[Peace] What to look for on Election Day

Tue Nov 4 08:36:46 CST 2008

Visit SocialistWorker.org TONIGHT for up-to-date election night coverage and commentary from our writers and columnists

What to look for on Election Day
Lance Selfa and Alan Maass suggest a few things to focus on today to see where Election 2008 is headed.

November 4, 2008

THERE'S NOT much doubt about who will win the presidential election.
Among more than 150 polls conducted nationally over the past month,
Barack Obama was the leader in every single one.
Obama's lead was around 7 percent, according to the trend average
maintained at pollster.com. But more than a few surveys--in particular,
those that estimate a larger-than-expected turnout based on the
enthusiasm of Obama supporters--had the Democrat up by more than 10
percent.
The margin is even more lopsided in the Electoral College vote,
despite the fact that this 18th century institution, created to defend
the power of the Southern slaveocracy, favors smaller, more rural and
overwhelmingly white states. Obama needs 270 Electoral College votes to
win the White House. George Bush won (or, we should say, "won") 271 in
2000 and 286 in 2004. Obama, by contrast, is almost certain to break
300, and there are even scenarios where he comes near 400.
So Election Night holds little suspense as far as the winner is
concerned. But how the vote breaks down--who turned out, what groups
support the Democrats and by what margins, which Republican incumbents
get booted out of Congress--will tell an important story.
Here are a few things to look for during the day and as the results roll in on Election Night.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Who got out the vote?
THE MODERN record for voter turnout in a presidential election was
61.9 percent in 1968. This year's vote will come close, if not beat
that mark. In some hotly contested "battleground" states, officials
expect a turnout of 80 percent or more.
This is a sign of the intense interest in an election that will mark
a sea change in American politics--the repudiation of not only eight
years of George W. Bush, but an even longer era of conservative
dominance over the two-party system.
During the early primaries, discontent with the Bush
administration's failed war in Iraq drove support for the Democrats.
Now, with Wall Street lurching into the worst crisis since the Great
Depression, it's the economy. There is virtually no political issue on
which the Republicans can claim to have the advantage.
You'll see signs of a heavy turnout long before the polls close--the usual TV footage of long lines outside polling places.
But another indicator won't be visible on Election Day--the huge
numbers of people who voted early in the 31 states that permit it.
According to an ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll released the day before the election, 27 percent of those who responded said they had already cast their ballots.
Here, Obama seems to have a huge advantage. Early voters in the ABC poll favored Obama by a 59-40 percent margin.
One factor driving the early vote is a huge number of first-time
voters. According to the Obama campaign, among early-voting Democrats
in Nevada, 43 percent were casting a ballot for the first time, or had
voted only sporadically in the past.
That's an unheard-of percentage, but it's similar and even surpassed
in other states. In North Carolina, for instance, among 869,000 people
who registered to vote this year, more than half had already cast an
early ballot. Around 50 percent is typical for turnout of newly
registered voters--and Election Day is still to come!
The key here is the enthusiasm behind the Obama campaign, which is
visible not only at the huge rallies, but in a vast campaign machine
made possible by the huge sums that Obama raised and the large numbers
of people who volunteered to work on the campaign. According to one
poll several weeks ago, in Ohio, an incredible 37 percent of households
said that they had been personally contacted by the Obama campaign--and
that was with the election still weeks away.
This is important to note. The Obama campaign isn't a political
movement like the ones readers of this Web site are used to
participating in. It's directed from the top, with the main purpose of
winning enough votes on Election Day to get its man into office.
But for those participating in the campaign--who volunteered their
time, marshaled their arguments and worked to change minds--it will
have felt like a movement. Those supporters will expect Obama
to represent a real change once he takes office. The clash between
their hopes and the realities of a Democrat in the White House is sure
to push numbers of these people to get involved in a different kind of
movement.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Trouble at the polls?
IF THE turnout is as heavy as predicted, keep an eye out for another image--of angry voters unjustly turned away from the polls.
In the razor-close election of 2000, voter suppression in Florida
was the margin of victory for George W. Bush--tens of thousands of
African Americans were purged from the voter rolls prior to the
election, police intimidated people on Election Day itself, and
right-wingers blocked a recount that would have given Al Gore a victory
in Florida, and thus the White House.
There's almost no way the election could be as close this time, and
thus no way for the Republicans to steal it. But expectations of an
Obama landslide could be confounded by voter suppression that's built
into system.
For one thing, the U.S.--which claims to be the "world's greatest
democracy"--leaves its national elections in the hands of a ramshackle
system of underfunded county-level election authorities. The entire
