Gin and Tacos

Let me quote myself on October 13 of this year, discussing the Senate races in the home stretch:

If the big victory they can take away from this election is "We have enough Senators to threaten a filibuster!" then the GOP has truly suffered a beating of historic proportions.

The battle to get to 58 will be a pretty easy one but there will be rapidly diminishing returns beyond that point. Fighting their way to 60 will require an improbable victory and a few more years of kissing Joe Lieberman’s ass, bending to his every whim.

And here we are, the Democrats hitting 58 Senate seats with two clusterfucks yet to be resolved. The odds of hitting sixty are not great; in fact, let us go ahead and assume that the GOP wins either the Franken-Coleman recount showdown or the Martin-Chambliss runoff. At this point I would like to cue streamers, fireworks, and celebratory 80s rock anthems. Congratulations guys, you did it! That is the big victory for the year: holding on to 41 Senate seats. G-O-P! G-O-P! G-O-P!

I think all of us who were thrilled by the outcome of this election are mindful of hubris. We know how quickly tables can turn in American politics. But looking at this election in isolation, I struggle to find the silver lining for the GOP.

The Fox News crowd were prepared on Election Day to give McCain a big "exceeding expectations" win. That is, if McCain avoided losing in a complete rout they could note that, given all of Obama's advantages, McCain did far better than he should have. Alas, the Electoral College was lopsided. McCain lost every major swing state, including his Hail Mary state of Pennsylvania. Obama's victory was big enough that without CA and NY he still would have won. Ouch. No Kerry 2004 "Well, it should have been a Bush blowout but we made it close with a terrible candidate, so that's good!" silver lining here.

The popular vote could be a source of solace. The Electoral College magnifies victories and makes reasonably close elections feel lopsided. The popular vote gap was 7% – nearly 9,000,000 votes. Not an overwhelming blowout, but certainly nothing to be happy about from the right.

The Senate? Well, if losing eight or nine seats in one election (bringing the total over the last two races to at least -13 R) counts as a victory it is a victory for the forces of delusion. The practical impact of the Democrats' failure to attain sixty seats is almost nil.

The House? We pay so little attention to the poor old House. Certainly it offered a glimmer of hope for the GOP? No, they lost another 21 seats (possibly more when the few remaining races are sorted out). Their deficit is now more than 80 seats: ~256 to 175. High-visibility and ultra-conservative incumbents like Marilyn Musgrave and Steve Chabot lost. Moderates like Christopher Shays and Jon Porter lost. Dennis Hastert's seat is now held by a Democrat. The GOP lost a House race in Idaho. Ouch.

Perhaps the GOP succeeded by experiencing defeat today to set up tomorrow's victories. This election could be salvaged if they established a clear Obama Alternative, a dynamic leader to bring better outcomes in 2010 and 2012. Well, they established Palin…as a punchline to several years' worth of late-night jokes.

I'm sorry, folks. I just do not see the "bright side." The only good thing about this election for Republicans is that it is over. Maybe the magnitude of their defeat will turn out to be the silver lining. With the other party solidly in control of the Federal government, the GOP's best bet may be to hope that things go poorly and start pointing fingers.

Nick Begich may have won Alaska after all. With early votes now being counted, Stevens' 3200-vote lead over Begich evaporated immediately. Since over 30,000 early votes remain to be counted, I don't like Stevens' odds. Early votes across the country have been overwhelmingly Democratic.

I may be saved from prediction-related embarrassment yet.

I think this deserves its own post.

By now you have probably been introduced to the argument that black voters were responsible for tipping the balance on Prop 8 in California. If not, try this or this. The second link is particularly interesting in the sense that the math works out – provided, as social scientists are wont to say, the assumptions hold.

There are two things that deserve emphasis. First, one of the assumptions is tenuous for reasons that have eluded most commentators thus far. Second, even if the argument is correct, this is lapsing into an exercise in misdirected anger and scapegoating.

The linked author's first assumption is, "that the vote among black people was as reported (69% Yes on 8)." This number, which is now being treated as a scientific fact, is based on a single polling organization's exit polling. Exit polling suffers from social desirability effects to a greater degree than traditional polls. That is, being face-to-face with the poll worker and surrounded by one's peers is likely to influence responses. The classic example in the literature is that the race of the questioner affects the responses people give on race-related questions. White people are less willing to say things that could be perceived as racist when talking to a black person. It makes sense, right?

