Month: November 2009

The exit polls are very clear and, when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. A reader writes:

How in the world can the pundits (even Megan or Marc, both of whom I like) honestly take results tonight as a referendum on Obama when:

1, Different people showed up to vote today than in 2008. It's apples to oranges to judge whether people like Obama's proposals compared to last year, when the number of young people, minorities etc voting is down. They don't like Deeds or Corzine etc but that doesn't mean they don't like Obama;

2. Governors races send winners to state office, not Washington, so the candidates do not run against Obama and Washington. Indeed, McDonnell and Christie went out of their way to avoid conflict with Obama.

3. In exit polls, people said they liked Obama at about the same rate as they did last year, and also said that these elections were not a referendum on him. How much clearer can people be?

In the end, just because pundits want to make election more significant than it is, doesn't mean it is.

Get your actual voting tallies live here.

Lexington sums up an argument, coming from various quarters, on the consequences of the GOP doing well today:

It could make it harder for Mr Obama to get his agenda through the Senate. Democrats from red and purple states are nervous enough already. If they think voters are recoiling from Mr Obama's  policies, their support for him will grow more guarded and conditional.

And we now have news that the Senate Democrats may be unable or unwilling to move a health insurance bill until the new year. Marc goes further:

[The 2009 races will] determine whether Democrats believe they'll be punished or rewarded for favoring an Obama-identified health care plan.

Megan makes the same point:

Either Hoffman will lose, in which case the strategy of policing the party will lose some of its appeal, or he will win, in which case Blue Dog democrats and Republicans in squishy states will probably tack right–a critical win during the health care debate.

John Aravosis is upset that the Organizing for America (OFA), an arm of the DNC, has not lobbied against the anti-equality bill in Maine and sent out a message urging people to vote but omitting any mention of the marriage issue. Greg Sargent has more:

The reason this could become a real issue for OFA is that the vote on the Maine initiative — which would repeal gay marriage — is expected to be super close. And a loss — particularly one rooted in turnout, which OFA has the capacity to boost — will result in fierce recriminations. What’s more, tensions are already so raw because of a host of other ways gay advocates feel let down by the new president that they may be even more inclined to point a finger at OFA in the event of a loss. This one could get ugly.

It is staggering to me that the message discipline from the DNC is so tight that they even forbade OFA from telling Obama-supporters which way to vote on the referendum. It's one more sign, I fear, that the Democratic establishment's opposition to marriage equality is real; and the president's peeps are increasingly determined to do what they can keep us from the right to civil marriage.

Mark Blumenthal offers his final thoughts on what we can expect tonight and advises not taking exit polls very seriously. He's unsure about Maine:

A 2004 paper by Joe Shipman, then director of election polling for SurveyUSA, showed that polling on ballot measures had triple the rate of error (9.5 average error on the margin) as polls in presidential elections (3.4) and nearly double that of contests for statewide offices (4.6). I summarized the assumed reasons for that greater error rate in a long post four years ago today, but the most relevant to Maine are a greater difficulty modeling the likely electorate and the problem of accurately conveying ballot language.

Silver is more positive about the Washington referendum. I'd say: look at the age of the voters in exit polls. An off-year election tends to attract the hardcore, and they tend to be older, which is why fears about Maine are well-founded.

Friends and family say goodbye to Marines in the 3rd Battalion, 10th Marine Regiment, deploying to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom November 3, 2009 at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Once in Afghanistan, the unit will fall under the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade -Afghanistan. Their mission will be to support combat operations as an artillery battalion. By Logan Mock-Bunting/Getty Images.

The latest news from Benedict's actual church:

A northeastern Pennsylvania priest has been removed from his duties after church officials say he accidentally displayed inappropriate pictures from his computer before Sunday Mass.

The Diocese of Scranton said the Rev. Edward Lyman was using his computer on Oct. 25 to project an informational DVD about the annual diocesan fundraiser when four photos were displayed. They featured what church officials describe as "minimally attired adult males."

Diocese spokesman William Genello said the photos were not pornographic, did not include minors and were not taken by the priest.

A reader writes:

Several years ago I would the read The Corner 4-5 times a day. But then it got boring and repetitive with repeating the same old arguments over and over again. Gradually I lost interest and now rarely read it. I am afraid that I am coming close to the same decision about The Daily Dish. Please, please, please drop your obsessive coverage of the Palin/Johnston non-story. It’s nothing but trailer trash gossip. It seems to matter only to you, and no matter how much you try to spin it as you-are-looking-into-something-important-while-the-MSM -ignores-it meme, it doesn’t convince me of anything but your over the top obsession with it. Palin is a pathological liar and I don’t believe her story of when she went into labor etc…but she said it just to dramatize her life and to give a story to the conservative press. I hope you have someone sane around you who can talk you out of this coverage before you start losing readers–and yes I am close to being done with you.

Sane, responsible people have been trying to talk me out of asking questions about Palin for more than a year. Ha! The one thing I have never cared about, I should add, is losing readers over my positions.

If I worried about such things, I would have stayed in the MSM. I’ve churned through a lot of readers over the years, and lost countless of them because of their dismay at my evolution or thinking out loud. I don’t care. My job is to get things right as best I can and to follow my own nose, even if it occasionally ends up bloody. Checking to see what is the respectable thing to say or think and worrying about one’s reputation is not my thing.

But you can go elsewhere for this in spades. God knows the Washington media is full of it. So go away if you don’t like it. My defense is simply that it interests me, and that Palin is the de facto leader of the right, alongside Glenn Beck, right now. She is about to embark on a massive p.r. offensive. At the same time, the father of her grandson is threatening to sue her for blocking his access to his child and offering any number of tantalizing clues about what he regards as a potential scandal. And we’re all supposed to ignore this … because it’s too tacky?

To repeat: screw that. This is the blogosphere. And please, please, please read someone else if you don’t like it.

Ezra Klein ruminates on NY-23 and David Axelrod's argument that the "Limbaughs and Becks of the world are basically hanging a 'Moderates need not apply' sign outside the Republican National Committee headquarters" by running Dede out of the race:

It's not so much that Republicans are mistaking the enthusiasm of a rump faction for the preferences of the electorate — the Republican Party tried to back Scozzafava, after all — as they're powerless to resist.

All of which suggests that the right historical analogue may not be Ronald Reagan but Barry Goldwater. And though Goldwater's campaign led to Reagan's later rise, it also led to a historic pickup for the Democrats and the creation of Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, PBS, food stamps, welfare …

I'm not sure we're not getting way ahead of ourselves. It would be silly to extrapolate an entire political era from one congressional off-year election – to the advantage of any party. We just don't know if in a few months' time anyone will even remember today.