Light drizzle here in the Triad today as Election Day gears up. I passed by a church serving as a polling place near my house this morning. Cars lined up everywear on the curb and all. Line stretched out the door but people were waiting patiently in line using umbrellas to keep the rain away.
Lot of people are engaged in this election and everyone is anticipating the results, the earliest ones we will see sometime after 7pm EST. The commentariat consensus is that if Barack Obama pulls out a victory in Virginia and is very close in Indiana, then the night should be very good for him. The clincher will be the Florida and North Carolina results. A win by Obama in either state will mean that John McCain has no path to victory given that Obama is expected to carry all of the states that John Kerry won in 2004 including Pennsylanvia with New Mexico and Iowa already assumed to be in his column.
Still, no winner will be officially declared until the networks call enough states for either candidate to pass the 270 electoral vote threshold. We will know the winner beforehand no doubt as 4-6 states will act as leading indicators for the nation as a whole.
I expect a long night for me as I flip back and forth on my television catching the results and commentary. I will move the computer out into the dining room too to catch the on-line commentary and track the results on a state by state level not just for the presidential, but also Senate and congressional seats along with the Governor’s race here in North Carolina.
Reviewing the various news shows this weekend, most of them were in some combination of predicting the results on November 4th and a retrospective of the presidential campaign over the past year or two.
Nearly uniformly, most commentators are predicting an Obama win on election day. Question is whether to what degree will his election be decisive. Most of the predictions fall around the 320 electoral votes range. The caveat in that prediction is that many of the electoral votes will come from states that he will eked out a narrow win like in North Carolina and Florida.
It is hard to say what the final day of electioneering will cause the results to change in any meaningful way. Same too as for any significant event that will change the course of the election narrative. There will not be enough time for the electorate to process the information and rethink their election choice. As for that block of undecided voters out there, about 6% of the electorate, the profile of these voters is that they are mostly 2004 George Bush voters. So for these voters, if Obama manages to keep it in a roughly even split, say 60% McCain 40% Obama, Obama should come out well in the end.
I think when it is all said and done, come Wednesday morning, everyone will be just plain exhausted and not just on television. I think the whole population is also exhausted to a degree with the election but not in the sense that they had enough with the election. Rather, it is that people have been so invested in this election as no other in recent history. There is a sense for some that it does not end because so much of their lives for the past 10 months have been wrapped up in the election whether directly through volunteering or contributing or just passively through following the news and opinion makers.
I think much of the involvement of the electorate has been amplified through the maturity of communication tools like the Internet and cellphones. The Internet, through partisan blogs and websites, has been used to drive messages, provide news and context and provide communities on-line for like-minded people. As a communication tool, the Internet has finally reached a point that it can compete directly with mainstream media outlets whatever they may be. Where in elections past we just get a very filtered version of the news, now we can get as many polls we can handle and also whatever news comes out of the campaign, we will know about it in hours. In a sense we are in the world of election information overload.
As for me, I would not know what to do with my life after November 4th. My time these days is now constantly searching the web for new information from the campaigns and read as many pundits and commentators as I can possibly read. All of that will come to an end soon after the election. No doubt there will be several days of post-mortem analysis of the election on who did what right and what they did wrong to sustain my interest. But I feel it will all essentially come to a conclusion of sorts by the weekend. Then I will be in some of political withdrawal for a few weeks.
After that, life will take its normal course. I think the family will appreciate getting their father/husband back. It is a glorious autumn here in North Carolina so I will take a few days off after Tuesday and enjoy it.
Over the next few months, I will keep tabs on the transition process and see how the government will position itself to act on the policies it had put forth during the course of the election. Bu as for me, I will disengage myself from politics for awhile and focus on more in getting in shape for the terrible recession that I expect for the first six months of the year. Life goes on but I do have hope.
How soon will the networks and other media call the Presidential election? If certain states are considered to be key to either of the two candidate’s chance of victory for the day, it is conceivable that we may know the result as early as 7:30pm EST.
Why is this so?
Using the Greenpapers.com site and its collection of polling time closures as a guide, we find that many of the states that are now considered to be battleground states will be closing early. This include the following:
Closing at 7:00pm EST:
- Indiana (CST part of the state closes at this time while the EST time closes at 6pm)
- Kentucky (CST part of the state closes at this time while the EST time closes at 6pm)
- Florida
- Georgia
- South Carolina
- Vermont
- Virginia
Closing at 7:30pm
- Ohio
- West Virginia
Now poll closures do not mean that the results will be known right away. Also, the nominal poll closing time in some areas may be extended because of line-ups at polling states. Finally, networks are loathe to call any states prematurely until a certain percentage of votes come in from monitored districts considered to be bellwether districts for the state. When those results confirm whatever exit polls they have on hand, then they will call the state for the candidate.