process is primitive and prone to errors and fraud.
The bias against working people and especially minorities is
obvious. In Ohio in 2004, Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell
made sure that Republican-leaning areas had more than enough voting
machines to accommodate Bush supporters. Meanwhile, inner-city areas in
Cleveland and near college campuses had to make do with fewer and older
machines.
Watch the cable news today, and you're far more likely to see black
and brown faces in the lines that stretch out the door of polling
places.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The leading indicators
IF THE election is going to turn into a Democratic Party landslide,
we're likely to know pretty early. Keep an eye on returns (which become
available as early as 6 p.m. EST) from these four states: Indiana,
Kentucky, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Indiana hasn't voted for a Democrat in presidential elections since
1964. But pollster.com's analysis of state-level polls suggests the
state is a toss-up this year.
Kentucky, another "red" state that was one of the first
Southern/border states to move into the Republican column in the 1950s,
is a long shot to go to Obama. But its voters may be on the verge of
tossing Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell out of office.
If Indiana goes to Obama and McConnell loses his reelection bid,
these would be early indications of a landslide that will sweep
Republicans out at all levels. Even if the GOP prevails in these
states, it will be important to see by how much. If the vote is close,
it would still be an omen of a long night for Republicans.
In addition to the presidential race, congressional elections are
set for a big swing to the Democrats. More than three dozen Republican
incumbents announced their retirement rather than face the prospect of
losing on Election Day. The Democrats will build on their majority in
the House, and in the Senate, they could break the 60-seat
barrier--leaving Republicans without even the minority needed to carry
out filibusters on party-line votes.
Returns from Virginia will start coming in at 7 p.m. (EST). The
noteworthy point here will be whether McCain gets any last-minute
support that shakes the certainty of an Obama victory.
For more than a month, most polling agencies have put Virginia
solidly in Obama's column. It and Colorado have been, in Electoral
College terms, the Obama campaign's key strategic gains.
If, as most polls suggest, Obama wins Virginia and Colorado, McCain
has to win a "blue" state--one that recently voted for Democrats--while
holding onto both Ohio and Florida, which both went narrowly for Bush
in 2004. This explains the McCain campaign's obsession with
Pennsylvania (21 electoral votes), compared to a combined 22 electoral
votes available in Virginia and Colorado.
Virginia's and Colorado's likely shift into the Democratic column is
part of a general trend running against the Republicans, but it's worth
noting one detail--both states' growing Latino population is changing
their political balance. Obama and the Democrats will do much better
among Latinos than John Kerry did in 2004--a direct result of the
Republican party's turn to anti-immigrant scapegoating in the face of
the mass movement of immigrants that erupted in 2006.
At 8 p.m. (EST), it will be time to look at Pennsylvania. McCain's
last-minute focus on the state may have picked up a couple of points,
but Obama is still the odds-on favorite.
McCain is counting on a strong turnout in the conservative central
part of the state and a close finish in the formerly Republican, now
increasingly Democratic, suburbs of Philadelphia. If these suburbs go
to Obama at rates of 55 percent or above, then McCain is toast.
How likely is this scenario? Polling expert Nate Silver of
fivethirtyeight.com thinks there is a greater probability of Obama
winning McCain's home state of Arizona than of McCain winning
Pennsylvania.
If McCain loses Pennsylvania, the election is basically over, and celebrations of the end of the Republican era can begin.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Confederate states for Obama
DURING THE Civil War, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee commanded the
Army of Northern Virginia, defending slavery and the South's capital of
Richmond from the Union Army.
One hundred and forty-three years after Lee surrendered, a Black man
stands on the verge of being elected president. And if Barack Obama
wins, Virginia--particularly Northern Virginia--will be a key to his
victory.
In fact, Obama chose to stage his election-eve rally in the Northern
Virginia town of Manassus, site of the first battle of the Civil War.
Symbolism aside, the fact that Obama is likely to win Virginia and
has a fair shot in other Southern states like North Carolina, Florida
and even Georgia is another piece of evidence that the Republican era,
based largely on a "Southern strategy" of appealing to the backlash
against the civil rights period, is over.
"This is the last election Republicans can win on old formulas," the
journalist and former Carter administration official Hodding Carter III
told the Charlotte Observer. Carter said this year's election marks the emergence of long-term trends that have given the South "a different complexion."
The main reason for this is the massive demographic changes that
have made these states more multiracial and shifted their economic
bases away from agriculture, tourism and the military, and toward
education, health care, banking and high-tech industries--in short,
less traditionally "Southern" (if that word is taken to mean
"parochial" and "conservative"). As a Brookings Institution study
explained:

