Category Archives: Politics

One step forward, two steps back

Yea, Barack Obama was elected, and the heavens did smile. But what of these state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage, (apparently) passed even in places such as California?

Yesterday was a major triumph for civil rights as race is concerned, 40-odd years on in the fight. The jubilation over that victory is tempered by the setbacks in today’s civil rights struggle, just as some real progress was starting to take shape. How many more decades will we drag out this fight before truths we should hold to be self-evident make themselves so?

Election night liveblog HERE!

OK, I’m going to give this “liveblog” thing a shot. I’ll be posting timely updates here as I think of them, trapping every fleeting thought in amber and preserving it for subsequent humiliation. Don’t miss it! The page will automatically refresh every 5 minutes to annoy you keep you up-to-the-minute with the nonstop excitement that is bound to ensue.

11:37 PM ▸ They’re already talking automatic recount on the Senate race. Maybe it’s time for bed. For those of you who’ve hung in there with me, thanks for reading! Yes we can! And we did!

11:33 PM ▸ Al believes he’s going to win. I’m shocked. But no matter what happens, he says, “Know this: we have changed this country.”

11:30 PM ▸ Has Al Franken been drinking? I suppose that’s OK, we’re all celebrating our new president-elect. I met Al in person at the Minnesota State Fair — last year — and I promised him my vote. He got it. Let’s hope it counts.

11:25 PM ▸ What’s Coleman on about? Looks like he got a new haircut. Seems a bit premature for him to be up addressing his supporters though. Ugh. This Senate race is going to be long and painful.

11:16 PM ▸ Wow, a president who’s not just thinking of how much he can take from the next four years, but how much he — and we — can give to the world a century from now. Vision. We have it again.

11:09 PM ▸ “This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance to make that change.”

11:03 PM ▸ See, everyone? Obama = puppies! Yay!!!

11:01 PM ▸ I know whether you’ve won or lost plays a factor in this, but when McCain mentioned Obama, his supporters booed. When Obama mentioned McCain, his supporters cheered.

10:41 PM ▸ OK, I’m back, two Baileys-es later. Let’s see how the lesser races go. Come on, Al Franken!

9:40 PM ▸ Congratulations to Joe Biden… for winning re-election to his Senate seat. I’m going to put the computer away for a while and toast President Obama with a tasty beverage!

9:36 PM ▸ OK, we can stop talking about how a year ago everyone was thinking this would be a Clinton vs. Giuliani race. I do like how they’re tiptoeing around the obvious fact that Obama has California and the other West Coast states. None of what they are saying is even remotely relevant! It’s over!

9:19 PM ▸ Yes, folks, it’s over. The networks can’t “officially” call states where the polls are still open, but there’s no real doubt that Obama will carry California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii. If he’s already got 207, plus California’s 55, that’ll put him at 262. (To say nothing of the other three states I just mentioned.) Eight more votes from any of the other states, which he’s certain to get, and it’s over.

9:16 PM ▸ Wow, John Murtha got re-elected despite his missteps in referring to his own constituents as racists and then, in his semi-apology, as rednecks.

9:04 PM ▸ Now Nate Silver joins me in calling it for Obama, as of 8:46 PM.

8:54 PM ▸ Taking a break now for the kids’ nighttime rituals, slightly abridged.

8:52 PM ▸ Tim Russert, we miss you and your whiteboard.

8:47 PM ▸ Hmmm… as this map is starting to fill in, it’s looking like a Civil War map. All of the northern states are blue; all of the southern states are red. Let’s see how Virginia and North Carolina go. It would certainly be symbolic if the old Confederate capital, at least, went for Obama.

8:33 PM ▸ Combining the call of Ohio with FiveThirtyEight.com‘s “safe” votes, we’re at 279. Folks, I think it’s over!

8:31 PM ▸ Virginia’s coming back in line… I’m giddy! 200-to-85 right now.

8:27 PM ▸ Obama wins Ohio! Big news!!! Jw can breathe a sigh of relief.