Having said that, four of those states (Ohio, Virginia, Indiana, Florida) were red Republican states in the past two elections and if we know that at least one of them have flipped to Barack Obama, then it is pretty good chance that the night will be his.
Indeed, the earlier that one of those states is called with something like a significant margin of polls, the better Obama’s chances. This is because certain states are considered to be in the bag for either candidate. States like New York or Wyoming will be called for the candidates as soon as the polls close in those states.
Watch for states like Georgia which are expected to go for McCain. If the margin becomes very close and a winner is not declared early on, that will mean that Obama’s support will be considered to be very broad.
In any case, by the time the Pacific states close their polls at 11:00pm, we should have a good time how the voting goes for the election.
Just a little more than two weeks before the election on November 4th for the presidential election and it will an anxious several days until then. While Barack Obama has a good lead now on John McCain in the national polls and more importantly a sizable lead in the electoral college votes, at no point should this be taken for granted. But the signs are good and I feel more confident now than I was in 2004 on the outcome.
But the lead can easily vanish with an event that is beyond Obama’s ability to control. It is unlikely given the control Obama has had over his conduct of the campaign to make a gaffe of any sorts can change the course of the election. Joe Biden may say something that gets some media attention more unlikely to resonate beyond a single 24 hour news cycle.
Still, it is questionable on what sort of event would change the election so drastically. We already had the October surprise in the form of the financial crisis which affected more people than other event can. even a terrorist attack will have to be outsize in the degree of the 9-11 attacks to make such an impression. A natural disaster like a California earthquake may take the attention of the news media for several days which affects the McCain campaign more than the Obama’s since it desperately needs visibility in order to catch since it is so short in cash relative to the Obama campaign. On Monday, we will find out how much the Obama campaign raised in the month of September. It has to be a large number given the amount of advertising it has bought to date since the kickoff of the campaigns on the Labour Day weekend.
Here in North Carolina, we are seeing at least one stop per campaign every week now. Sunday, Barack Obama is coming to Fayetteville NC for a rally. Sarah Palin was here on Thursday past and John McCain is in the state today.
Advertising seems to be a bit more skewed towards Obama but I think McCain’s is part of national buys for a show by region like NBC news in the Mid-Atlantic states. But the real serious air war is happening between Kay Hagan and Elizabeth Dole for the Senate seat. Plenty of outside advertisers like the Republican Governors Association and the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. The advertising for this race exceeds the presidential race in numbers if not dollars spent. As I do not listen to local radio (NPR all the way) I do not know the volume of radio ads in the area.
On drives around Winston-Salem, yard signage seems to be a bit lighter than I remember from previous years. The city proper seems to be predominantly Obama while the rural outskirts is more McCain but not as much as one suspects. Similarly, bumper stickers seem to be 50-50 but not as much as from prior years. Perhaps it is better to channel your support into volunteering and get out the vote than just sticking a sign into the ground.
On other down ballot races, outside of the Senate race, there is not much talk about them. Even the Bev Perdue and Pat McCory race for Governor does not have the drive of the national races. Congressional races are quiet. There is some advertising for District 5 between Virginia Foxx (R), who once voted against Katrina relief, and Roy Carter (D) but the outcome seems a foregone conclusion and is the District 12 for Mel Watt (D).
Early voting has been heavy since it started on October 16th.
Voters waited up to an hour yesterday to cast their ballots as the first day of early voting began at the Forsyth County Government Center in downtown Winston-Salem.
At times, the line stretched around the second-floor balcony and continued at the foot of the escalator down a hallway to the parking garage, said Rob Coffman, the county’s director of elections.
“If we can get 30 percent early voters or absentees, I think it will make Election Day go better for everybody,” Coffman said. Twenty-one percent of the people who voted in the May primary voted early.
A line of about 60 people greeted election officials yesterday when early voting began at 8 a.m. The busiest time was in the early afternoon, when some people waited about an hour. At other times, the wait was 30 minutes.
Donald Evans was the first in line yesterday, arriving about 6. He said he wanted to make sure he was in line early because he had to go to work later in the morning as a bus driver. He recommended that others vote early as well.
“To vote early, once you get it over, you feel happy about it,” Evans said.
By the end of the day, 1,733 people had voted.
Voters use touch-screen computers to cast their ballots during the early-voting process.
Coffman said that voters should be aware that if they cast only a straight-party vote they still haven’t voted for president or for any of the nonpartisan contests on the ballot, including a local bond referendum.
“The president is actually the first office you see on the ballot,” Coffman said. “The next is the straight-party voting.”
Linda Poller, one of the earliest voters, said she was stunned when she realized after voting that she hadn’t voted in the presidential race. She had meant to vote for Barack Obama and didn’t realize — until it was too late — that she had skipped that part of the ballot.
