The consensus in the mainstream media is that Hillary Clinton lost any chance for the Democratic presidential nomination yesterday, thanks to a big defeat in North Carolina and only a wafer-thin victory in Indiana. Yesterday’s results pretty much mirror the primary season as a whole: Barack Obama’s victories have tended to come with wider margins […]
Presidential election 2008
Posted inPolitics, The Download
No exit (or, the sitcom campaign)
What more to say about Pennsylvania? The Democratic race has become a sitcom, in which all the stock characters — the sassy grandma, the dumb jock, etc. — go through crisis after crisis and never change a bit. Last night, as usual, Clinton won the votes of women, older people, Catholics, and voters without a […]
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Update: Democratic primary vote in the 10 regions
I’ve added the Pennsylvania results to the chart showing how Clinton and Obama have fared in our 10 political regions. For the first time, Obama leads in four regions, as his votes in Philadelphia and its suburbs push him to a narrow edge in the Northeast Corridor. And for the first time, Clinton’s strongest […]
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Don’t make these voters angry
I’m working on some charts and maps showing which counties have a consistent bias for or against the incumbent party in presidential elections, which may take a little while. As a sneak preview, here are the major counties with the biggest vote swings in the last three elections where the incumbent party lost. In 1980, […]
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Does it even matter who the Democrats nominate?
John Judis has a New Republic piece warning that Barack Obama will have a very tough time winning the "white working class vote" in November: Obama comes from a modest background and has tried to appeal as a candidate of both Harvard Law School and Chicago’s Back-of-the-Yards, where he organized laid-off steel workers, but he […]
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Sen. Clinton, Massachusetts has already voted
"Why is Barack Obama smiling?" I wondered. But I quickly realized that the 8-1/2 inch x 12 glossy in my mailbox wasn’t from the Illinois senator. It was a stinging indictment of the Democratic presidential contender’s Senate voting record, courtesy of this New York colleague. Fair enough. But today’s question, sports fans, is: Why is […]
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The lay of the land in Florida’s Gold Coast
After looking at the map of the 10 States of American Politics, Brian wrote: A friend suggested Broward County (FL) be included with Northeast Corridor, just as Miami-Dade was put with El Norte rather than with South Coast. Was this ever considered? Outside the Everglades, the county’s density is over 4,000, voting tends to be […]
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Where the political earth moved in 1976
In our journey through recent presidential elections, we come to 1976, the high-water mark for the Democratic Party over the past 40 years and the last time that party won the South. (Go here for explanations of our 10 regions and links to data from other election years.) Georgia’s Jimmy Carter won six of […]
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Electoral College compromise?
Reader Peter Porcupine responded to my post about the Electoral College and the possibility of repeating the 2000 election by suggesting an alternative: There is an intermediate step between the existing system and a popular vote, and several states use it now. It is to apportion electoral college votes according to popular votes within a […]
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New maps: Democratic primary results as of April 5
Taking into account updated results from several primary and caucus states, here is a county-by-county map on the relative strengths of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton so far. (Look for a separate post with county-by-county spreadsheets for the real geeks.) First, the differences between the two candidates measured by percentages of the vote. If the […]