Before we get all caught up in the “change” meme, a look at the numbers, that is the popular vote, still shows that as since 1988, we are still pretty much a 50/50 nation. CNN, this morning at 95% is reporting that the Obama Tsunami barely crested past a 5% margin of victory. You have to go back to 1984 before you see a double-digit margin of victory.

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/president/

So we have about 7 million votes separating McCain and Obama. If you look at the electoral map, a large part of the country still somehow voted the McCain/Palin ticket to win. Compare to 2004.

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/president/

3 million votes separated Bush and Kerry. But interestingly it looks, although CNN is still not reporting 100% in 2008, that the voter turnout in popular vote was higher in 2004.

Granted, 2004 and 2008 represent steep increases in vote turnout. For point of reference here is the 2000 link.

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/results/

And 1996.

http://uspoliticsguide.com/US-Politics-Directory/Historical-Presidential-Election-Results/1996-Presidential-Election-Results.htm

Click on the Connecticut results for the interesting mirror to the nationwide number crunching, with only 95% of 2008 Connecticut reporting, it looks like the vote total is below 2006 numbers, and that even with the missing precincts, the total looks to barely, as a few thousand, exceed the 2006 vote.

For all the hype about the high turnouts, I would have expected the underlying total vote to reflect the same.

UPDATE:� I’m not the only one curious about the numbers. From A VC yesterday:

I heard on the weekend news shows that we might see 135mm people cast a vote this year. If so, it’s a big move up. Here’s some data I pulled together this morning, going back to the 1960 election, a year before I was born.

You’ll note that I am projecting Obama to get 10mm more votes than McCain today. We’ll see if that in fact happens, but I am optimistic. This chart shows that we’ve witnessed a significant increase in voters in the past three elections. That is good news. But to really see what’s going on you need to factor this by total population which I did in the following chart.

This chart shows that if I am right about the 135mm votes this election, the percentage of the US population (as measured by the census) who votes will have increased from 35% where it has largely been stuck for 40 years to almost 45%.

A message from Hollywood: www.declareyourself.com

Coffee, hrmm. Seems to be a theme lately …

Less than a week to go. I suppose there have been stranger home stretches. Maybe the year Perot was in the mix. But between half-hour infomercials, the Joe the Plumber Express – c’mon guys, wtf? – the mavericky diva, Tina Fey, Al Franken, Ted Stevens, Michele Bachmann, John Murtha, the Bradley effect, and so on …. Well, it’ll be over soon.

Here’s where it stands. Polls are showing some tightening over all, but Obama is on offense, fully funded and with a heavily manned field operation; he is winning over suburban voters and other unaffiliated and swing voters; plus he has a base strategy a la Rove’s Dubya 2 campaign.

The polling and McCain’s dwindling resources have dictated a focused strategy for his campaign. Here’s what Karl Rove’s website has to say as of tonight:

National polls have started to show the presidential race tightening, but 66 state polls released so far this week haven’t captured any significant movement toward John McCain. In fact, since Sunday, Nevada (5 EV) has flipped from toss-up to Obama, giving him 311 electoral votes to McCain’s 157, with 70 as a toss-up. McCain still needs to pick up all of the current toss-up states—which all went for Bush in both 2000 and 2004—and peel off several large states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia from Obama.

The Rove & Company map shows Montana, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Florida as the toss-ups.

FiveThirtyEight proprietor and newly minted media guru Nate Silver’s Senate pie chart is showing 57 Senate seats at the moment going to the Democratic caucus; plus the unaffiliated (read socialist) Bernie Saunders making it 58; and excluding Joe Lieberman who will probably be caucusing with the Republicans, if you believe Senator Ensign.

Four of Connecticut’s five Congressional races are polling roughly as follows: CT05 – somewhere between “over” and a landslide for incumbent Chris Murphy; CT02 – challenger Sullivan is toast as Courtney turns a paper-thin win in ’06 into a safe seat; CT01 & CT03 – only token opposition to begin with; and a race that will be watched by everybody who watches this stuff, CT04. Himes and Shays in a dead heat, with Shays trying not to make any mistakes, and Himes trying to find some way to shake things up in the closing lengths.

Sources: Karl Rove & Company; FiveThirtyEight. Continue Reading

Gen. David Petraeus’s reason for not voting in past presidential elections is not logical, patriotic or brave.

The issue was raised by the media in the days following Gen. Colin Powell’s endorsement of Sen. Barrack Obama. Petraeus was asked who he would endorse, and his answer was that he didn’t vote for presidential candidates because he would have to do the bidding of whomever became commander and chief.