8:26 PM ▸ Now that Minnesota’s in for Obama, I’m waiting to hear about the Senate race and the 6th District House race. I also want to hear how the Minneapolis school board results turned out. If you want to homeschool, fine. But, if you ask me, a homeschooler simply doesn’t belong on the school board!

8:17 PM ▸ Ugh. The “I’m a PC” ads sucked bad enough before they were all shot on $20 Walmart webcams.

8:15 PM ▸ FiveThirtyEight.com is now saying Obama has 259 “safe” electoral votes. If they’re right, he only needs to snag 11 more out of the toss-up pool and it’s over.

8:14 PM ▸ I now have a mispronunciation that I hate more than “nucular.” It is not pronounced “pundint”!!!!

8:05 PM ▸ Grant Park, Chicago: They got their tickets “in” the Internet? Don’t you mean the “Inter-Tubes”?

8:04 PM ▸ I am now seeing the benefit of HD. There’s all kinds of extra data crammed into the sides of the screen. I guess we’ll be sticking with the broadcast networks now. (Too cheap for digital cable.)

8:03 PM ▸ Painting a map on the ice rink at Rockefeller Center. Sweet.

8:01 PM ▸ W00t! Obama wins Minnesota. Arizona TOO CLOSE TO CALL. Hmmm….

7:59 PM ▸ Flipped to KARE-11. Not that I really need to see these guys in High Definition. I thought the one dude was Newt Gingrich at first. *shudder*

7:55 PM ▸ MSNBC, you’re losing me. If I gave a crap what Tom Delay thinks, I’d watch Fox News.

7:53 PM ▸ Chatting with SLP over Facebook even though we’re sitting in the same room. This is ridiculous.

7:45 PM ▸ I wonder if the Republican Party is on track to be relegated to the margins the way the Democrats were in the ’50s, such as in 1952 and 1956 when (both times) Adlai Stevenson only won a small band of Deep South states against the Eisenhower juggernaut. I don’t think that transition is happening this year, but based on how things go over the next four years, the 2012 electoral map might look like a mirror image of the 1952 map.

7:38 PM ▸ I don’t think this is going to move as smoothly as I had initially hoped. Virginia was looking solid Obama over the last few days on FiveThirtyEight.com.

7:31 PM ▸ Virginia… ouch. Too close to call, but McCain is way ahead with roughly a third of the precincts reporting… THIS JUST IN — Elizabeth Dole lost her seat. That was a pretty nasty campaign.

7:27 PM ▸ OK, it’s on. We’re watching MSNBC. Ann Curry was just talking about white voters in North Carolina who said race was a factor. (I think it was North Carolina. Some southern state, at any rate.) Apparently 24% of white voters in that state said race was a factor, and among them 30% “still” (that’s a quote) voted for Obama. Isn’t it possible that race was a factor for some of them in a positive way? I’m white, and I think it’s about damn time we have a black president too!

7:25 PM ▸ Is it over? I just got home. I heard on NPR in the car that Obama took Pennsylvania. Big news. McCain has a steep climb to recover from this position.

5:23 PM ▸ This will probably be my only update-by-iPhone. The on-screen keyboard is just not designed for coding HTML. Anyway, I’m at the mall with the kids, having Chicken McNuggets shoved in my face. Not by choice. Oh well… the cashier at McDonalds gave me a free milk when she saw my Obama button. Let the redistribution begin!

2:27 PM ▸ OK, time to go think about something else for a while. I’ll be back when I just can’t stand it anymore.

1:56 PM ▸ Tick… tock… tick… tock…. Is it over yet?

11:54 AM ▸ My Voting Story. Since I’m already starting to hear tales of woe from friends and acquaintances in other states, I felt like I should share my own story. Gloat, if you will. We decided to vote after the kids were off at school, so we ended up walking to our polling place (the Methodist church at the end of our block) around 9:15 AM. We talked to some neighbors along the way, who had already voted, and they mentioned that there had been a bit of a line earlier as people voted before work, but now things had tapered off.

