thoughts on the coming American political landscape

[jlh]

First, if you're Canadian, I hope you're voting today!

Pollster.com has a new chart up of the year-long Obama v McCain trend. I'm embedding the Java script because the static one is 07/08.

This is the average of all the national polls, done by Pollster; you can see the dots of the individual polls surrounding the main trend line. So let's take a look. There's January, when no one's paying much attention, then Obama wins Iowa and his numbers start to go up in February. March-April the Democratic primaries get heated and Obama goes down for a bit. And then, well before Obama actually has the nomination sewn up, he goes up and stays up all summer. In late August comes his convention bump.

After that, we get McCain's RNC/Palin bump and friends, how long does that last? That's right, two weeks. And Obama starting to pull away and go above McCain predates the economic situation; that just makes the trend stronger. Now McCain is running around talking about how he has the press and the Democrats right where he wants them. But you know, in the midterm in 2006 Karl Rove infamously said to NPR that while they might have numbers indicating a Democratic surge he had "THE numbers" that showed Republicans holding on to the House and Senate. They did not; he was completely bullshitting.

It's odd, this fear that the Democrats have; it's as though they've drunk more of the koolaid than the true believers. We've had incompetently run campaigns for so long (can you imagine what Hillary's national campaign would have looked like?) that we can't believe anyone on the left is actually capable of running a good one. I mean, think about the popular opinions about these presidents:

• Clinton: Got us a lot of money, kept us in peace, but sort of a joke. Administration all over the place and not as competent as they might have been.
  
• GHWB: Washington insider, knew how to run a damn government and work international diplomacy. Unfortunately didn't know how to inspire a country.
  
• Reagan: Put the right people in place to get Washington running like a well-oiled machine, PLUS convinced us that it was Morning in America.
  
• Carter: Couldn't govern his way out of a paper bag. Thought the answer to the oil crisis was sweaters, and told us we were in a malaise. (He actually didn't, but that's a technicality.)
  
• Ford: Good man, did his best in a bad situation.
  
• Nixon: Evil, but also had the government running like a well oiled machine and represented that silent majority he was always talking about. Stopped the protests and the war (eventually) and went to China.
  
• LBJ: Unpopular war, overspending, welfare state, people protesting in the streets. Sure, civil rights, but wasn't that kind of part of the problem?
  
• JFK: Hot. Dead.
  
• Eisenhower: Had the government running like such a well-oiled machine that even though there were actually huge international incidents almost every damn day during the 50s, managed to get in 18 holes of golf every day. Warned about the military-industrial complex, but unfortunately no one was listening. But he got those commies to sit up and take notice!
  
• Truman: Has somewhat risen from the depths of unpopularlity in 1952 (Korea, red scare, etc). Not as steady a hand on the tiller as ol' FDR. A little too much like your excitable uncle.
  
• FDR: Awesome, except to the extreme right who fucking hated his guts and said so at every opportunity. Fascism wasn't just on the rise in Europe in the 30s, kids. But beloved for leading us through Depression and war.

So we have to go all the way back to FDR to find a Democratic president that was seen as good at getting shit done in Washington. I mean, seriously, what the hell? No wonder the left is like, so Obama can be competent? Really? And he won over Hillary because his people studied how the primary system worked in each state? And he's winning over McCain because his people studied how the electoral college can break in their favor? Really? We actually can govern our way out of a paper bag?

Jesus. Of course we fucking can. The depth of your panic has nothing to do with what is actually going on and everything to do with thinking that the Nixon solid south strategy and Lee Atwater's politics of race will work forever and ever amen. But of course as this country gets browner (oh noes!) that strategy will work less and less. Obama may win the country decisively without winning the white vote. The GOP were idiots about immigration and screwed themselves out of a large and growing Hispanic vote that was theirs for the taking, given the social conservatism of that group. (Ezra Klein at the American Prospect has some interesting thoughts on the so-called centrality of the older midwestern white working class voter.)