“I voted in 2004, and I remember now in the back of my mind someone saying you have to vote for president separately,” she said. “No one said that this morning.”
Both the computer screens and the paper ballots that will be used on Election Day specify in two places that a straight-party vote doesn’t include the presidential race. After Poller’s voting mishap, Coffman said he told elections workers to help get the word out about how straight-party voting works.
Source: Winston-Salem Journal
Not sure how prevalent the problem mentioned in the article of the straight line party voting affects the selection of the presidential choice but hopefully, it will be minimal and not play a role in the final outcome.
The days are pretty warm here in Winston-Salem and autumn is here. No excuses for getting out early to vote.
A rough week it has been in the financial market and by extension, the economy as a whole. It does not say much for the ‘fundamentals of the economy’ that it requires the government to take on hundreds of billions of dollars to stabilise the one part of the economy that more than anything else is behind the malaise in the economy through its credit pumping schemes especially in the housing market.
So the week ends with the stock market just a bit lower overall than where it ended last week. A very wild week which saw the Dow Jones average move by hundreds of points in the course of a day.
Not much I can do on my own other that hunker down and wait for better days to come.
Whereas the stock market remains relatively unchanged from last week, not so with presidential race. A week ago, John McCain was up by 1-2 points on the national polls and nearly drew even in the electoral college votes. But from the time he said that he economy was fundamentally strong on Monday morning, McCain has been playing catch up to Barack Obama. While McCain continued to make gaffe after gaffe and keeps blaming Obama for the crisis, Obama has been more stateman-like and appearing more clear-headed and cool about the situation. This is an Obama which voters are comfortable with and it is making a difference in the polls Obama is now leading in most of the national polls and several states are swinging in his favour
But it is a long time to election day, plenty of time for various events to keep popping up that may change the course of the election. A potential one is next week for the first of the presidential debates. Expectations are not that high for Obama as his debate performance in the Democratic primaries was just adequate. The debate is supposedly about foreign policy, a strength of John McCain apparently, but look towards seeing it more focused on economy issues rather the foreign policy issues.
It is good to be in the lead once more but as Obama has found out several times this years, such leads are made of dust and not for a moment should Obama waver on putting forth his economic plan and keep pressure on McCain.
Via a circuitous route on my Internet surfing, I came across an article written by William Galston at the Democratic Strategist. In the article, he outlines a way for Barack Obama to set the tone for the remainder of his campaign.
An Open Letter From William Galston
The article is lengthy and I will not repeat it verbatim but outline the points he made as advice to Obama to win the campaign:
- Offer a coherent account of what has gone wrong with the economy
- Offer a focused, parsimonious list of remedies for the economic ills you cite
- Draw crisp, punchy contrasts between your plans and McCain’s
- Make the stump speech no more than 15 minutes long
- Provide coordination between an economic message and the rest of your campaign
What Galston repeatedly says in the article is that even though McCain is no where near the intellectual that Obama is, by distilling his message, fraudulent it may be, by harping on a few themes in a simple fashion, he is getting his message across better than Obama is.
There may be some truth to that. Many of us undoubtedly hear or read the transcript thereof of the speech Obama gave today in Colorado outlining his take on the situation facing the economy. He showed his understanding of the situation and the challenges it poses but also prescribing the solutions needed to fix it.
In terms of governance, Obama demonstrates his unmatched qualifications as compared to McCain. But to govern, he first has to win the campaign.
There are times I wish that Obama stays on a theme for more than one day. It seems that whenever the campaign tries something out in terms of messaging it and it starts to register it is confronted with a change in the campaign environment making it move onto to the next message. Part of that is because of pressure from the media and supporters to respond as quickly as possible. There are some things I wish they could sustain for longer periods like the McCain “I do not how many houses I have” gaffe which reflects the disconnect McCain has for the real economy. For media coverage, it last for just two days which is the usual lifespan of such things but what irritates me about it is that it was just thrown away and never incorporated in the larger picture that needs to be revealed about McCain in terms of his character and what he stands for.
The Sarah Palin wave is starting to recede now and the national polls are tightening now and moving in Obama’s favor. This was not unexpected. Question is whether Obama can create enough momentum to open up a clear lead on McCain.
Looking at Galston’s prescription for success, there was little harping on the emotion part. On Hardball, this evening, Chris Matthews played a bit of the speech today for Governor Richardson and Matthews asked where is the passion? There has been a lot of discussion on that topic in the past few weeks but Galston does not go there but he emphasizes that there must be a clarity in Obama’s message. Not necessarily dumb it down but make it succinct enough that a few phrases or moments will resonate with those who hear it.
This approach requires relentless focusing on the economy as the issue to the exclusion of everything else including Sarah Palin. In essence it is the old “It’s the economy, stupid” phrase from the Clinton campaign of which Galston was a part of in 1992.