I am willing to accept that homophobia is a bigger problem in some cultural traditions than others. But why do we immediately assume that these poll numbers mean that more black voters oppose gay marriage or voted "Yes" on 8? That is not a valid assumption. What I see is proof that more black respondents told the exit pollster that they voted for it. It is an empirical fact that people give the answers they think they are supposed to give in surveys. Maybe, especially if asked in a room full of other black voters, respondents conformed to social expectations. Maybe they gave the answer that was less likely to draw attention or grief to themselves. Saying "I'm cool with teh gay marriage," depending on where the speaker happens to be standing in this country, can be greeted with praise, ambivalence, or outright hostility.

Second, let's say that "the math" is right and, in contrast to other racial groups, blacks are really against gay marriage. And the argument is that Obama turned out new and enthusiastic black voters who helped him to a crushing victory in CA but also pushed Prop 8 over the edge. It's well and good for high-income white liberals like Dan Savage to go into histrionics about those damn homophobic colored people sinking California's efforts at marriage equality, but I read this as a simple failure of the campaign. Barack Obama unequivocally took the "no" position on Prop 8, as did Joe Biden. Did these voters, who in this argument were motivated to vote almost solely by Obama, know that? Did the campaign go into "bad" neighborhoods and pitch their argument in a way that would resonate with non-upper-middle-class white people, or did they spend all their time and energy preaching to upper-middle-class white people who already agreed with them?

It seems to me that the No on 8 campaign essentially ignored the black vote and is shocked to learn that they may have done poorly with that demographic. Whether or not the broader argument is valid and black voters did sink the issue, I see this as proof that open-minded left wingers are not immune from taking a few swings in the batting cages of America's favorite pastime: finding a racial or ethnic group to scapegoat. Right now the hand-wringing and campaign post-mortems on the left sound like the embarrassed post-hoc excuses of the sitcom husband upon forgetting his anniversary.

If I may go all Mr. Smith Goes to Washington for a moment, I believe that the single most important aspect of any election is that, regardless of whether or not my preferred candidate wins, the outcome is widely accepted as legitimate. Elections decided in court are tremendously harmful to the political process. It is very, very important that at the end of Election Day one side says "Hey, we won!" and the other says "Yup, we lost." Our entire system is founded on this simple nod to legitimacy. The losers do not, as so often happens in troubled parts of the world, arm themselves to the teeth and revolt in open warfare because they lost. Our political process needs to work like a boxing match – beat the hell out of one another until the bell rings and then embrace afterwards as a sign of mutual respect.

For all the talk about the potential for voter fraud in 2008, the election largely went off without a hitch. I encourage you to correct me and cite an example if there is a "Diebold Surprise" story that I missed. In my voracious consumption of all things election related over the past week I have come away with the impression that both sides believe that the results accurately reflect the vote. With the exception of the fringe-right (who are going to rant about how ACORN and homeless black illegal immigrant crackheads stole the election no matter what) the outcome is not in dispute.

As an avowed electronic voting machine skeptic, I admit being surprised by this turn of events. Even in Pennsylvania, with its Keystone (see what I did there?) Kops transition from paper to touch screens, what issues arose never escalated beyond the level of inconvenience. Here in Indiana we executed our third straight touch-screen election without a hitch. Many other jurisdictions did likewise. Has electronic voting been vindicated?

Well, yes and no.

After a good deal of reflection I've realized that electronic voting does some things at least as well as paper and even does a few things better. It certainly makes counting easier. Many voters note that there is something "unsatisfying" about just pushing buttons rather than holding something tangible – a product of one's efforts – and dropping it in the lock box. Personally, I can't shake the "Does anything actually happen when I press this button?" feeling. But the more I thought about it, all voting is a black box (pun intended). Just as I have no idea whether or not this electronic machine actually submits a vote when I hit the buttons, I have no idea where my ballot goes when I drop it in the box. For all I know the EVM isn't even connected to anything; for all I know my paper ballot is thrown into a dumpster and burned after I walk away. Maybe it gets lost. Maybe one of the 153 year old poll workers spills coffee and Poli-Dent all over my ballot and it becomes unreadable. I have been operating under lousy logic in believing that electronic voting is any more mysterious than the alternative.