People have been talking about the inevitable decline of the Republican coalition of social conservatives, neocons, fiscal conservatives and western libertarians for a while now, and it does take time. After all, while Nixon put a big chink in the New Deal Democratic coalition by taking the southern whites in '68 it wasn't until working class voters went to Reagan in '80 that the whole thing fell apart. But the complete failure of the neocons in W's administration, managing to simultaneously fuck over the fiscal conservatives with an expensive war, piss off the social conservatives through lack of action on the federal level and general condescension within the West Wing, and tell those western libertarians to fuck off as they limited civil liberties, while not actually achieving their own program of "winning" the middle east for the US, might have been the final nail in the coffin. The pundits are starting to talk about a true libertarian party, which I'm in favor of, because they would be a better true opposition to the Democrats than the Republicans, who keep distracting everyone from the big-small government argument that is at the heart of the American state with communism or race or abortion or whateverthehell.

I'm not trying to overpromise here, and I'm beginning to suspect that even an Obama win won't keep everyone from panicking, as the blogs have already started worrying about the 2010 midterm "correction" they're sure is coming. But I am saying that we're actually overdue for a gear shift in the American political landscape. We're ready as a country to move on from the social schisms of the '60s, and part of Obama's appeal is his dismissal of them, wholesale, and his understanding that everyone suffered from them. McCain is clearly trying to keep them going because that's the only playbook the Republicans have. But while all those angry white people might have brought the Republicans to power in '68 and '80, they just aren't enough to put them in the White House in 2008.

Comments

[phoenixsong]

<3

(I have nothing coherent to contribute. I'll leave that to others s:) )

[annearchy.livejournal.com]

God, I hope so.

[misscake]

I agree with everything you say here, but note that even though the appeal of the Republican party is starting to wane, they've historically been able to pull election wins out of their asses. So, I'm still going to hold my breath for the next 21 days.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Yes, but historically when? 2000 and 2004 are not great examples. 2006, not so much. And they didn't pull it out in 1992 or 1996. What I'm trying to say is that we keep saying that the Republicans always win, but that can only even sort of be said in, say, 1998-2004, which to my mind isn't an historical trend.

I'm not saying we have this in the bag, but I'm wondering where this idea of "historically been able to pull election wins out of their asses" even comes from. It's so widespread, and I can't find evidence of it, just really good PR about Rove that has everyone freaked out.

[misscake]

You're right, 2000 and 2004 aren't the best examples, but they are the most recent and, therefore, most prominent in people's mind when they think the Dems should have won but didn't. So, maybe it's not a good use of the word historical in that strong examples don't go beyond the last 2 elections. But I'm also thinking of local and state elections which is where I think their tactics have been more effective for a longer period of time.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

In local and state elections it's easier for them to win because so many of the districts are so segregated by demographic. But that's true of Democrats as well. And I think 2006 really shows what motivated and organized Democrats can do--so many senate, governor and house races won by Democrats in that year? Why do we keep thinking about 2000 and 2004 and not take hope from 2006 which was two years ago?

Also, I don't think that the Democrats "should" have won in 2004. I wish we had won, but that election wasn't stolen. It was a badly run campaign with a weak candidate that couldn't give anyone a reason to vote for him and so the undecideds ... didn't. And I've never seen the rather ugly condescension that so much of the coastal left has for the flyover states as I did in that election. We disliked Bush so much that we'd convinced ourselves that only a moron would vote for him, without ever stepping back to think about what people were gaining (or thought they were gaining) from his presidency and then coming up with responses to that. I mean, even Hitler actually did things for the German middle class--that's why they kept voting for him.

