I’m having way too much fun checking out the right-wing bloggers who so confidently believed in the coming Romney wave. I take it I’m not the only one.
One of the biggest losers yesterday was Karl Rove. He didn’t just lose an election; he lost his aura as the guy who could manipulate American politics to his will. He controlled about $300 million dollars; his groups were the largest single outside group trying to swing this election. Big-money donors trusted Karl to give them the outcome they wanted. Karl was the inside guy who could pull the right levers and drive the right wedges and stampede voters to vote for Republicans.
He did not deliver. He didn’t even come close to delivering. All that “smart” money was pissed away.
Karl’s meltdown on Fox News last night wasn’t really about Ohio, or Mitt Romney. It was Karl being stripped naked and shown to be a fraud, and a fool. He obviously was not expecting to lose Ohio. He is not the all-knowing guru of politics after all.
I’ve long thought Karl was overrated. If you look closely at his background, you see that he made his reputation in politics by managing campaigns that picked off Democratic incumbents in southern states by relentlessly smearing them. It was cheap and dirty politics. He became a bogyman to liberals while working for the Bush Administration, yes, but to a large extent he was riding a wave of right-wing ascendency. But that’s over, and so is Rove.
A big shout-out to Mazie Hirono, the new senator-elect (and a Democrat) from Hawaii. Although I don’t know if she practices now, she was raised Jodo Shinshu, and has said she takes a lot of her values from Buddhism.
I see that all the states have been called except Florida. And that’s fine; Florida can take the next few days to count chads to its heart’s content, and it won’t matter. That’s nice.
Later on I’ll probably write something about What It All Means, but I was struck by this column at Buzzfeed, of all places, by Ben Smith:
ObamaCare is now a firmly rooted component of the nation’s social compact. Americans appear to have accepted his campaign’s argument that he deserves more credit for a nascent economic recovery than blame for its slow pace.
And the vision of a conservative resurgence appears to have fallen short. The best the Republican Party could muster was a Massachusetts moderate masquerading as “severely conservative.” The Tea Party is a memory, an embarrassment to a party that didn’t even mention it at its national convention in Tampa. And the network that led the conservative resurgence, Fox suffered a sort of televised meltdown as the results came in, with Karl Rove berating host Megyn Kelly for calling the election, he said, prematurely.
Republicans have warned of a more liberal Obama over the coming term, an outcome Democrats hope for and consider likely. But the scale of the decisions facing the country will create an intense pressure for compromise, and now on Democratic terms.
But the 2012 election marked a cultural shift as much as a political one. Ballot measures that had failed for years — allowing the marriage of two men or two women in Maine and Maryland; legalizing marijuana in Washington state and Colorado — were voted into law. The nation’s leading champion of bank regulation, Elizabeth Warren, handily defeated moderate Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts, and the nation’s first lesbian senator, Tammy Baldwin, was elected in Wisconsin. Even climate change, which was absent for nearly the entire campaign, came roaring back with Hurricane Sandy and was the subject of endorsements for Obama and harsh attacks on Romney.
These measures were passed, and Obama re-elected, by an American electorate that Republicans had dismissed as a fluke of African-American pride and youth enthusiasm, and which a generation of pundits — Michael Barone, George Will — wrote off as a fantasy.
What I’m seeing, here and elsewhere, is a sad admission that the day when the angry white male voter ruled is over. Of course, in some states, especially the South, it will linger for a long time. But on a national level, the racial dog whistles don’t work. Putting down feminists, promising to repeal Roe v. Wade, doesn’t work. Hysteria over same-sex marriage doesn’t work. Nativism doesn’t work. The All Hate All the Time campaign doesn’t work.
Smith’s column is headlined “Welcome to Liberal America.” Heh.
Not surprisingly, Mittens is sulking and refusing to concede. However, before I turn in for the night, I want to point out that President Obama right now is just short of 270 without Ohio, Virginia, and Florida. And by my calculation, the state that could put him over the top without OH, VA, and FL, is Nevada.
Nevada hasn’t been called yet. With the states called for Obama minus Ohio, by my count the President has 265 electoral votes. Nevada has 6 electoral votes, and it is expected to go to Obama. Once he has Nevada, the President has 271 electoral votes without Ohio, without North Carolina and without Florida.
And Nate Silver believed Nevada is safe for Obama.
Right now I don’t have a sense of where Nevada is in its vote counting, so I’m not going to wait up for it.
Update: There’s no information on the Ohio government website, either. I honestly don’t expect to hear about Ohio for awhile yet.
7:55: Lots of closing coming up at 8 pm.
8:00 PM:
The independent Angus King won the Senate race in Main.
Warren-Brown too early to call.
8:15. Right now, with called states, Romney has 67 electoral votes and the President has 65 electoral votes.