Virginia and Florida have eligible voter populations that are rapidly
changing. White working class voters are declining sharply while white
college graduates are growing, and minorities, especially Hispanics and
Asians, are growing even faster. These changes are having their largest
effects in these states' major metropolitan areas, particularly Miami
and rapidly-growing Orlando and Tampa in Florida's I-4 Corridor, and
the suburbs of Washington, D.C. in Northern Virginia.

While these are long-term changes that will echo beyond 2008, the
current economic crisis has hit these areas hard. Florida and Virginia
are epicenters of the housing bust, and North Carolina, as a banking
center, is catching blowback from the financial meltdown. That's
another problem for the Republicans.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
How did white workers vote?
THROUGHOUT ELECTION 2008--from the Democratic primaries through
November 4--no group of voters has attracted more attention from the
media than the "white working class."
In the primary battle between Obama and Hillary Clinton, this group
was said to be the base of Clinton's support. Their supposed reluctance
to vote for Obama--despite his demonstrated strong showing among white
Democratic voters in Iowa, Wisconsin, Virginia and Indiana--was
supposed to be his Achilles heel against McCain.
Acting on this conventional wisdom, McCain staked the last three
weeks of his campaign on trying to win Pennsylvania and Ohio away from
Obama by championing "Joe the Plumber," the archetypical worker who, he
said, would lose out under Obama's tax plan.
In reality, "Joe the Plumber" wasn't a licensed plumber, and his
tale of woe revolved around the claim that his taxes would increase if
he were able to buy out his boss and take over a small company. In
other words, McCain should have been campaigning for "Joe the Small
Businessman" instead.
In reality, the commentators' "white working class" label has always
been as shaky a construct as "Joe the Plumber" was in reality.
Most pollster definitions of the white working class are
education-based: white voters without a college education. That says
nothing about the kind of jobs people do, the differences between men
and women, nor the influence of unionization on political ideas.
These narrow confines do define a segment of the electorate, but it
is a dwindling one. A Brookings Institution study of 10 "purple" states
("swing" states that could go to either Democrats or Republicans on
Election Night) showed that the percentage of the electorate made up of
the stereotypical white worker declined anywhere from 1 percent to 6
percent between 2000 and 2006.
This is still a significant voting bloc. But a politics based on
whipping up resentment among various "Joes"--as the McCain-Palin
campaign descended to--ran into trouble this year.
There are two sources. First, the U.S. working class is more
multiracial than ever. So even talking about workers as being
middle-aged white males is increasingly anachronistic.
Second, there's resistance from the putative "Joes" themselves. According to a recent CBS/New York Times
poll, Obama may win as much as 44 percent of the white vote, higher
than the historic average of 39 percent white support for Democrats
since 1964.
The explanation for this among commentators is that the economic
crisis has made white voters focus on something other than race. As
Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling
Institute, put it: "The most important color is green."
But under the pundits' noses, something bigger may be happening. As New York Times columnist Frank Rich astutely pointed out:

