Michael Barone, rambling in US News:
Chambliss’s Win in Georgia Shows Obama’s Diminishing Coattails
Saxby Chambliss has won the Georgia runoff by a 57.4 percent-to-42.6 percent margin with 97 percent of precincts reporting. That’s a margin of 14.8 percentage points, far greater than the 49.8 percent-to-46.8 percent margin that Chambliss led by in the November 4 voting, and it’s well above the 53 percent to 46 percent that was projected for the runoff on pollster.com.
Chambliss’s victory over Jim Martin means that the Democrats will not get 60 seats in the Senate, even if Al Franken somehow manages to overcome Norm Coleman’s circa 300-vote lead in the Minnesota recount. Franken’s only apparent recourse is to the courts or to the full Senate; I doubt he’ll get anywhere in the courts, and I doubt that Barack Obama will want the Democrats to take on a bruising partisan fight to get a 59th seat in the Senate (though labor leaders, eager to pass the card check bill and knowing that Arlen Specter voted to cut off the filibuster against it in the outgoing Congress, may press for that).
***The bottom line: The Obama campaign did a magnificent job of turning out black voters in rural and small-town counties in Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia for the November 4 election. But it was not able to replicate those results in the Georgia runoff. Black turnout pretty much matched white turnout in the inner Atlanta area, where black political organizations have been active for many years, but it failed to do so in the outer suburbs with increasing black majorities and in North Georgia counties with few blacks. Black turnout did match statewide levels in black-majority cities in southern Georgia, but not enough to outweigh similar white turnout in adjacent suburban counties. As the analysts at NBC News suggest, Obama coattails that were helpful to many newly elected Democrats in the South in November 2008 may not be so helpful to them in 2010 and any special elections that occur between now and then.
That suggests another hypothesis: that the Obama turnout effort among blacks may not be replicable. You can only vote to elect the first black president once.
Unless you agree completely to the hypothesis, wouldn’t the Chambliss GE and then the run-off suggest the STRENGTH of Obama’s coattails? Obama was on the ticket for one, and not the other. Which one did Martin do better in? Additionally, doesn’t the President’s party generally lose seats in the mid-term, anyway?
Seems mighty strange to assert something about the voting patterns of a block of people in an election to be held four years from now, based on, well, speculation. I guess the pundits are as bored as we are right now.
Twisted Martini
Sounds like Charlie Weis talking about the strength of his team after their narrow victory against Navy.
Tim Fuller
Masters of the BIG LIE. Kinda nice to see that the use of the BIG LIE jumped the shark in 2008. Somebody send Barone a memo.
Enjoy.
ScottS
Barone has gradually morphed from being an analyst ("The 49% Nation" is a classic) to being a propagandist hack.
/ignore
Zifnab
This can only be good news for John McCain!
D.N. Nation
Baroney is a moron. Here’s but a taste of some of his post titles from the 2008 Election:
"The Race Isn’t Necessarily Over"
"Joe the Plumber Gives McCain a Chance to Overtake Obama"
"Obama Supporters Spew Hate"
and my favorite…
"Sarah Palin Won the Debate"
That last one is key…Baroney hyped Palin all early fall, and actually whipped out the proximity-to-Russia argument *before she even did*.
Baroney used to serve a useful purpose in political analysis. Used to. He’s a pathetic hack, these days, rarely advancing discourse beyond Hannity levels.
Napoleon
Just when you think Republican hacks like Barone (and that is what he is) can not come up with even stupider memes then they already have, they do.
Obama lost that state. How can you have "coattails" when you loose. The Democratic candidate didn’t have any right being within a million miles in this race, yet he forced a runoff.
dmsilev
Barone ignores the rather amazing point that this special election should never have happened at all. A Republican Senator, running for re-election in Georgia, couldn’t break 50% in the original vote. That says that the R next to a candidate’s name is pretty close to becoming the scarlet letter of our day.
Yeah, it sucks that Chambliss is going back to the Senate, but this was supposed to be one of the safest of safe seats for the Republicans.
-dms
Cap'n Phealy
Only now do we see the true genius of the Bush/Rove strategy: they created enough of a national fuckup that the President-Elect has to spend all of his time getting ready to take charge of the multi-year (if not multi-decade) effort required to clean up the mess, keeping him in Illinois and out of Georgia, thereby allowing a completely worthless schmuck to come back to Washington DC on the glorious wave of a runoff election he should have been able to avoid easily in the first place, thereby keeping the nasty Democrats from taking a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
Ooooh, scary!