Update: With 939 of 2,588 precincts reporting, Romney is ahead in Virginia, 56 to 42 percent.
Mitt has 82 electoral votes. So far, both candidates have won states they were supposed to win. No upsets.
Connecticut — Chris Murphy has defeated the wrestling federation lady for the Senate seat.
8:55: Once we get to 9 o’clock there will be only eleven states left in which polls are still open.
* There were no lines at my polling place today, but it was busy. There was no where to park so I ended up walking to the polls, in a local elementary school. It’s not far, but it’s all uphill. By the time I got there I had to sit for a while to recover. I was grateful the walk back was all downhill. If it had been uphill both ways, I couldn’t have made it.
9:00:
We got Michigan and New Mexico, as expected.
We got New Jersey. I’m surprised we’ve got a projection already.
Update: Chuck Todd is saying that the President is way ahead in Hamilton County, Ohio. This is huge. Hamilton County is southern Ohio, very conservative, “Mean Jean” Schmidt country.
Update: We got Pennsylvania, as expected.
I’ve been watching the state government election return page from Virginia. Romney was way ahead early on, but it’s getting tighter.
Update: We got Wisconsin. Nate Silver said we would, but a lot of the pollsters were calling it a tossup state.
SHERROD BROWN WINS IN OHIO! A big relief!
President Obama is now ahead in the electoral vote count.
9:51: So far there are no surprises, really. Warren and Donnelly were ahead in the polls, but it’s good to see the results.
9:55: MSNBC is reporting that the Obama campaign is feeling confident about Florida.
Update: Claire McCaskill wins!
Romney and the President are now tied n electoral college votes, 162 to 162.
I just flipped over to Fox. They’re very quiet over there.
Deb Fischer defeated Bob Kerrey for the Nebraska Senate seat.
Update: The Bangkok Post is reporting that Tammy Duckworth won her congressional race in Illinois, but I don’t think I saw anything about it on television.
Virginia. A couple of hours ago, Romney was way ahead. Now, with 81 percent of the vote counted, Obama has nearly drawn even. It could still go either way.
Why We May Not Have to Wait Up for Florida, Virginia and Ohio
If President Obama wins the following states, he gets to 272 electoral votes:
California
Colorado
Hawaii
Iowa
Nevada
Oregon
Washington
Colorado, Iowa, and Nevada are too close or too early to call, and the rest haven’t closed yet, but they are all expected to go for Obama. Those states plus the states Obama already has won add up to 272 electoral votes, by my calculation.
___________________
Kaine beats Allen in the Senate race in Virginia.
__________________
With the big enchilada, California, plus Washington and Hawaii, the President now needs 27 more electoral votes to win. Mitt needs 67 more electoral votes, even after we give him North Carolina.
We got Iowa. We need 21 more electoral votes.
We got Ohio!
That means
Obama wins!
Obama has 274 electoral votes. It’s over.
They are real, real quiet at Fox News.
Update: Looks like a great party in Chicago.
Update: With 92 percent of precincts counted, Obama has moved slightly ahead of Romney in Virginia.
BIG UPDATE: The Romney campaign is not conceding Ohio. All the media outlets are calling Ohio for Obama.
As I said somewhere tonight, the President will almost certainly get to 270 electoral votes without Ohio.
Jeff the Flake in Arizona was elected to the Senate. Boo.
Anyway — I’m looking at Virginia, and I think Virginia will be called for President Obama some time tonight.
* Some news outlets have called Colorado for Obama, but MSNBC hasn’t yet.
First off — this video is too funny. Watch the “scary Blank Panther” politely open the door for a couple of white ladies while Fox bobbleheads declare how intimidating he is. (H/t Tbogg)
Second, there’s been some kind of nonsense in Philadelphia involving, so the rightie bloggers say, Republican poll watchers kicked out of polling places and then reinstated by a judge. Since the only accounts of this I can find are on right-wing blogs and the also right-wing Washington Examiner and Fox News, we don’t have the whole story.
Today’s the day, folks. Come by here tonight for the live blog of the returns.
I predict we won’t know returns from Ohio and Florida for many hours or even days, but I’m hoping it won’t matter.
I also predict that Chris Christie will become the scapegoat for a Romney loss. The Romney people already are painting Christie as an ingrate and a fair-weather friend (literally) to the campaign. IMO Christie has pretty much cemented his re-election as governor of New Jersey, but other Republicans will stop inviting him to their birthday parties.
Update: Nate Silver on Colbert. I get a kick out of the way the audience treats a quintessential nerd like a rock star.