On its very face, this is an illogical response—especially coming from a man named one of the world’s top public intellectuals by Foreign Policy magazine. The voting booth is a sanctuary for the anonymous expression of our conscience as citizens. Neither Gen. Petraeus’ vote nor Joe the Plumber’s vote is part of the public record, unless and until they wish to disclose how they voted. I can readily see why a top-ranked military official would not want to make his choice of candidate public. In that case, all that’s required is to tell the interrogator that the information they seek is private, and leave it at that.

While many may consider a man of Petraeus’ stature the pinnacle of a patriot, the abrogation of duty to vote is decidedly not the action of a patriot. It is our paramount civic responsibility to vote, just as serving in the military is a high service and often a supreme sacrifice to our country.

One might also assume that Gen. Petraeus’ rise through the ranks had something to do with bravery, since he wears the Bronze star. However, it seems the dodge of a coward to not vote because you may have to serve a president you personally wouldn’t have chosen to lead the country. But wait. Isn’t that what military training aims to achieve—serving a higher authority with which you may not be in total agreement? Soldiers are trained to say, “Yes, sir!” even when their hearts say, “No.”

In the corporate world, which so dominates our culture and politics, men and women carry out the orders of CEOs who donate large sums to candidates and often put their subordinates in a similar position as Gen. Petraeus. Yet, do these people choose not to vote because they have to work under a CEO whose politics don’t coincide with theirs? Perhaps some take Gen. Petraeus’ tact, but most vote their conscience and have the guts to speak their truth or give a no comment.

The LaTimes is reporting on this little Nielsen study that matches television viewing preferences to political preferences.

Nielsen does this by measuring what it calls “engagement.” Researchers ask a scientific sampling of people about the content of their favorite programs (sports excluded).

Those who know the most about a cable program are deemed more “engaged.”

These results are then matched with each individual’s self-reported political affiliation or independence.

The results from Nielsen:

Big development in the trending of the Presidential polling according to Pollster. No, the rise in Obama’s numbers hasn’t leveled off. They’ve reversed direction, and are heading down at the same pitch as they were rising. And McCain’s numbers haven’t bottomed out. They bounced off of about 43% and are rising more sharply than O’bama’s are falling.

Preferred provider of aggregated polling numbers 538.com, most convincingly, shows a rather abrupt turn and suddenly a significant gap has opened up between the trend line and the projection line on their Super Tracker graph, to the downside for Obama.

This might be a momentary correction in the context of the national trend, but it foretells a race rapidly tightening. True, Virginia is still in Obama’s column (according to Pollster), and Florida and Ohio, without which McCain cannot win, are now toss-up with an edge in Florida to Obama (within the margin of error). True, the battleground (toss-up) states are all must win for McCain. But there are a number of states � with 93 electoral votes � that are relatively weak for Obama, and only two states � with 18 electoral votes � similarly situated for McCain.

Obama has a better GOTV operation in place, and a lot more money to execute a massive media campaign in the next couple weeks. That said, the trend is McCain’s friend right now. Where things will stand on November 4 is not at all certain, but it’s going to be closer than it was looking.

Source: Pollster, 538,
Continue Reading

It has been a long eight years of a Republican Administration in Washington.

So with Barack Obama closing in on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, ambitious and experienced minds are contemplating the opportunities that lie just ahead. Connecticut has a wealth of talent, ready to answer the call to serve their country.

There are currently no fewer than five US Ambassadors hailing from Greenwich, for example, including those to Ireland and France.

And remember what Dick Blumenthal was doing before he ran for Connecticut’s Attorney General? And Kevin J. O’Connor, currently Associate Attorney General of the United States, went to Washington to serve as Chief of Staff to Alberto Gonzales from United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut. In 1998 he took a run at the open First Congressional District seat, losing to John Larson. Who wants to be US Attorney in Connecticut?

The Presidents inner circle of appointees includes about fifteen Assistants to the President, plus Counsel. The next tier are the Deputy Assistants to the President, then you have the Special Assistants to the President including a bunch of Legislative aides, policy slots and the various Associate Counsels.

You’ve got the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of the United States Trade Representative, Legislative Affairs, Communications, Council of Economic Advisers, Council on Environmental Quality, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Office of National Drug Control Policy. And that is just the President’s staff.

Then there are the Cabinet Departments. Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury, Veterans Affairs.

And that doesn’t include the Independent Agencies and Government Corporations, excepting the Director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which already occupied by Lee Hamilton.

About 7,000 appointments in all. Plus the Ambassadorships and the Federal bench.

Lots of opportunity.
Continue Reading

The candidates make light of the campaign at the Alfred E Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner.

Joe The Plumber gets a lucrative contract with a wealthy couple with seven houses. Obama hangs out with punks at the Senate. Good stuff.

David Brooks goes on the record on the matter of Sarah Palin:

[William F. Buckley] thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I’m afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

Here is the video clip of Brooks’ remarks. Huffington Post elaborates a bit in the post linked below.