Unfortunately it is very easy to stand in the glow of an election which largely went off without a hitch and say "Hey, EVMs are pretty cool after all!" It's tempting but should be resisted because the fatal flaw in the system is latent. The system either works very well (as in 2008) or, when something inevitably goes wrong one of these years, it is a complete disaster. There isn't much middle ground. When the system fails there is no safety net. Eventually there will be a "whoops, the results got erased somehow" moment and only then will it be apparent – ah, so this is why this was a bad idea all along.

I'm glad that things went smoothly this year, but to use this as impetus to change my feelings about electronic voting would be the Survivor's Bias in action – everything worked out so I guess the system is OK. That is poor logic. Say what you will about paper and punch cards, but such ballots can be re-counted. They can be kept in boxes for posterity. With EVMs, votes which are not properly recorded for whatever reason are simply gone. The criteria for choosing a voting method cannot be how it performs under ideal circumstances; it must be how the system reacts when everything is inexorably fucked up. Paper, for all its flaws, wins because it is more robust under uncertainty. The real danger with EVMs is not insidious hackers altering election results as so many of us have feared – it is the all-or-nothing nature of the system, a flaw that will be all too apparent when random, unpredictable error inevitably strikes.

I am just going to say this without applying a sucrose coating: the left blew some opportunities in this election. The "Dewey Defeats Truman" pessimism that, no matter what, Obama would find a way to lose passed from prudent to quaint to irritating to counterproductive over the final months. I and everyone else who voted for Obama wasted time and energy fretting on a race that was, for all intents and purposes, over six to eight weeks ago. We saw the numbers, refused to believe them, and kept our focus on a blowout race while marginal seats in Congress and ballot measures could have been pushed past the tipping point with our all-out effort.

It seems odd to say that such an overwhelming Democratic win involved missed opportunities, but they were there. And they stem directly from the fact that Obama supporters stubbornly refused to accept reality – that their candidate had a statistically significant lead in nearly every state required for an Electoral College victory. Just like die-hard McCain supporters but for very different reasons, many Obamans were convinced that all that data was simply wrong. It was not the finest hour for logic. After so many years of losing, winning becomes inconceivable. Of course some degree of skepticism is healthy. It would have been irresponsible for Obama supporters to say "Fuck it, we got this one" or simply take a victory as a given. But there are opportunity costs to the singular focus on the presidential race.

For example.

In California, the presidential race was not competitive. Prop 8 certainly was. It would have made sense for left-wing activists to put Obama and McCain out of mind and devote full attention to state and local races of import. So what was the Bay Area Obama campaign doing? Rounding up busloads of volunteers and driving them to Nevada to campaign for Obama. Was that logical? Well, only if you managed to convince yourself that Obama's 8-to-10-point lead in the Nevada polls was more in need of elbow grease than the uphill battle to push Prop 8 below 50%.

Now, I don't want to suggest that every California Obaman behaved identically, that no one thought of this before the election, or that no one gave Prop 8 their all. But this is anecdote is just one example of the consequences of failing to see the line between prudence and irrationality. Nevada simply wasn't that close – certainly not close enough to import volunteers across state lines. There is always a race right where you live that could benefit from your attention. I can't help but wonder, for instance, if the amazingly tight Senate races in Oregon and Minnesota would have benefitted from the attention of Obama voters in those uncompetitive states. Prop 8 – largely a victim of ignorance and a terrible campaign on the "no" side – could have. Perhaps rather than jumping to Americans' favorite political conclusion ("Let's scapegoat the blacks!" Stay classy, Dan Savage!) the "no" supporters should ask themselves if they did all they could and presented their case effectively or if they wasted a lot of time worrying that McCain would employ some manner of sorcery to forestall the obvious.

Let's take a deep breath and get it through our (apparently) thick skulls – the polling was essentially correct and we can in fact win one every once in a while. Obama led where the data suggested he led. If anything, Rassmussen, Zogby, Strategic Vision, and other right-leaning pollsters caused the aggregate polling to understate Obama's lead. The key in future elections will be to strike a careful balance between overconfidence and neurosis. Lapsing into the latter was costly. Success can never be taken for granted, but we must do a better job of asking ourselves if we are putting our scarce time, energy, and money to the best possible use or if we are hurling them at an uncompetitive race out of paranoia. What did that last $50 million raised by Obama do for his campaign? Nothing. What could it have done for Prop 8? We don't know, but now we have to wonder.