Comrade Stuck
It only takes 1.3 seconds to burn down a Barone strawman
After which, you just scratch your head and wait for the next
one. Mr. Barone is not bored, he is still a Bush true Believer
and no rules of logic apply to his speculation. They don’t have to.
Because he has faith, and mere statistics be damned.
sorry for the strange text format, an 800 to 600 resolution is the only one that now works with my flickering CRT monitor. The font is so larger that only 3 or four words fit on the screen at same time and I have to side scroll while typing. UPS is going to save the day today though with a new LCD delivery.
Chuck
coattails – I do not think it means what [whoever wrote the headline] thinks it means (the one usage in the column is correct).
Also, circa doesn’t mean the same thing as approximately. The sad thing is that somebody got paid to "edit" this.
NonyNony
Sure, you laugh now. But when Obama doesn’t have it all fixed by February 1st, you’ll see the cunning nature of the GOP’s plan. Everyone will be so outraged at his failed presidency that Democrats won’t be elected to office for decades. And all because wasn’t able to fix the problems that the GOP created within a matter of days of being sworn into office! It’s ingenious, I’m telling you – ingenious!
Seriously, I had one of my wingnut brothers tell me this weekend that Obama was going to be another Carter because he wasn’t going to be able to fix things and their next Reagan was going to sweep in to fix it all in a repeat of 1980. Three guesses as to who their next Reagan was going to be – I’ll give you the hint that her name rhymes with "Tara Falin’" and just leave it at that…
(Gods how I wish my little brother would pull the scales off his eyes about the GOP clowncar and how useless it has been for him. Sadly, no.)
TenguPhule
Redundancy is Redudant, Comrade Cole!
Matthew
Please John, he’s desperately grasping for straws here, don’t get in his way. He really needs to feel that the election wasn’t a staggering rebuke of everything he believes in. Obama couldn’t win in Georgia or make a perennial Georgia loser a winner and didn’t do shit in Oklahoma and Alabama. This means something, this is important.
NonWonderDog
That and the fact that Franken is only behind by so much because the Coleman campaign has made a couple thousand frivolous ballot challenges to insure that Franken is behind at the end of the recount. That way they can yell and scream that they were ahead in the initial count and are ahead in the recount, so they don’t actually have to resolve all the ballot challenges. Since they’re going to resolve the challenges regardless of Norm’s whining, Coleman must think that being ahead before the elections board meets gives him grounds to sue if they determine that Franken wins. (To be fair, the Franken campaign has made a couple thousand frivolous challenges, too–but not as many as the Coleman campaign and only after the Coleman campaign started it. They want to avoid the scenario above.)
According to the Franken campaign–and they might be lying–the race is almost exactly tied (they say Franken by 22) if you assume that every challenge by either candidate will be thrown out and the ballots counted the way the precinct judge ruled. Since most of the challenges are frivolous, at least 90% of them will probably be thrown out. It’s a total toss-up right now.
Zifnab
It will be entertaining to see how frivolous Coleman’s claims are versus Franken’s. At the very least, it gives Franken a degree of credibility with the election judges when his ballots don’t completely waste their time. And if he can inch ahead in the recount before the absentee ballots are ruled on, it could be entertaining to see how Coleman reacts. I’d love to see the GOP take the role of "Sore/Loserman" as it cries itself through the court system. Hypocrisy fits the GOP like a glove.
MBunge
So, Barone says Democrats won some traditionally Republican seats in 2008 and will likely lose some of them when they revert back to the GOP in 2010 and 2012. How much did he get paid for restating exactly what happens in every single election where one side wins big?
Mike
Crusty Dem
Seriously. How can anyone so unable to analyze basic data get a job as an analyst. I have very low expectations for pundits, but this is truly an astounding statement, given available data.. And what follows may be even more wrong:
Maybe Obama wasn’t able to get the African-American vote out for him because HE WASN’T FUCKING RUNNING, NUMBNUTS!!! This isn’t just wrong, this is Kristol-wrong. It’s Jonah-wrong. It’s freaking Red state-wrong. It’s a flawed premise and a bad analogy stacked on top of a strawman, placed on a slippery slope and set on fire. Freaking hell, man, I’ve never seen reasoning this flawed.
Incertus
If there’s really anyone out there who thought Martin had a chance in this runoff, please get in touch with me. I have a business opportunity for you that you won’t believe.
