Happy Birthday to Karen Dotrice, 57. That's Jane Banks -- and, on Upstairs Downstairs, Lily. Not bad!
Sure is a lot of good stuff today:
1. These are the maps I really like of the 2012 election.
2. Downballot, 2012 was apparently not such a good year for women running for office. Abby Rapoport discusses. I wish we had a partisan breakdown, though. See also Ann Friedman on Year of the Woman talk.
3. Aaron Blake on GOP Senate candidate quality. Not definitive, but consistent with everything else I've seen.
4. Totally agree with Mark Blumenthal about this one: "Crowning a single "best pollster" now on the basis of just one poll from each organization is a futile and misleading effort." Plus more about what to expect as the vote-counting continues. Excellent, informative post.
5. I pretty much agree with everything Scott Lemieux says about the phony idea that Nixon was a liberal on domestic policy. Congress matters! So does context. Meanwhile...I've fallen behind, I know, on Watergate. With the election out of the way, I'll get back to it soon.
6. Dan Larison says some really smart things in this post (especially the second to last paragraph), but truth is that I'm just going to be a sucker for any post entitled "The GOP, 'Real Parties,' and Factions." The idea that Larison is reacting to -- that a major political party in a two-party system in a nation of 300 million could be a Burkean party united in the pursuit of an idea -- is about as wrong as you can get. Perhaps if I get to it I'll write more about it; suffice to say that as weird as it is for conservatives to pretend (as they often do) that groups only exist among other people, it's even weirder to invoke Madison while pretending one's side isn't motivated by self-interest. Ah well. Back to Larison: I'd suggest next time he go with "What the GOP, 'Real Parties,' Factions, the San Francisco Giants, and Elvis Costello have to do with the New Star Wars Movie," if he really wants to get a link from me.
7. Or just put a picture of Harold and Kumar up. Noah Smith on makers and takers.
8. And young voters, Facebook, and experimental treatments, reported by Rebecca Rosen (via my buddy Christine). Key point from Don Green: the Obama young voter cohort may well keep voting for Democrats for a long time.
Didn't you write that Nixon once snarled at a credulous aide that if Congress actually passed it, he'd have to veto one of his "own" "liberal" bills? Or was that someone else?
ReplyDeleteRe: #7: Props to Obama for specifically mentioning Asian Americans in his re-election acceptance speech peroration. American racial politics has never simply been about black-white ethnic divisions. Latinos are the new commentariat subject du jour, but Asian immigration and assimilation has a long, important history too.
ReplyDeleteI'm reading Nate Silver, and have a question.
ReplyDeleteHe says, Two more presidential elections, 2016 and 2020, will be contested under the current Electoral College configuration, which gave Barack Obama a second term on Tuesday.
Obviously, census determines the current Electoral College configuration. But does redistricting? If so, does this suggest that Republicans might have given themselves an advantage in maintaing the House, but put the Oval Office out of reach?
(I know, there's no consensus on redistricting yet, but I'm asking anyway.)
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and just in case: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/as-nation-and-parties-change-republicans-are-at-an-electoral-college-disadvantage/
And never mind, I just recalled: I live in one of the only two states that splits the EC vote; the rest are winner-take-all.
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