I'm sorry, I know I sound frustrated, and I am. There are all these good things that are happening, including 2006, and all everyone talks about is the bad things, and then just gets themselves into a new frenzy about bad things that might happen in 2010. I really feel like this sort of defeatism that has infected the right is more our enemy than McCain at this point. We've gotten ourselves to a place where we believe that the right will always win every election, and that simply isn't true--but it will be, if we just roll over to their supposedly superior campaign skills.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Also, I don't think that the Democrats "should" have won in 2004. I wish we had won, but that election wasn't stolen. It was a badly run campaign with a weak candidate ... And I've never seen the rather ugly condescension that so much of the coastal left has for the flyover states as I did in that election.

Some of this I agree with. Kerry ran a terrible campaign, thanks to Bill Daley and his own arrogance. And his campaign had learned nothing from Rove 2000. We sent New Yorkers to Ohio to canvass; Rove sent Ohioans. Nuff said.

OTOH, the concept of "East Coast Elites" is another absurd Rovian invention, and the fact that it is so widely accepted as objective fact speaks to how good Rove is at this game. If there's an East Coast Elite, it's on Wall Street and it's Republican. (Listening to Mitt Romney, Harvard MBA, Harvard JD, Governor of Massachusetts, rail against the East Coast Elites was an exercise in Orwellian doublespeak.)

But I'm surprised to see you call our present anxiety "defeatism." I heard a lot of Dem defeatist whingeing after the RNC, when Palin had her mini-bump. Three otherwise smart friends of mine announced in despair that we had just lose the election. Silly people, apparently had never seen an electoral campaign before.

But since then, I've seen the Dems passionately fired up, committed, and optimistic. We have one of the best, most exciting candidates any party has fielded in 50 years, and we know it. I yelled at one of my whingeing friends to volunteer on the campaign, and she's been hard at it in VA ever since. Palin did wonders for Democratic volunteerism.

But we would be fools to count the election over in advance of the day. We have to carry at least one difficult state. I think we will do it--probably more than one. But complacency would be foolish.

Sorry to hector, Clio. But I really don't see us thinking that the right will always win, and it's patently clear that their campaign skills are out of date and crap. But with 3 weeks to go, we do not yet have the election in the bag, and it's reasonable to be alert, attentive, and anxious.

(I don't want to go too far down the Hitler road, but it's an exaggeration to say that the middle class in Germany "kept voting for him." I recommend Richard Evans's "The Coming of the Third Reich," which gives an excellent description of how Hitler came to power and controlled phony elections in the 1930s, until he dispensed with them entirely. Brilliant book. http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/1594200041)

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Please, please, stop sending me links to history books I've already read; sometimes I say very simple things to make a point. My point about Hitler was that yes, he did do things for people; there were people who had a very nice time during his rule, thank you very much. And I didn't say anything about "east coast elites". If anything, I was talking about my own friends on my flist who freaked out in 2004 and said they were moving to Canada because this wasn't their country anymore, if that was the outcome of the election, and only stupid people could possibly vote for Bush. I've been trying to argue against that for the last four years.

I am absolutely seeing, all over my flist and in chat, that there is no way we can possibly win this election. I'm not saying we should be complacent. I'm merely saying we shouldn't be defeatist--and I AM seeing that defeatism, among the people I know. I am ABSOLUTELY seeing people saying to me that the GOP will find a way to pull this election out of their ass.

I don't think I can solve how wrong you've gotten my point in this entry or my points in general. I don't think you understand how condescending you sound--I know your points; I am studying for a degree in American History after all. But this isn't a history lesson. Again, those assessments of the presidents were merely a reflection of popular opinion, as I labelled them. This was me trying to talk to people about why yes, Obama can win, and they might want to stop talking about how sure they are that he won't, because I'm kind of over it. I don't think we disagree in any real way, and I'm sorry that you find what I was trying to do in this entry so wrong, or find that I need such a lecture. But we can agree to disagree on what I was trying to do here, at least.

[misscake]

I am absolutely seeing, all over my flist and in chat, that there is no way we can possibly win this election.

Ah, okay, I see your frustration here.

