Analysis and Aftermath

There are some great post-election pieces being written. Analysis of what happened and the pictures painted of the crumbling walls of the GOP.

The final map is really interesting. MSNBC breaks down the results by county, so we can drill down the results and see that Obama (Democrats) won everywhere that there is a higher population (cities). This is not so different, Democrats typically win cities, but Obama won many cities in very red states, like Wyoming and Montana. In addition, the Democrats are reaching out into the suburbs, overtaking what was once a GOP stronghold.

I think that the suburbs are fed-up with the partisanship and the extreme focus of the GOP on social issues. Suburban folks just want to be able to pay their bills, most don't care if the neighbor kid has an abortion, if there are (what was previously thought of as 'minorities' - demographics are changing and in another generation 'whites' will be the minority) living down the street or if a gay couple owns the home in the next cul-de-sac. Middle class people are less able to be divided by those GOP social issues; because they care more about having cable and getting the next generation TV, than they do this wedge issue crap. I think that the new “Republicans” are more libertarian than social conservatives and I don’t think that the GOP has figured that out.

It is also interesting to look at the margins. As of 10:01 am PT, Obama won the election 53% to 46%. He won by 7,974,965 votes. This is an amazing mandate, but what is also incredible to think about is how close many of the states not won were. When I look at some of the closer races, if we had gotten another few thousand people to the polls, Obama would have won those states too. This is an amazing factoid.

The young voters, despite popular mythology, were not necessarily the ones who carried the Obama victory. The demographics are interesting. Obama won every single demographic, except for whites, but even that margin was greater than Kerry.

*61 percent of Obama's votes came from white voters; 90 percent of McCain's came from white voters.
*23 percent of Obama's votes came from black voters; only one percent of McCain's came from African American voters.
*Latino voters accounted for 11 percent of Obama's vote and six percent of McCain's.
*Twenty-three percent of the Obama voters were under age 30 but only 13 percent of McCain backers were.

The demographic analysis in the article is interesting; they approach it asking "what if" certain blocks did not vote.

I love this. Obama has been going over Bush's executive orders and signing statements and is preparing to reverse some of the most egregious crap in his first days in office. Anything that can be reversed by his signature - he is already lining up the papers to sign them. Right. Fucking. On.

"A team of four dozen advisers, working for months in virtual solitude, set out to identify regulatory and policy changes Obama could implement soon after his inauguration."

This makes me smile.

The Christian Right is suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder. The treatments for this disease are intense and success rates are minimal. Perhaps we will find an end to the Religious Fanatics having so much of an impact on our politics.

Some, the old school Godbots, want to dig in their heels deeper, and focus harder on the wedge issues of god, guns, gays and controlling women and their bodies. The newer evangelicals are actually reading their Bibles and discovering that Jesus actually cared more about the poor and the planet, (because the planet's health affects all people,) than He did giving onto Caesar God's law. We shall see which direction they go, but I suspect that they will just implode into a million different pieces - some more tolerable than others.

The Right Wing extremists are freaking the fuck out. They really do not know what to do except to continue to spew lies and mistruths and half-facts and fear.

The thing is that that kind of crap just does not work on people who are really afraid, of real things.

I am going to counter a theory that I proposed earlier: that people who are insecure because of uncertainty and instability are more apt to believe conspiracy theories. I do not necessarily think that this is incorrect; I just think that the Right Wing's plan to keep people too busy and so uneducated that they do not have time to pay attention to the truth of a situation has backfired on them.

I think that the far Right's BS has not only hit the lower class in such large numbers that they do not have the time to pay attention to Rush and Hannity's crap - it has also spread to the middle class in such a way that the people are so worried about paying their bills and making ends meet that they do not have the energy to worry about whatever extremist bile that Rush and Hannity are selling. It backfired. For this I am grateful.

Eleanor's article really does not say anything much different than we have all been talking about since Tuesday; really I linked to it because I love her Newsweek photo. She looks fabulous in the photo and I just thought people should see it.

(PS: There is not any more...not even any photos of journalists that I think are better than their real life look. Clicking the "read more" will just lead to the many thousands of comments that my blogging generates...heh.)