One line in particular jumped out from Obama victory speech last night. Yes, there were the implicit suggestions that immigration and climate change would be the big agenda items of Obama’s second term. But this one: “I want to thank every American who participated in this election … whether you voted for the very first time or waited in line for a very long time. By the way, we have to fix that.”
Off the cuff? A throwaway line? Maybe. But the way he said it and, not to be precious about it … but, the look on his face, suggested we’ll be returning to this. As we should. The mechanics of the U.S. election system are a mess. The last effort to reform it, following the 2000 Florida debacle, was piecemeal and not fundamental. It’s going to take national leadership to get it done.
More on this in the future.
Hearing from little bird that President’s pollsters final battleground polling was 1/10th of one percentage point off from the final aggregated battleground results.
So there’s a pollster in Obamaland with a Duracell battery on his shoulder, daring Nate Silver to knock it off … Read More
Heidi Heitkamp pulls out another of the improbable Senate wins for Democrats as Republican Rick Berg conceded Wednesday afternoon.
Two incumbent Republican congressman are headed to a Dec. 8 runoff in the LA-3. Rep. Charles Boustany lead 45-30 over Rep. Jeff Landry, a tea party fave, in yesterday’s primary but fell short of the majority needed to avoid a runoff.
In installment #8 in our series of your photos from election day we present our special voting with your cute kid edition. Cool stuff under the fold … Read More
The animated faces of victory and defeat election night. Some great pics.
I’m doing a Live Chat at TPMPrime at 4 PM eastern. And now I’m happy to announce I have very rock solid predictions I can share with you about who’s going to win on election day. Get your questions in now.
Let’s recap, shall we? For months Barack Obama and Mitt Romney waged a fierce, substantive battle against each other over some (though not nearly all) of the most consequential issues facing the country. At the broadest level, they debated the state’s natural role in providing support and mobility to working people and how to pay for it. Obama won that debate, pretty decisively.
And yet, it only took about an hour after the networks called the election for Republicans to renew their opposition to raising taxes on high income earners, leaving us right back where we started. Read More
So PollTracker. How’d we do? Pretty damn well.
PollTacker accurately predicted the results in 49 of 50 states last night. The one exception was Florida. The final PollTracker Average was Romney +1.2. Though it hasn’t been called yet, it’s pretty clear President Obama will take the state with something between a .5% and 1% margin.
On the Senate side PollTracker did even better. PollTracker accurately predicted every Senate race in the country. The only half-miss was North Dakota. The final PollTracker Average of the Heitkamp v. Berg race was an exact tie. And I mean, exact: 46% to 46%. Not even a difference on the decimal point.