I'm surprised that people are having that reaction. I am 95% certain we WILL win. As you said in one of your comments above, we have one of the best run campaigns ever for one of the best candidates we've had in a long time. Not to mention, the other guys certainly seem to be having major internal communication problems. So, I'm not panicking in the slightest. I am reluctant, though, to call this election a done deal just because I feel like I'll jinx it if I do.

Sorry, though, if my comments added to your frustrations because that wasn't my intention at all. :D

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I don't want to jinx it either! And I know not everyone has my flist. It isn't done, but that means it isn't done, either way, and there's no reason to panic when Schwartz runs around bullshitting that he has the Democrats right where he wants us. Weird shit can always happen. And look downthread for a panic that I personally can't answer in any way (though I'm allergic to conspiracy theories I admit!)

Don't worry about it at all!

[(Anonymous)]

I apologize, Clio, I shouldn't have gone off in your LJ like that. I misread your original point, to be sure.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Thanks. It's fine, I was more, waah! I agree with you! You misunderstand!

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Why aren't 2000 and 2004 good examples? Gore made an error in not enlisting the Clintons to campaign for him, especially in Florida, but the Dems really didn't see the Rove juggernaut coming. Kerry ran a terrible campaign, but Bush still should have lost, on the Iraq mess alone.

And 1968 is a prime example. Unpopular war and a GOP candidate who was already deeply tainted. That election was Humphrey's to lose. And lose it he did, though we now know that the dirty tricks were even worse than reported. Some blame can be put on the Chicago DNC, which shocked Americans with its violence. But Nixon should never have been even marginally viable. Everyone knew by November of 1968 that Vietnam was unwinnable, and that Nixon would drag it out as long as he could. Yet he squeaked in.

Your characterization of Nixon's presidency is pure GOP retrospective spin:

had the government running like a well oiled machine

Sure, in between scandal after scandal. Nixon was (fortunately) stymied by a Democratic Congress, which wrote a great deal of the legislation and forced much of it through, over his strong resistance. He dealt badly with the Congress, was combattive, lied, alienated his supporters, and generally was a fuckup. He stalled so long on enforcing LBJ's desegregation laws that the Supreme Court had to admonish him. He gets credit for the moon landing, but slashed the NASA budget to pay for his imperialist adventures. Not to mention the small matter of Spiro Agnew resigning to avoid indictment for extortion, bribery, fraud, and other non-Watergate criminal charges. Nixon's Attorney General went to jail and disbarred.

So yeah, the Democratic Congress managed to pass a fair amount of good domestic legislation during the Nixon presidency, but no thanks to any executive skills on his part.

Stopped the protests
Not. Really really not. Just to mention a few:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Days_of_Rage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Day_Protests_1971
http://www.lexingtonbattlegreen1971.com/lexington1971.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camden_Riots
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attica_Prison_riots

The protests continued until well into 1972, when Vietnamization took place and US troops began withdrawing in large enough numbers that the end was in sight. Until then, most of the protests were *about* Nixon's war policy. Absent Nixon, we'd have left Vietnam in early 1969, and RFK would have turned his attention to civil rights issues. The endless racial strife in American cities during Nixon's presidency was a direct result of his endless foot-dragging on civil rights, pandering to the George Wallace crowd.

went to China

This is usually credited to Nixon, but it's more accurate to say that China came to the US. It was the shift in Chinese policy that opened China; Nixon just happened to be there. (Similarly, crediting Nixon with founding the EPA is like crediting W with rescuing the economy. Nixon fought both EPA and Chinese diplomacy as long as he could, but was eventually forced to go forward with both, mainly through congressional pressure--and in the case of the EPA, the massive popularity of the idea.)

I assume you're skipping 1972 because it was a stolen election?

Sorry to rant, but after 30 years of Republican spin, it's time to revisit their version of events.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I think you're misunderstanding my point in this post. I completely agree with you!!!!!! The popular idea of Nixon's presidency IS pure GOP spin! I'm trying to say in this post that we have to stop being so afriad of the GOP and so 100% sure that they will find some way to win even if the poll numbers suck.

