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.
The Hill asked a few folks to offer their election predictions late last week, so I had to commit to something. You can find my full analysis here. The bottom line - Obama 53, McCain 46, Obama wins 353 in the Electoral College. Dems get to 59 in the Senate and pick up 20 seats in the House.
And a new day dawns in Washington. A new and better day.
I'm not referring to tomorrow's final contest - although we can safely estimatethat 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 volunteeringand organizing for a campaign in record numbers.
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 McCainwill 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.
Great piece in The Hill today. Simon explains an important part of the "21st Century Coalition" Barack Obama has formed to win this race - Hispanics - and the GOP's most important miscalculation:
Democrats may not get to 60 in the Senate, but they will have a huge night on Tuesday, according to Simon Rosenberg. Rosenberg heads the NDN, which is a progressive think tank and advocacy organization.
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) will beat Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) 53 to 46 percent nationally and win 353 electoral votes, Rosenberg said. Democrats will pick up 20 seats in the House and eight in the upper chamber, he predicted.
The big story coming out of the election, according to Rosenberg, will be that "Democrats have figured out how to win a presidential race."
The 2008 election will be the first in which a Democrat wins a majority vote without winning the South, he added.
"This is a new electoral map. This is a game-changer," Rosenberg stated, explaining that the Hispanic vote and Southwest voters going for Democrats will put the GOP in an electoral bind in the future.
"The way Republicans handled immigration is one of the greatest political mistakes in the last 50 years," he said.
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 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.
Both candidates are fighting to make their closing arguments to Hispanics over the less than three days until the Presidential election as they appear tonight on Univision's internationally known variety show, "Sábado Gigante." Even non-Spanish speaking Americans throughout the U.S. have heard of the famous host, "Don Francisco" and his beautiful female co-hosts. The show takes a more serious turn tonight, as it airs Don Francisco's interviews with Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain during which they discussed the most pressing issues in the Hispanic community. Sen. McCain gave his interview in Sedona, AZ, Sen. Barack Obama taped his during a campaign visit to Miami, FL.
These interviews began in 2000 during George W. Bush and Al Gore's presidential campaigns, and followed with Bush and Kerry in 2004. You can watch tonight's interviews with Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain when they air during the show's second hour, at 9 p.m. EST on Univision (check local listings).
In reviewing the polls today the trend lines continued unaltered - Obama holds his commanding lead with no evidence that the race is in any way breaking towards McCain. As DemFromCT's am report shows there was no meaningful movement towards McCain overnight and Obama's numbers held. Gallup's 3 daily tracks released at 1pm this afternoon have all sorts of bad news for McCain, with the 2 likely voter tracks each now having the race 52-42 for Obama. For all this talk that the late breaking vote may break to McCain there is no evidence of this. What still must be terrifying to the national GOP is that there are so many late polls with Obama ahead by 8-12 points, and with their man still mired in the low 40s.
I offered some thoughts yesterday on why the race the broke the way it did this Fall. Called Keys to the Fall: Obama Leads, McCain Stumbles, you can find it on the Huffington Post (where it ran on the home page for almost 24 hours) or a version right here on our blog.
So.....I was asked by a newspaper to offer my predictions for Tuesday. I committed to Obama 53, McCain 46 and Obama claiming 353 electoral college votes. But given the polls of recent days there is a remote but growing possibility that Obama wins by 10 points or more.
Also if you haven't seen it read Jonathan Weisman's front page political story in the Wall Street Journal today. It includes this passage, which includes data and arguments that will be familiar to our readers:
Demographics also shifted in the right places to give Democrats a lift. In Colorado, Virginia and North Carolina, the influx of a younger, more-educated populace brought voters more receptive to the Democrats' message. A concerted Republican campaign to curb illegal immigration turned a wave of new foreign-born voters against the GOP in Florida, Nevada and Colorado, just as the Latino vote in those states was growing.
Between 2000 and this year, the Hispanic electorate will have doubled, to 12% of voters, according to Census data and NDN, a Democratic group that studies the electorate. That growth has been concentrated in once-Republican states, not only in the Mountain West but in the South. By 2006, Hispanics represented 31% of voters in New Mexico, 13% in Nevada, 11% in Florida and 8% in Colorado.
President Bush and his political team were able to ride that wave, nearly doubling the GOP's share of the Latino vote from 21% in 1996 to 40% in 2004, according to exit polls. Then came 2006 and the Republican Party embrace of get-tough legislation on illegal immigration, followed by Republican efforts to kill bipartisan bills to stiffen border enforcement and provide illegal immigrants a pathway to citizenship.
In 2006, Republican support among Hispanics fell to 30%. Even Sen. McCain, who co-authored the bipartisan immigration legislation, does not appear able to reverse the trend. An NDN poll in August, when Sens. Obama and McCain were virtually tied in the polls, found Sen. Obama leading among Colorado Hispanics 56% to 26% and Nevada Hispanics 62% to 20%.
In Colorado alone, more than 70,000 new Latino voters have registered since 2004. An Associated Press-GFK poll released Wednesday found that 16% of Colorado's likely voters identify themselves as Hispanic -- and 70% of them back Sen. Obama.
The growth of professional havens in Northern Virginia, the Research Triangle of Raleigh-Durham, N.C., and the Boulder-Denver corridor of Colorado may also be contributing to the changing electoral landscape. Voters in such places tend to be younger, more ethnically and racially diverse and less interested in social-conservative issues, such as abortion and gay marriage. And there are a lot of them: 83 million so-called millennials between ages 19 and 37, compared with 74 million Baby Boomers between 51 and 69.
530pm Update: This from today's Washington Post track analysis:
In today's Washington Post-ABC News daily tracking poll, Obama holds a 53 to 44 percent lead over McCain, unchanged from yesterday, and little in the survey suggests that trimming the margin would be an easy feat.
For the first time, the slice of likely voters who report they will "definitely" vote for Obama has (by just a hair) now reached 50 percent, a milestone which George W. Bush never reached in Post-ABC tracking polls in 2004 or 2000, and the number of movable voters - those who said they could change their minds or who remain undecided - has slimmed to 7 percent.
McCain's campaigning over the past week has not convinced more voters that Obama is a risky choice, nor has he gained ground as the candidate better able to handle taxes or the economy. (Obama holds a 13-point advantage on taxes, his largest of the campaign, and a 14-point lead on the economy.) For the second time in Post-ABC polling, Obama has crossed into majority support as the candidate better able to manage an unexpected crisis.
One plus for McCain: Strong enthusiasm among his supporters has moved up a bit to 41 percent, the highest level it's been since the Republican convention, but still far behind the 68 percent of Obama supporters who are deeply enthused by his candidacy.
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