat when he questioned all the rhetoric, much of it from white liberals, about Obama being "post-racial." Smiley pointed out that there is "no such thing in America as race transcendence." He is right of course. America can no sooner disown its racial legacy, starting with the original sin of slavery, than it can disown its flag; it's built into our DNA. Obama acknowledged as much in his landmark speech on race in Philadelphia in March.

Yet much has changed for the better since the era of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," thanks to the epic battles of the civil-rights movement that have made the Obama phenomenon possible. As Mark Harris reminds us in his recent book about late 1960s Hollywood, "Pictures at a Revolution," it was not until the year of the movie's release that the Warren Court handed down the Loving decision overturning laws that forbade interracial marriage in 16 states; in the film's final cut there's still an outdated line referring to the possibility that the young couple's nuptials could be illegal (as Obama's parents' marriage would have been in, say, Virginia). In that same year of 1967, L.B.J.'s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, offered his resignation when his daughter, a Stanford student, announced her engagement to a black Georgetown grad working at NASA. (Johnson didn't accept it.)

Obama's message and genealogy alike embody what has changed in the decades since. When he speaks of red and blue America being seamlessly woven into the United States of America, it is always shorthand for the reconciliation of black and white and brown and yellow America as well. Demographically, that's where America is heading in the new century, and that will be its destiny no matter who wins the election this year.

Still, the country isn't there yet, and should Obama be elected, America will not be cleansed of its racial history or conflicts. It will still have a virtually all-white party as one of its two most powerful political organizations. There will still be white liberals who look at Obama and can't quite figure out what to make of his complex mixture of idealism and hard-knuckled political cunning, of his twin identities of international sojourner and conventional middle-class overachiever.

After some 20 months, we're all still getting used to Obama and still, for that matter, trying to read his sometimes ambiguous takes on both economic and foreign affairs. What we have learned definitively about him so far - and what may most account for his victory, should he achieve it - is that he had both the brains and the muscle to outsmart, outmaneuver and outlast some of the smartest people in the country, starting with the Clintons. We know that he ran a brilliant campaign that remained sane and kept to its initial plan even when his Republican opponent and his own allies were panicking all around him. We know that that plan was based on the premise that Americans actually are sick of the divisive wedge issues that have defined the past couple of decades, of which race is the most divisive of all.

Obama doesn't transcend race. He isn't post-race. He is the latest chapter in the ever-unfurling American racial saga. It is an astonishing chapter. For most Americans, it seems as if Obama first came to dinner only yesterday. Should he win the White House on Tuesday, many will cheer and more than a few will cry as history moves inexorably forward.

But we are a people as practical as we are dreamy. We'll soon remember that the country is in a deep ditch, and that we turned to the black guy not only because we hoped he would lift us up but because he looked like the strongest leader to dig us out.

I would strongly recommend reading the whole column.  This theme - that our changing demographics is offering America the opportunity to turn race into something other what it has been in our history - is something we've been exploring here at NDN a great deal these last few years.  If you haven't read it check out an essay I wrote earlier this year, On Obama, Race and the End of the Southern Strategy, which looks at all this in greater detail.

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