The reason I was saying that 2000 and 2004 were bad examples was that I don't think the election was stolen in 2004; I think the Democrats never gave anyone a reason to vote for them, only reasons to vote against Bush. And the Iraq mess hadn't yet come home to roost in middle America--the boys hadnt' started coming home totally PTSD with an army that had no intention of taking care of them. That's what pissed off all those military families; I know some of them.

I totally understand all that you're saying here about Nixon. My entire point is that none of it is true. I wasn't making a personal assessment of these presidents; I said "think about the popular opinions about these presidents", not "think about their real historical record." I'm really sorry that wasn't clear, but you're arguing against someone who agrees with you about Nixon. I was just trying to make a point about the popular opinion about them, and why Democrats need to take their head out of their ass and stop taking what the GOP says as gospel just because they say it over and over again.

Anyway, what I was saying here was, why are we allowing ourselves to be frightened by the spector of 2000 and 2004 when they said the same bullshit about how they're "really winning" in 2006 when they really lost. Why are we giving the GOP all this mystical power? Why is it that so many of the left pundits have moved on from Obama winning in 2008 immediately to dire predictions about 2010?

[locumtenens.livejournal.com]

Eee! Very inspiring and calming, actually.

JFK: Hot. Dead.

This made me laugh. A lot.

♥

[aome.livejournal.com]

I just hope we don't have to annotate Obama the same way, given the way crazed conservatives have been acting lately.

Thanks for sharing the chart and your thoughts, Clio. :)

[boosette.livejournal.com]

This is possibly the first non-panicked, intelligent election post I've read all season. ♥

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Not sure I buy your assessment of the various presidents; in particular, I think you grossly undervalue Johnson. Until the Vietnam war derailed him, he was one of the great presidents. He did a hell of a lot more than "overspending, welfare state, civil rights." And JFK as well. Those two presidents dragged this country kicking and screaming into modernity, shed the bigotry of the interior, made America a postwar leader of real stature. Consider, as just one example, the wave of independences in Africa in the early 1960s.

Had it not been for Vietnam--and Sirhan Sirhan--I daresay we would have had Democrats for most of the 20th century, building on the remarkable achievements of JFK and LBJ.

But indeed, Dems are anxious. I'd say it's not entirely due to having run poor campaigns (Clinton's 2 campaigns were brilliant). We expect dirty tricks from the GOP--all the more so now that they're desperate and panicky. The win-at-all-costs ethic has permeated the fiber of the party, so why not expect something nasty the last week in October? W conniving with Ahmadinejad to threaten a nuke strike at Israel, frex. That would convert the Jewish vote in FL. Or Putin just happening to do something scary. That could panic the interior states.

can you imagine what Hillary's national campaign would have looked like?

I thank the Ancestors every frigging day that she lost. I'd have canvassed for her, but it would have been hard. She's nearly as cranky as McCain--and (as it now turns out) petulant, sulky, and vindictive. Her behavior on the stump has been embarrassing. She's rapidly icing herself out of a post in an Obama cabinet.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Oh, I should have been clearer--those aren't my assessments; they're my reduction of the general popular assessment. My assessment of Ike is much more nuanced, and Nixon as well, and I think Carter actually accomplished some shit but no one ever remembers that. I think LBJ was a fantastic president of great vision, and dragging the dems toward civil rights was a huge achievement. Those racist southern whites hadn't belonged in the new democratic party since Wilson left office. And I agree that Vietnam and the culture wars surrounding change in the 60s really wrecked the party. I feel like the best antecedent to Obama is really RFK.

I'm just amazed that these two weeks, I mean, talk about pandering to your dirty underside, McCain and Palin, and it totally didn't work. People are all, yikes. And I was listening to those lovely undecideds in PA this morning and they were all, well, Obama's sure different, but maybe we need different right about now.