Those of you who read regularly know that for a year I have been putting forward the pseudo-conspiracy theory that the GOP tanked this presidential election. The nomination-by-default of John McCain, the failure to pony up money for the campaign, and the almost surreally-bad Palin choice combined to create the impression that the GOP was laughing its collective ass off and daring America to vote for them. But it the mediocrity wasn't limited to the general election.

McCain won the nomination largely because the other candidates were just terrible. Tell me, please, who their nominee would have been if McCain had quit in December when his campaign appeared DOA. Huckabee? Romney? Fred Thompson? Obama might have hit 425 EV against those dipshits. These candidates and others contributed to the GOP primaries' distinctly "B" Squad feel. It was as if all the top candidates said "No way, we'll wait for an election we can actually win" and let the scrubs spend their money getting shellacked.

This all made perfect sense to me until, in light of some of the premature but always entertaining 2012 talk, I thought about who sat this race out on the GOP side. No one did. There is no "A" Squad. There was no strong candidate who decided to bide his or her time rather than run on George W. Bush's coattails. The party didn't just lose the election badly, which is a common enough occurence in our political system. Rather the election was an exhibition of how utterly bare the cupboard is for the GOP. The gaggle of amateurish bozos that competed for the nomination and of whom McCain was clearly the superior choice were the best candidates the party had in 2008. It doesn't matter that they looked less like GOP candidates than satirical caricatures of Republicans – there were no reinforcements ready to join the fray when things got ugly.

In case the party thinks the worst is over, the short-term forecast looks even more bleak.

The GOP is currently a leaderless party. Who are their notables in the Senate? Mostly ancient war horses like Orrin Hatch, Arlen Specter, and Dick Lugar. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell could barely win his seat this year and is wildly unpopular outside of Kentucky. The House offers no potential stars, with Minority Leader John Boehner being the most visible member. Any of the Cabinet figures associated with the Bush administration are, if not lepers, close to it.

Fortunately the best presidential candidates are always popular governors, right? Surely the GOP has plenty of good, youngish Govs waiting to take the next step. Well…..not really. First of all, if the party plans to go this route it failed to use this election to introduce the public to unknowns from these ranks (although perhaps this was the plan with Palin, and good luck with her in 2012). Second, there just aren't that many attractive candidates. Two – Minnesota's Tim Pawlenty and Indiana's Mitch Daniels – are probably the two best candidates the party could run in 2012. Both could appeal well to normal, non-psychotically-religious middle class Americans. Unfortunately, by "best candidates" I mean they would probably only lose by 75 or 100 EV.

No, the question of "Who's next?" does not have an easy answer for the GOP. Of course it doesn't need to be figured out four years in advance, but the traditional pool of candidates – Governors and Senators – does not appear to offer any strong, logical choices. If the new President doesn't completely, utterly blow things in his first term, the GOP isn't going to take down an incumbent Obama with Charlie Crist, Matt Blunt, or Mitch Daniels. If anything, whatever decent candidates do emerge and establish themselves as the "A" Squad will wait until 2016 unless Obama's first term is awful. Whether or not the party finds a decent leader in the next four years, we are likely to see the same parade of retreads, nobodies, and nutjobs we saw in 2008 – without a fallback option of McCain's caliber.

That's not a compliment.

How convincing was Obama's victory on Tuesday? He could have given his opponent California and New York and still won. Think about that for a second. The Democratic candidate did not need California, New York, or their 86 electoral votes to win. See for yourself.

As Lane County rolls in (including Eugene and U. of Oregon) Merkley has opened up a 40,000 vote lead. With that county only ~70% reported, I think this one's over for Gordy Smith.

I was wrong about waiting two weeks out of politeness; Team McCain's kneecapping of Sarah Palin begins immediately. Catch this video of Carl Cameron on O'Reilly talking about how, during debate prep, Palin didn't know that Africa was a continent as opposed to a country and couldn't name the nations in NAFTA.

I'd suspect this of being well-poisoning disinformation if it wasn't so goddamn plausible.