The man on the left, a Democrat, has officially defeated the man on the right, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate.
That makes the Dem majority in the Senate now 58.
Minnesota’s still up in the air. The official recount begins today.
Watch that race closely.
If it’s 59 before December 2nd, the Georgia runoff will be one of the most closely watched - & fought for - races this year.
UPDATE:
The New York Times has reason for the Democratic party not to get all cocky, which leads to a gem from a friend who just e-mailed me:
The future White House Chief of Staff helped the Democrats gain ground in western North Carolina’s Congressional district, with some relentless pressure applied to former Vols quarterback Heath Shuler.
I thought it was well-done. It certainly beats Ross Perot’s informercial from 1992.
He kept it positive - didn’t mention the word “Bush” once.
Watch & tell me what you think.
Read McCain’s ‘prebuttal’ to the infomercial here.
A lot of you have voted already. As of Monday, more than 50,000 people have voted in Hamilton County.
Which way are early voters leaning? Marc Ambinder:
Obama leads by 16 points among likely voters, by 17 points among independents, by 13 points among men, by 20 points among women, is tied among whites, and is up eight among white Catholics. Of the 15 percent of the sample who’ve already voted, Obama leads by 19 points (although this subsample has a fairly large MoE). 74% of Obama’s backers say they support him “strongly,” which is 20 points higher than the percentage who say the same about their support for McCain.
Click here for the full Pew results, as of Tuesday.
Here’s a site where you can see the early voting numbers already in from around the country. Very useful.
From that site I glean:
The Peach state is turning into one of THE states to watch this year - & I had written that state off months ago, back when Bob Barr’s Georgia support started dropping off.
& not just the presidential race. The battle for Saxby Chambliss’ Senate seat remains intense.
The two latest polls come from polling firms that lean either way.
The left-leaning InsiderAdvantage poll has Saxby Chambliss & Jim Martin at 46-44%, That same poll also shows McCain leading by just 1 point).
The right-leaning Strategic Vision poll has Chambliss up by 2, & McCain up by 6.
& it’s possible that Georgia may be the last Senate race called - as in called several weeks after election night. MSNBC’s First Read blog explains:
“If Martin wins, he’ll have Obama to thank because the surge in African-American turnout is clearly benefiting the Democrat. By the way, Georgia could be the state that is the final race called in the country. Why? The state has that quirky runoff law, and a third-party candidate in the race might hold one of the major party candidates under 50%. The last time Georgia hosted a Senate runoff was the last time the country elected a new Democratic president: 1992, when the election of Clinton ended up helping the Republicans pull the Senate upset (Paul Coverdell defeated Wyche Fowler). This time, however, Republicans fear that an Obama victory will only energize African Americans in the runoff and make Chambliss’ path to victory even more difficult.”
Speaking of African-American turnout, it’s huge in Georgia - check it out. Georgia’s Secretary of State reports that 35% of early voters are African-American - more than double the percentage of the state’s population.
& there seems to be a correlation between a state’s African-American voting population & percentage of early voter turnout. FiveThirtyEight.com’s Nate Silver has the details here. In short, the higher the percentage of blacks in a state, the higher early voter turnout is. The states with the highest turnout are Georgia, North Carolina & Louisiana.
Can McCain count on voters who make up their minds in this final week? The trends (from Pollster.com) from past Presidential elections, in terms of their numbers, don’t look promising:
Click this link (again, to Pollster.com) to find out which way those last-minute voters swing.
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But still, interestingly, yet probably unsurprisingly, Obama still faces a major disadvantage with voters down here in that long-GOP stronghold, the South, per ABC News:
Obama is outperforming any Democrat back to Jimmy Carter among white voters, getting 45 percent to McCain’s 52 percent. But in the South, it is a very different story. Obama fares worse among Southern whites than any Democrat since George McGovern in 1972.
Whites in the East and West tilt narrowly toward Obama (he’s up 8 and 7 points, respectively), and the two run about evenly among those in the Midwest. By contrast, Southern whites break more than 2 to 1 for McCain, 65 percent to 32 percent.
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Above: wet, wet wet conditions in Chester, Pennsylvania on Tuesday. Doesn’t look fun at all.