It's the discounting of everything we've actually achieved--as you point out, LBJ and JFK are both due for a resurgence--and an overcount of whatever the GOP has done. I mean, they aren't our overlords. They're just the other party. Sure, Nixon totally cheated in 72 (though no one is really talking about that) but for the republicans to have cheated in that way they wouldn't be running against Obama. They'd be running against Hillary. And maybe that's why they've been so disorganized--they were so sure they were going to get to run against her, and bring up everything from the 60s and the 90s that they could, and now they have no idea what to do.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

I did misunderstand the thrust of your post; I apologize. Ranty ranty ranty. I go a little off on the subject of Nixon.

ITA re the GOP having expected Hillary and been unprepared for Obama. I also think the Rove tactics aren't working this year because the schism in the GOP that has been brewing for years, between the religious right and the old guard, has now ripened. McCain should have been a viable candidate, but the party is at war with itself.

Also, they have not figured out how to slander a black guy without looking like racists. I am SO enjoying that. They knew how to slander a woman without looking sexist, but this has nonplussed them.

Also, Axelrod is running a really good campaign. I've been very impressed by the PA operation.

Again, my apologies for spamming your LJ!

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Nixon, so awful.

I also think the Rove tactics aren't working this year because the schism in the GOP that has been brewing for years, between the religious right and the old guard, has now ripened. McCain should have been a viable candidate, but the party is at war with itself.

It makes me wonder if, in the ultimate irony, had McCain run the campaign in 2008 that he'd run in 2000, he might have been uniquely placed to take advantage of that, and to lead a new coalition to victory. How frustrated he must be.

And you know, everything that Obama has had to deal with just being the black guy in the room so often--that's the real source of his unflappability. You feel like he thinks the worst thing in the world to be is distracted. Clinton, otoh, was the epitome of "ooh, shiny!" He could be, because he's so damned smart, but it can make it hard to follow him. No drama, I love it. It's like he's been sitting around listening to Mary J.

Not only can they not slander a black guy, but they can't slander him by saying he sides with scary black people in cities. Or that he was on the "wrong" side in Vietnam. None of it works.

Mystical power.

[bookshop.livejournal.com]

This is a *fantastic* post.

It seems like at a major part of liberal panic is a question of combating "truthiness" at its basic level. *So* many people were convinced that 4 years of lies and incompetence would be enough to turn the tide in 2004, and when it didn't happen there was a serious mental shift after that election in the Democratic party. It's partly because Obama speaks a language close to that of the pulpit when he talks about change that he's been able to succeed where Hilary failed: he's tapping into the folksy traditionalist values that the Republican party had cornered, but he's aligning those values with the other side of the spectrum, and people who weren't willing to listen before are listening now. That's the crucial element that this election has that previous elections were missing from the Democratic platform.

But that's the element that's also the most dangerous. Liberals are panicking because they know exactly how pervasive that folk narrative is. They know that the vast majority of McCain supporters are still caught up in it. They know that right-wing conservatives are still very much part of the political machine in the Republican party, and it's hard to contend with politics that use any underhanded means necessary to keep constituents thinking that God is on their side. You're right that the erosion of that machine is inevitable, but that doesn't make the machine itself any less scary.

And, when you have voters who say things like "you have your truth and I have mine," it makes it difficult to confront that machine head on. In order to do that, Democrats have had to take neoconservative politics very seriously and think them through instead of laughing them off, and I think what they're feeling basically boils down to "if we blow this, they'll be all over us. We won't get another fair shot at the white house for another twelve years." The sense is that truthiness will out, as it were, and I think the fear is not that we can't damage the fundamentalist machine, but that unless we can replace it with something better and stronger and *more* unifying, in another 4 or 8 years it will be back and ready for another propaganda-based go at electing "God's candidate," and it will, because of the Republican chokehold over that folksy narrative of traditional american values, have just as much power over the American public as it ever did.