While political junkies and pundits can relish the details of an Obama speech, most people do not have the time to do so. The soundbite era is truly alive and well but Obama’s message does not need to be reduce to that extent. Rather, just stay on message, repeat it often, keep it short so that when people are in the voting booth on election day but with their thoughts focused on their own personal financial situation, it will be Obama’s message that they will remember as the one that gives them hope that things will turn out better.
Pretty good tracking graphic of the ongoing saga of John McCain and his new inability to talk the truth:
The details are found here: Count The Lies
It is now part of the accepted thinking that the selection of Sarah Palin has been a momentous game changer for this election. Where the crowds were small and lackluster for McCain, now they are out in number and enthusiasm.
Before despairing, we should also recognize that Obama has had his own fair share of game changing moments. The first one was the endorsement of Ted Kennedy back in January. Kennedy’s endorsement gave Obama’s the legitimacy of the establishment Democratic Party and made old time liberals more comfortable with Kennedy.
The next big game changer moment was the wins especially in the caucus states on Super Tuesday in early February. By staying close to Hilary Clinton in delegate but with a financial reserves she could not match, he was able to win the next set of primaries and caucuses without too much opposition providing momentum for the rest of the campaign.
A third game changing moment was the endorsement of John Edwards after the West Virgina primary. By coming out with that endorsement, whatever media coverage that Clinton hope to sustain after her victory was gone as the media talked nothing but the endorsement and what it meant for the Obama campaign.
So here we are just 8 weeks out from election day. The media is in a frenzy about the McCain-Palin ticket (or is it the Palin-McCain ticket?). All they talked about is that and Obama/Biden are lucky to get any attention at all. Whatever critical insight the media had in early part of last week, is pretty much gone now in terms of a more fawning approach akin to Extra or Entertainment Tonight.
The conversation needs to change and must be soon or there will not be enough time to move the media narrative of the campaign.
Question is though, what game changing opportunities exist for Obama? It has to be significant to get everyone’s attention so it has to meaningful. Getting the endorsement of a minor non-Democratic person will not do.
So what is the best game changing opportunity exists that Obama has control over?
There are four possible game changing events:
- Major endorsement by a non-Democratic figure like Colin Powell or Chuck Hagel. An endorsement like this especially from a Republican would definitely make people take notice but are there any one of any particular statuture who could make a dramatic difference. I do not think so. Powell or Hagel will definitely make the pundits talk about it for a day or two but essentially all it does is change the conversation for a day or two without any lasting effect. There is also the fact that such endorsements bring little in terms of any political base. Perhaps someone like Michael Huckabee would have a greater impact but such people are firmly in McCain’s camp now.
- Hillary Clinton replaces Joe Biden as Vice President nominee. Such an event would definitely will cause a stir for a long while but would it be a positive one? The selection of Palin seems to have galvanise many of Clinton’s supporters to go to Obama now as it is apparent that the choosing of Palin to bring Clinton supporters strictly on the basis of gender is failing. So it unlikely that choosing Clinton now will bring any more support to Obama. What a choice like that does is make the Obama camp look defensive and weak, that it needed Clinton to get them the presidency. It would reflect badly on the integrity of Obama in that he would thrown over his personal choice as VP for expedient’s sake. As it is though, there are no other VP picks now that would have an impact like Clinton.
- Obama announces a major policy initiative like Universal Healthcare. This election is about change and hope for the future. Healthcare is increasingly important in the lives of everyone these days and while healthcare is an important plank of the Obama campaign, it really never has gain a point of prominence. Many elections have been decided in the past based on simple slogans that distill the complexities of policy initiatives. A forty page document about healthcare on a website will not capture the hearts and minds of ordinary voters. But a slogan such as Healthcare for Everyone or All troops out of Iraq by 2010 reinforced constantly on the stump and in advertising may sway public opinion more than any policy document.
- Obama crushes McCain in the debates. From what I have heard fom media reports and on the interview Obama had with Keith Olbermann, it seems that the Obama camp is putting more emphasis on the upcoming debates to help build a lead and sustain a lead straight to the election day. It is a sound policy on the face of it. Three debates will have more viewers and decide more minds than any news event or advertising campaign. The problem, though, is that Obama has repeatedly shown himself in group debates and one on one debates with Hillary Clinton during the primary campaign as a fair debater at best. A haltingly delivery, the thinking before saying approach while getting the approval of pundits and commentators, comes across to the television audience as someone not sure of himself and perhaps indecisive. Against a man who made strength of character as the centerpiece of his personal history, it may not be the best approach regardless of how many errors, lies or gaffes McCain will commit in the course of the debate. Debate requires an ability to repartee quickly and to frame the answer to highlight your best qualities or your opponents worse ones. The second debate is in the town hall format, a supposed strength of McCain’s. If somehow, Obama does average in the debates then it makes his job harder to open a lead on McCain.