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Above: Obama making calls to undecided voters in Colorado.
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Michelle Obama appeared on Jay Leno Monday. Click here to watch.
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From the Toot:
“…once you’ve made a narrative choice, you do have to stick with it - you can’t just keep bouncing around, or people become confused. If you are telling the story of a scary vampire, you can’t decide in chapter 2 that he’s also 500 feet tall and radioactive and bent on destroying Tokyo, in chapter 3 that he is actually a giant man-eating shark, and in chapter 4 that he is all this and a super-terrorist trying to plant a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles. All of these things are, indeed, scary, but taken together they add up to a muddle.
This is the problem. It’s not just the McCain campaign’s problem - although their inability to pick a narrative and stick to it is a special kind of inexcusable - it’s a problem for the entire wingnut noise machine. Obama is a Marxist Muslim Arab Jesus Black White Terrorist Technocrat Racist Do-Gooder Liberal FDR Stalin Hilter Commie Fascist Gay Womanizing Naive Cynical Insider Noob Boring Radical Unaccomplished Elite Slick Gaffe-Prone Pedophile Pedophile-Seducing Liberation Theology Atheist Etc. & Anti-Etc. with a bunch of scary friends from - wait for it! - the Nineteen Hundred And Sixties. It makes no sense. It’s a jumble sale of fears and scary associations from 50 years of wingnut witch hunts and smear campaigns, a flea market of pre-owned and antique resentments, and if one does detect a semi-consistent 1960’s motif running through it all, that’s because that’s when most of these ideas were coined.”
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Above: at a joint rally with Sarah Palin in Hershey Pennsylvania on Tuesday.
He also appeared in North Carolina..
…but, interestingly, without incumbent GOP Senator Elizabeth Dole. (this may be why)
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It’s the major card McCain has left to play. But Newsweek’s Andrew Romano is pessimistic. Former Bush staffer Peter Wehner hsays the party needs to return to its reformist roots [which, I'd add, is what John McCain should have pushed harder for - challenging his party to return to its fundamental principles - instead of blatantly pandering to its base, which has spent the past year essentially rooting for the status quo, or at least is blind to why the status quo is in such a sorry state].
Single-party government rarely works for very long. It tends to overreach when there are no limits to those in power (see Congress/President Bush, 2002-2006). If this plays out, that will bode well for the beginning of a comeback for the now-battered GOP. [though I will say that if you sat on your hands & approved of how things were run under Republican leadership, you have a smaller rhetorical leg to stand on.]
['divided' here being less than a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate]
If this crazy year ends the way the trends are looking - that Obama will be elected - Obama’s historical standing would improve if he brought about change with the help & support of the minority party.
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Why is McCain behind Obama in the Pennsylvania polls? Michael Barone hazards a guess:
“My hypothesis is that that is because places like the Philly suburbs are places where the recent decline in household wealth has been most conspicuous. Housing prices mean a lot more to you when your house started off at $400,000 and declined to $290,000 than they did when you started off (as may be typical of Scranton or a blue-collar town in metro Pittsburgh) at $140,000 and declined to $110,000. Newspaper coverage of our current economic distress focuses on the very poor (like a recent Washington Post story on North Carolina, which focused on an ex-convict in a cheap motel in Charlotte), but the people who are getting hurt most visibly in their lifelong project of accumulating wealth are the more affluent. They’re the ones whose house values have most visibly and spectacularly declined, and whose 401(k) accounts and stock portfolios have tanked in the last few months as well. Folks in Scranton or in the cheap motel in Charlotte didn’t expect to live comfortably ever after off their increased house values, 401(k)’s, and Merrill Lynch accounts; a $700 monthly check from Social Security is about what they have long expected and that’s not in danger (yet). Folks in the Philly suburbs did expect to live comfortably off such assets.”
& he concludes
“The irony here is that voters motivated by anger at the decline in their wealth seem about to elect a president who has promised to embark on wealth-destroying policies.”
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The exodus of a chunk of voters - Libertarians - who traditionally vote Republican, that’s what.
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Here’s a view-from-the-crowd at a Joe rally in New Port Richey, Florida on Monday. He remained in Florida on Tuesday.