Once Hillary Clinton whipped Obama in the Rust Belt, it's been a
bloviation staple (echoing the Clinton camp's line) that a Black guy is
doomed among Reagan Democrats, Joe Sixpacks, rednecks, Joe the Plumbers
or whichever condescending term you want to choose. (Clinton at one low
point settled on "hard-working Americans, white Americans.") Michigan
in particular was repeatedly said to be slipping out of the Democrats'
reach because of incorrigible racism--until McCain abandoned it as
hopeless this month in the face of a double-digit Obama lead...
The dirty little secret of such divisive politicians has always been
that their rage toward the Others is exceeded only by their cynical
conviction that Real Americans are a benighted bunch of easily
manipulated bigots. This seems to be the election year when voters in
most of our myriad Americas are figuring that out.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
What about the referendums?
WITH ITS favored party, the Republicans, likely to take a drubbing,
the right wing has a few ballot measures on hot-button issues to
concentrate on.
The most closely watched will be Proposition 8 in California, which
would ban same-sex marriage only a few months after it was legalized by
a California Supreme Court decision and state offices started
distributing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples.
Both the decision and early polls showing widespread opposition to
Prop 8 are signs of a shift on a question that was central to the
Republicans' victories in the 2004 election. But with a month to go
before the election, right-wing organizations led by the Mormon Church
poured money into the pro-ban campaign. The latest polls showed a
statistical tie, with about 10 percent of people undecided.
One cause for optimism is that the Democrats are expecting a huge
surge to the polls in California--Obama's looming victory could
suppress turnout among Republicans likely to support the ban. But it
will be a very close.
We've seen this before, with the right going into elections with
momentum behind their referendums--and the primary reason is that
Democrats won't make a stand on these questions.
Nationally, Barack Obama has said he opposes Prop 8, but he and the
Democratic Party tried to divert attention from the issue to keep it
"off the table" in the presidential race. As a result, the voices in
favor of Prop 8 are louder than those opposing it--even though public
opinion surveys suggest it should be the other way around.
Thus, the right can get their way even when its arguments are discredited.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
What's the turnout in Grant Park?
OBAMA IS planning a huge victory celebration in Chicago's downtown lakefront park.
The campaign issued tickets over the Internet to an official
fenced-in area in Grant Park that will hold around 75,000 people--the
tickets were gone inside of 45 minutes. City officials figure at least
as many people will congregate outside; Mayor Richard Daley guessed the
total would be around 1 million.
That's a huge number, but Obama's campaign has been drawing
stadium-sized crowds throughout the year--a sign, obviously, of the
huge enthusiasm his campaign has generated.
To start with, this is a product of the general sea change in
American politics. The discrediting of the Bush administration and the
right-wing agenda has many millions of people thirsting for change, and
this has translated into huge enthusiasm for the Democrats in general.
The mainstream media viewed the long battle over the Democratic
presidential nomination as a weakness, with the eventual winner
emerging bloodied. But by the same token, the primaries produced a
surge in Democratic voter registration and record-breaking turnouts in
one state after another.
Obama has also been able to tap this enthusiasm better than any
other Democrat. Amid all the talk about whether white voters will
support Obama, one of the most underreported aspects of this election
is one the media take for granted--Obama's support among African
Americans.
Obama's candidacy is obviously a huge point of pride, as is evident
in Black communities across the country. After a long period of
setbacks--whether measured by the attacks on affirmative action, or the
ongoing economic misery disproportionately inflicted on African
Americans--Obama is a source of inspiration who has renewed a keen
interest in politics.
Grant Park will see a moving display of that hope and politicization tonight.
What goes for African Americans is true more widely, however. Obama
will be the first Black president of a country founded on slavery and
built up through the systematic use of racism. His victory alone is a
sign of an immense social change--something unimaginable a generation
ago.
Coming after the cynicism and demoralization bred by years of the
political dominance of the Republicans, Obama's win will have the
effect of giving millions of people confidence that something different
is possible--and that what we do matters.
That sentiment is at the heart of all the great struggles of the past that went far beyond the ballot box.
But the other lesson of the movements of the past is that no
politician or political party can be trusted to bring change on their
own. That requires organization and struggle from below--to put
pressure on whoever is sitting in the White House.

Related articles Election night journalThe right's referendum pushThe softening of Michelle ObamaThe Democrats' election to loseSeeing the forest through the sleaze

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