Re: Mystical power.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Well, I think the problem is allowing them to have that chokehold in the first place. I think one thing Obama is doing is allowing for another narrative. Instead of trying to find ways to fit into this narrative, instead of fitting into that America, people are saying, oh, wait, I am America. If being the son of an African immigrant counts, then so does being the daughter of a war refugee from El Salvador, and etc etc etc. 2004 was a stutter step toward it, and I think we've started to get family values back, but seriously: who is living that live they're talking about? Not many.

I heard an Polish-American "undecided" in PA talking about how foreign Obama sounded and I thought, jeez, you think Polish names sounded "American" 100 years ago? You think that being Catholic would get you into the White House? How soon we forget, yes, but also, things do change. Slowly, but they do. Rove's dream of a permanent majority was a chimera. The dems couldn't hang on to it--my god, 20 years in the White House!--and the Republicans can't, either.

You also remind me, Roland Barthes once famously said "there are no lies on the left." He was wrong, of course. There is "truthiness" that we believe unquestioningly. There are things we merely assume as the beliefs of an intelligent person. (Atheism is becoming one of them, as we relinquish religion as a whole to fundamentalists of all sorts. I think that's a huge tactical error both domestically and internationally, but I have gotten to the point where I assume all non-Jewish intellectuals I meet to be atheists until proven otherwise.) In fact, thinking that only a moron could vote for Bush in 2004, rather than sitting down and working out what the hell that was about, was a real blind spot.

I get that it's scary but I dunno, maybe it's my own struggle with anxiety right now in my personal life, or our current economic condition (how that euphemism reminds me of "recent events") but I'm in a very "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" place right now.

Thank you!

[zephre.livejournal.com]

Overwhelmingly, the documented differences between exit polls and actual returns in the 2004 election were in favor of Bush. Districts where exit polling (which may be the only (and granted, unreliable) record since so many electronic or mechanical voting machines have no back-ups or paper receipts) indicated a clear Kerry majority came back with machine tallies favoring Bush. The exit poll-election result discrepancy went only one way, and only in the Presidential count, and can't be fully explained by simple poll errors. There was no real effort to investigate any election results for fraud.*
That doesn't even get into the issues of voter suppression that were so intense in the last 8 years, and continue up to this minute.

I'm not worried about the Democrats not turning out the vote.
I'm not worried about the electorate realizing that the Democrats are the better choice.
I'm not even worried about the Bradley Effect.

I'm really worried that it won't matter what the voters actually think or do in their polling places, because the Corporate Election Machine will spit out the numbers the Corporate Politicians want, because they control the technology and the method of counting, with no recourse for actual, accurate recounts or non-partisan supervision.

I hold out hope that the Democratic momentum will be such that the vote will be impossible to completely overturn, but the masses of disenfranchised urban poor, minorities, and folks who have the misfortune of belonging to non-violent political protest or opposition organizations give me just a bit of pause.

So I worry.

(*Here's a bit from the conclusion of this report on the exit poll discrepancies (http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf) from USCountVotes.org:
Well-documented security vulnerabilities and accuracy issues have affected voting equipment as far back as the late 1960s(26), and history shows that partisan election officials have long possessed the power to suppress and otherwise distort the vote counts(27). The recent and ongoing proliferation of sophisticated computerized vote recording and tallying equipment(28), much of it unverifiable and hence "faith-based", dramatically augments the opportunities for wholesale and outcome-determinative distortions of the vote counting process. That the lion's share of this equipment is developed, provided, and serviced by partisan private corporations only amplifies these serious concerns. The fact that, in the 2004 election, all voting equipment technologies except paper ballots were associated with large unexplained exit poll discrepancies all favoring the same party certainly warrants further inquiry.)

[adjudicated.livejournal.com]

Thanks for taking the time to talk about politics -- I really got a lot out of reading this post. FWIW, my moroseness and panic of August has dissipated somewhat. I am tentatively hopeful.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I like cautiously optimistic. I guess, I'm not saying we absolutely will win, done deal, but I am saying we can, that this isn't a collective delusion. There's real stuff going on here.