Here are a couple of good articles at Lawyers, Guns and Money that are worth your time. Erik Loomis writes,
I would like to think that we on the left actually do understand history. We do not. There is a clear path to change. Conservatives understand this. You take over the party structure. That’s what they did in the 1950s and 1960s when they were disgusted by the moderate Republicanism of Dwight Eisenhower, Earl Warren, and Nelson Rockefeller. They took over party structures and local offices and turned them into bastions of energized conservatism. Note that conservatives basically don’t run 3rd party campaigns. Libertarians might talk about doing this–but they almost all vote Republican in the end because they know that they are moving their agenda forward by doing so.
Any reading of history shows that change within the American political system does not come through third party campaigns. It comes through the hard work of organizing our communities to demand change. Eventually legal and political changes are necessary–but only after people are organized to demand them. Look at the major movements in the last century. The labor movement, African-American civil rights, the women’s movement, gay rights movement. Each of these movements spent decades (or a century) organizing for change. For each of them, there was a moment when it all came together and they could demand transformations of federal and state law, which for gay rights is happening right now.
Note that not a single one of these transformational social movements used a third party mechanism as an important strategy.
It seems that every other year or so some progressive comes up with the bright idea of organizing a third party, as if such a thing has never been tried before. In fact, there have been many strong efforts to create a third party, beginning about 1830 or so. In the 19th century there were more alternative parties than you can shake a stick at. Yet there are only two nationally dominant parties at a time, although not the same ones. That we remain stuck with two, and only two, nationally dominant parties has to do with the way we hold elections, and until that changes, we’ve got two parties.
The other thing that has saddened me terribly is the way so many people turned their backs on President Obama almost as soon as he was elected. Some didn’t even wait for him to be inaugurated. A lot of those were disgruntled Hillary supporters. But it was naive to think that all we had to do was elect a Dem president and then sit back and wait for him to fix everything in the first half of the first term.
I went back and read the post I wrote after the election in 2008, saying that electing Obama was just the beginning of the fight. I think it holds up pretty well.
Erik Loomis is right; the Left doesn’t understand history and doesn’t understand how to play the long game. That’s why can’t get ahead of the Right. And the fact is, the Dems in the past couple of years have become tougher and more united, and as this campaign has shown they are no longer shy about standing firmly on controversial social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. This is a tangible change from where they were four years ago. We need to build on that.
Nate Silver has Mitt’s chances down to 13.7 percent, and a new NPR poll taken entirely after Hurricane Sandy shows the President ahead, 48 percent to 45 percent, among likely voters.
Republicans in Ohio and Florida are blatantly working to suppress Democratic votes and hand the states to Romney. One of the reasons I worked out the Poll Closing Watch List yesterday was to try to understand for myself how much it mattered. It would certainly hurt if Romney claims both Ohio and Florida, but it isn’t necessarily fatal.
And don’t forget Virginia. Virginia is leaning Obama, although it’s very close. If the President does win Virginia, the odds that Florida and Ohio won’t matter are much improved.
If President Barack Obama wins, he will be the popular choice of Hispanics, African-Americans, single women and highly educated urban whites. That’s what the polling has consistently shown in the final days of the campaign. It looks more likely than not that he will lose independents, and it’s possible he will get a lower percentage of white voters than George W. Bush got of Hispanic voters in 2000.
A broad mandate this is not.
The pressure on Obama to deliver for this liberal base will be powerful. Already, top left-wing groups are pressuring him not to buckle on a grand bargain that includes any entitlement cuts.
And if Obama wins, he will be dealing with a House Democratic Caucus more liberal than he is. The past four years have decimated the once-strong bloc of conservative Southern Democrats, leaving behind a caucus more liberal than ever. By POLITICO’s count, there will most likely be roughly 14 conservative “Blue Dog†Democrats in the next Congress, down from 50-plus only a few years ago.
I almost don’t know where to start.
Josh Marshall snarks: “Or to be more specific, Obama’s winning but not with the best votes. I mean really, if you can’t win with a broad cross-section of white people, can you really be said to represent the country? Really.”
Steve M: “Never mind the fact that if you’re a successful Republican presidential candidate, you’re considered to have a ‘broad mandate’ if you get suburban white voters in Michigan as well as suburban white voters in Mississippi.”
Yes, children, if President Obama wins on quantity of votes, he will still lose on quality of votes and therefore have no mandate to govern. He’s not a real President, because angry old less-educated southern white men don’t like him, is why.
Scott Lemieux: “Shorter Politico: Democratic states should get 3/5ths representation in the Electoral College.” Hah.
And, of course, I see the increased percentage of real Dems, as opposed to Blue Dogs, in Congress as a feature, not a bug. And “Already, top left-wing groups are pressuring him not to buckle on a grand bargain that includes any entitlement cuts.” Yes, thank you. Exactly what’s needed.