Above: at a rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, appearing with McCain.
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Sadly, there appears to be quite a few reports of ‘ugly Americanism‘ at her rallies, & that’s a shame for Palin & her supporters, who in my opinion should quickly & forcefully speak out about those who would tarnish her image, especially if you are hoping she becomes the Republican party’s standard-bearer after the election.
That’s it for now! I know it’s a lot to digest, but please feel free to comment on anything mentioned above. ALL views are welcome here.
& check back later in the day, as I’ll provide more info in this post. Let me know what you think of the ‘one-post’ format. I think I’ll stick to doing it this way through the home stretch.
Interesting tidbit from the Nielsen blog about the differences in the level of engagement between television viewers who consider themselves Democrats or Republicans:
Nielsen’s analysis found that the cable programs that received the highest overall engagement scores — meaning viewers were most engaged in the shows’ content — also received the most bipartisan support, drawing high engagement scores from viewers of both parties, as well as from viewers who identify as political “Independents.”
As might be expected, however, several programs had clear partisan bents. On Comedy Central, for example, Democratic viewers paid the most attention to “The Colbert Report,” while “South Park” was the network’s most engaging show among Republicans.
Read the full list of ‘most engaged shows’ here.
Interesting experiment from Tommy McCall, who’s the former information graphics editor of Money Magazine.
He asks:
“…which party has been better for American pocketbooks and capitalism as a whole? Well, here’s an experiment: imagine that during these years you had to invest exclusively under either Democratic or Republican administrations. How would you have fared?”
Click here for the answer. It may surprise you.
Why it’s the Democrats’ fault, at the State_of_America blog (unclear who the author is)
Why it’s the Republicans’ fault, by Robert Creamer
Both pieces are worth your time.
This year, more than ever due to the highest of high stakes, you need to expose yourself to viewpoints that don’t share yours.
Walking a mile in their shoes will lead you down the path to wisdom.
Tell me what you think in the comments! All viewpoints are welcome & encouraged.
Hey, I got an idea: tell me which of these arguments that are on the other side of your own comes closest to having merit with you! Come on! It’ll be fun!
(image above taken from ‘the Scream‘ by Edvard Munch - image by Matt Brunson)
From the LA Times:
David Bonior, the former Michigan congressman who managed Democrat John Edwards’ campaign called the new poll findings a “real concern,” saying: “We can’t lose white women and expect to do well in this race.”
One Democratic operative is worried the “freshness, newness and aura around Barack has been eclipsed. The campaign has been knocked off stride.”
DCCC Chair Rep. Chris Van Hollen says support for Palin will fade when her record is better known: “They need to get that information out, and they need to get it out quickly,” he said.
Democratic consultant Eric Jaye: The Obama camp needs to be “very careful not to turn Sarah Palin into a working-class heroine.”
From the Huffington Post:
“Every second of this campaign not spent talking about the Republican Party’s record, and John McCain’s role in that record, is a victory for John McCain.” - Ariana Huffington
“As a Democrat, I am nervous and on the verge of desperation. As a media relations professional — someone who does messaging and media training for a living — I am simply puzzled. This is not hard stuff. The Democrats MUST stop responding and become more proactive. Here are ten tips for the Obama campaign, gratis.” - Leah McElrath Renna
“Over the last couple of days I’ve received more calls and emails than I can count from people with fear in their voices. They want to know what to make of McCain’s post- convention bounce in the polls. They want to know if Obama can still win. Most of all they want to know what they can do to help.” - Robert Creamer
“…right now, more than ever, we need a dynamic leader with the intellectual capacity to tackle the issues at hand. We need a leader who can solve economic problems, as well as deal with nuclear threats. We need a leader who can approach problems with reason and logic. Not so long ago, we had such leaders. And better yet, the public actually admired them for being masters of their craft. Nowadays it seems that many Americans equate education and intellectual capacity with snobbery and arrogance. Education and experience in leadership, though, determine capacity for leadership. Somebody lacking the necessary education and experience simply will not have the capacity to successfully lead. We wouldn’t want someone without cooking experience to cook for us, so why would we want someone without political or foreign policy experience to govern us?
