 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
 |
||||||||
Have New Mexico and Colorado already won the election for Barack Obama?
Maybe that’s taking things a little far, but if he wins those states (and he’s got a big edge in early voting locked down), McCain has to win Pennsylvania (extremely unlikely) — but even with Pennsylvania, Obama would still likely take it back with Nevada, Virginia, and Iowa.
But, who knows? Maybe Drudge is right, and it’s time to welcome out new Maverick overlords.
…George Will is still in some theoretical sense still a McCain backer — or at least not an Obama backer.
But, man, does he let McCain have it today.
This is not a man who will be shedding any tears for the end of the Maverick.
Reasonoids, and people in the Reason orbit, answer as to whom they’ll be voting for.
I count three (3) McCain votes in a large sample: Grover Norquist, Bob Poole, Roger Stone (!).
My answer:
Who are you voting for in November?
I am voting for Barack Obama, because I believe in hope and change and unicorns. Also, John McCain is dangerously mentally unfit to be president and has decided, with his choice of Sarah Palin, to complete the transformation of the GOP into a southern-centered party based on social division and cultural resentment.
The rest of my answer, and everyone else’s, at the link.
Over at Reason.com today, I take a look at how things have been shaping up with the future of libertarians in the GOP:
Back in 2000, Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s political savior, Karl Rove, was performing nothing short of an electoral resurrection, running around South Carolina calling Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) an unpatriotic, illegitimate-black-baby-fathering Manchurian Candidate.
Who could have guessed that eight years later, the senator from Arizona would be dedicating the remainder of his political life to finishing Karl Rove’s good works on Earth?
And yet, as McCain runs around the country this fall, calling Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) an unpatriotic, socialistic terrorist-paller-around-with, it seems he’s taken it upon himself to complete what should be called the Rove Realignment.
No, not the once-envisioned “rolling realignment,” under which the Republican Party would add to its base of white Evangelical Protestants, bringing in Hispanics, culturally conservative African Americans, and economically vulnerable whites—those who supported Medicare Part D and opposed gay marriage in equal measure—to create a “permanent” Republican majority that would last at least a generation.
McCain’s working on the other realignment: The one where eight years of fiscal recklessness and cultural warfare alienates swing voters and withers the Republican Party until the very base of the conservative movement cracks in half—splitting a coalition that has endured since the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964.
Further down, I’ve got what I believe are the only numbers showing how libertarians are lining up in this election (defined as fiscal conservatives / social liberals) — suffice it to say, it’s not particularly behind McCain.
Between this and my longtime crusade againt the Maverick, it’s probably pretty clear where I stand in this election. But I’ll have a little more to say on the topic later this week.
This election season, I’ve found the polling site 538 invaluable, both as a source of electoral projections and as a corrective to whatever random poll Matt Drudge decides to unwarrantedly hype day-to-day. So, I wasn’t surprised to see an insightful article from 538’s Nate Silver turn up at The New Republic: “How the West Was Lost.”
Now, of course, that’s lost by the GOP. And I believe Nate is more on the Obama side of things. So, really maybe that should be how the West was won (at least from a left-leaning perspective)? Nonetheless, given that the GOP has alienated the region more than the Democrats have won it over, I suppose the title makes sense. And I’ll just stop talking about it.
Anyway…
Having written in my book about the changes in the Interior West, I’ve hardly been surprised this year to see the region emerge as the second battleground, after the more traditional battleground, the Midwest. And the Interior West is an important battleground, because as I’ve noted ad nauseum, even if McCain wins every other Bush 2004 state (cough), CO, NM, and NV alone would throw the election to the Democrats. And, behold, Obama leads in all three — comfortably in CO and NM, where he’s led all year, and narrowly in NV.
Silver notes a couple of the important reasons things have shaken out this way. Folks have been moving from both coasts to the Interior West at a steady clip, transplanting their blue selves into traditionally red states. And, more Hispanic voters are in these states every year (which is a “blue” trend, even if McCain has bucked his base on immigration).
What Silver leaves out is the religious factor. The Interior West has far fewer Evangelicals than the Republican Party’s solid southern states (around 30% in each of the Interior West states versus ~60-70% in the Southern ones). This has meant that Interior West voters are far less attached to today’s Republican Party than their southern counterparts. See, for instance, this chart from Pew, showing how various religious denominations have been behaving this election cycle. While Evangelicals seem to have been unaffected, politically, by the financial crisis, mainline Protestants have switched from advantage McCain by 10 points to advantage Obama by (currently) 5 points.
For all the talk about Florida, Ohio, and even Pennsylvania in these final days, this election was over as soon as McCain wasn’t able to hold onto the states in his own back yard.
How exactly did the “Maverick” lose the ability to hold on to his own back yard? Let’s just say it has something to do with the campaign he’s run. It’ll be time soon enough for post-election recriminations.
I can’t wait.
Recent Comments