We walked right in, no line, signed in, walked over to the ballot table, took our ballots to the little folding (and flimsy) voting carrels, marked ’em up, took them to the Tabulatron 2000™ (or whatever it’s called), fed them in, and that was it. Got our stickers and walked out. OK, the Tabulatron spit out my ballot at first so I had to give it a second try, but then it worked. I even distinctly heard the sound of the ballot dropping, intact, to the bottom of the big metal box inside, so I’m fairly sure it was not shredded.

Now, lest you get the impression that the electorate is staying home around here, that is not the case. The place was humming with people. It just happened that the capacity of the polling place was precisely matched to the number of people coming in to vote at that time. I could almost hear a Raymond Scott tune playing in the background.

Go Minneapolis!

11:39 AM ▸ Popcorn has been requested. Here you go…

11:23 AM ▸ He hasn’t even won yet and they’re already renaming buildings after him.

11:11 AM ▸ I managed to work for an hour. Now it’s time to get some lunch and think about the election some more. And post some asinine status updates on Facebook.

10:11 AM ▸ Currently on the U of M campus. Election buzz is tangible. Lots of Obama love. Also clean water amendment. Yay, sales tax! (I voted for that, too.)

9:25 AM ▸ The deed is done.

6:34 AM ▸ Let’s get things started by dropping in the MSNBC election dashboard. This will serve as the Al Michaels (or, if you’re old skool, Pat Summerall) to my John Madden.

Don’t be fooled by all of that red territory

America does not vote by the square mile. The electoral college is fundamentally flawed, but it does at least approach an accurate representation of the will of the American populace, as much as the will of 305 million people can be evenly divided amongst 538 electoral votes.

As it stands, the vote is weighted slightly, and unfairly, in favor of states with small populations. I’ll spare you the civics lesson on how the number of votes per state is determined (if you don’t already know, shame on you, Sarah Palin), but suffice to say that each state has at least 3 electoral votes. The inequality here is best summed up in the comparison between Wyoming, our least populous state, and California, our most populous state. Wyoming’s 3 electoral votes reflect the will of its 522,380 residents at a rate of 1 vote per 174,127 people. California’s 55 electoral votes, in contrast, are divided amongst its 36,553,215 residents at a rate of 1 vote per 664,604 people. In other words, a person’s vote in Wyoming counts 3.8 times as much towards the electoral total as a person’s vote in California.

That’s unfair. But there it is. So in short, the will of the citizens of Wyoming is disproportionately represented by almost four times as much as that of the citizens of California, per person.

Nonetheless, it’s worth considering the mass of California’s 55 electoral votes when contemplating a speculative map such as the one below (from Yahoo’s Election Dashboard) — based on the likely outcome as determined by the “prediction markets” — a.k.a. the bookmakers who take bets on who will win the election. Of course, betting on the outcome of the presidential race by an American citizen is illegal. But that doesn’t keep residents of other countries from taking a sporting interest in the outcome. And, given bookmakers’ need for an accurate prediction of the outcome of any wager-worthy event like this, they’re probably more reliable than the latest polls, or even the kind of meta analysis we’re seeing out of FiveThiryEight.com.

As an Obama supporter, I often look at maps like this and am dismayed to see so much red. Geez, I think, Obama may end up squeaking by on this but just look at it — that’s a whole lotta McCain territory out there. But again, the land isn’t voting. The people are. It helps to pay attention to those little numbers on each state. I did a quick tally and found that large, snakelike swath of the west, consisting of Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas all together comprises 55 electoral votes. The same as California.

In fact, the only big red state is Texas, and the only other reasonably big state among them is Georgia. So McCain has two 15-or-more-electoral-votes states, compared with Obama’s nine (California, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina and Florida), and Virginia and Massachusetts are also larger than any other McCain states.

So there you have it. Remember that land doesn’t vote — people do. And even if, thanks to the electoral college, people’s votes count relatively more if there’s more land between them, ultimately the proportion of voters favoring one candidate or another is not accurately indicated by the amount of red or blue space you see on the map, but by how big those little numbers on the map are.