Calling oneself a hero after making mistakes shouldn’t earn public trust. And certainly, selecting a person as a running mate solely because she’s a woman — and therefore appeals to a segment of potential voters — doesn’t make you right. Palin is unqualified on her record to be the president of the United States, plain and simple
Either we’re a country that believes race and gender are the key issues in 2008, or we’re going to elect the most suitable people we can find. Pragmatism doesn’t mean we elect an unqualified candidate who claims that two years as governor of Alaska qualifies her to be president. Palin has no foreign policy experience whatsoever. Alaska’s proximity to Russia doesn’t count. How about her views on unprotected sex? If we’re going to deal with morality and values, then we need to be honest. There’s something hypocritical about Palin telling our children to abstain altogether, or to at the very least have protected sex, when she apparently forgets to teach her own children to do the same. We can’t allow our leaders to play the old “do as I say, not as I do” game. Why have we resorted to nominating pretty faces on People Magazine as suitable candidates to run our nation? Is it going to take the National Enquirer covering stories about Palin’s child, childhood, six colleges, etc. to really wake us up from this bad dream? - Michael Medavoy
What do you think?
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Above: the Democrats examine civil rights in the first televised Democratic convention of 1948 in Philadelphia.
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Above: 1952 was still a dramatic one compared to today’s standards. Adlai Stevenson would go on to lose big to Ike.
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Above: 1956, where Walter Cronkite hosts the television coverage. Great to see TV in its infancy years.
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Above: think Bill Clinton is the first ex-pres to oppose a nominee? Check out Harry Truman’s behavior at the 1960 convention.
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Also from 1960, watch the blistering fight from the stump between LBJ & JFK, who would end up on the same ticket.
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1964: LBJ’s convention was a preview to a major landslide.. & the calm before the storm of the 1960s.
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Also that year, Martin Luther King was there challenging the all-white delegation from Mississippi.
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& then came ‘68. Great moment here that essentially lost Democrats the election. Just imagine this happening today. Great live coverage here from the CBS team.
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Dan Rather was man-handled on the floor, too. I’ve had trouble posting this clip, so sorry if it doesn’t work.
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Here’s the History Channel’s take. Wish the music wouldn’t be so obtrusive here. Salty language alert from Chicago’s mayor.
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In 1972 Democrats tried to calm things down.. but they made a huge mistake by keeping McGovern from making his acceptance speech until after midnight. McGovern lost big this year.
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& then came Watergate.. which helped Jimmy Carter become the first deep Southerner to win the presidency in over a century.
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In 1980 Ted Kennedy tried to challenge the incumbent Carter, & failed. Bill Clinton makes an early appearance. Very awkward moment near the end of this clip in which Kennedy & Carter do not shake hands.
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1984 saw the first time a woman appeared on a presidential ticket (which ultimately lost). Here’s a behind-the-scenes look.
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Michael Dukakis was the star of the 1988 convention. He ultimately lost.
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Bill Clinton found a winning formula in 1992.
That’s enough for now! Sorry for all the clips.. I’m a history buff, what can I say?
We’ll of course give the same treatment to past GOP conventions next week.
In the meantime, which convention do you think is most notable above? Post a comment & let me know!
It’s time for the local Democratic delegation to hit the road for Denver. Today on NewsChannel 9 at 5:30, you’ll hear from one of them, Justin Wilkins (above, left) - & I’ll link the story as soon as it’s posted online.
As for who they’ll hear & what they’ll see, read the rundown of the Democratic Denver Convention after the jump.
Democrats continued to live down to their reputation this weekend.
The Rules & Bylaws Committee of the Democratic Party met & decided to seat delegates from the disputed states - Michigan & Florida.. but have them only count for half the vote:
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Needless to say, this did not go over well with Clinton fans. Here’s the reaction of Harold Ickes, who’s a Clinton supporter on the committee, & who helped schedule this year’s “top-heavy” primaries in the hopes that his candidate would prevail:
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Will Hillary continue past tomorrow? Good question. The answer (as it has been since February 5th) will determine which she cares about more — herself, or her party.
What do you think? Post a comment!
HAPPY PENNSYLVANIA PRIMARY DAY!
More links & clips about today than you can shake a cheesesteak at, after you click “read the rest of this entry.