Jim
This meme that the Georgia Senate runoff election is somehow good news for the Republicans is Palin size stupid. Even assuming Franken falls short (and Barone’s use of a 300 vote deficit given the circumstances further demonstrates the high degree of hackery in his writings), the Dems will have a 58-42 advantage in the Senate. If Coleman and Chambliss had won on election night everyone would still be saying it was a good night for the Dems.
Martin
Well, the analysis is correct in spirit if wrong in word. The Dems should be concerned about this result. A party cannot rely on one individual to carry the rest of the party to victory. Obama can’t be on the ticket for the 2010 congressional races, and the Dems need to find their pace outside of Obama’s campaign. They’re doing alright, but with all the grassroots progress made this cycle, Georgia wasn’t able to tap that when they needed it. That’s something the Dems need to look at and address in the next 2 years.
Let’s not lose sight that much of the point of what Obama was trying to do is to build a base of support in both labor and money that would endure and could be called upon for support in the future. Just a month out and the result wasn’t terribly good. I don’t mind Martin losing, but he lost by a pretty wide margin. We at least should have been able to keep it a closer race with that kind of mobilization.
AhabTRuler
Yes, except for everyone saying that this was precisely what was going to happen.
Mr Furious
I’m with you John. That whole thing demonstrates the STRENGTH of Obama’s coattails. When he’s on the ballot, downticket Dems overachieve. When he’s not, they don’t.
The runoff vote has nothing to do with coattails since he’s not on the ballot and it’s a completely separate election. You could make an argument against Obama’s ability to drive turnout for the runoff—though he didn’t campaign—or that the Dems failed to maintain the November momentum, but the term "coattails" shouldn’t even enter the discussion.
JR
Did anyone see Will Forte’s impression of Zell Miller on SNL a couple of weeks ago? His reasoning for why Jim Martin never had a chance was more believable than Barone’s. Down here, you have to have a name like Zell or Saxby. Our current governor is a grown-ass man named "Sonny" (he’s also moron, but that’s not what you asked.)
Also, re: turnout: I voted, but a lot of people didn’t. It’s almost Christmas and seems like we’ve been voting forever, so… 6 more years of Zaxby’s Chicken!
Comrade Kevin
And then, via Firedog Lake, there’s this jackass over at the Wall Street Journal who claims that Chambliss’ win proves that he never smeared Max Cleland.
4tehlulz
Mr. Barone then proceeded to curl up in a corner and repeat this quote in a desperate attempt to assure himself that everything is OK.
Napoleon
Don’t the Dems have a wider margin in the house that any political party has had in 20 some years and a wider margin in the Senate then any political party has had for 30 some years. Seriously, its hard to get all concerned about any one result (particularly when its in a region that the Dems are most likely to loose) when the overall trend has been that the Dems are pounding the Reps.
BombIranForChrist
Whoa, hold on their partner. Yer using yer thinkin’ sack again. But that’s ok, there’s a cure. Take your favorite hammer and hit your head with it for a spell. The tinglin’ means its workin’. Then come back and try again. Yee haw!
TheHatOnMyCat
That concept only has relevance if you think the election was about electing the first black president.
From where I sit, it was about electing a better president.
And in that context, epic win.
AhabTRuler
@TheHatOnMyCat: Exactly. I voted for the better candidate and the (D). Everything else was just bonus.
Balconesfault
I love that the RNC had to pump a couple million extra into Georgia … and that the wingnuts will spend the next 3 years giving Sarah Palin credit for Chambliss win is going to be the gift that keeps on giving.
Every penny of the $50 I sent Martin a few months ago, if it had anything to do with forcing the runoff, was money well spent.
Jay in Oregon
I’d love to see the GOP take the role of "Sore/Loserman" as it cries itself through the court system. Hypocrisy fits the GOP like a glove.
We already saw shades of that in 2004 in Washington state with Republican candidate Dino Rossi facing Democratic candidate Christine Gregoire.
Rossi was ahead in the inital count, and the calls were fast and furious for Gregoire to throw in the towel because EVERYONE KNEW that Rossi was going to end up winning. Gregoire stuck to her guns and won the election in the recount. Boy, you should have heard the whining…
And everyone likes to point at Gore in 2000 but everyone seems to forget that the full title of that case is "GEORGE W. BUSH, et al., PETITIONERS v. ALBERT GORE, Jr., et al." As in, Bush was the one who ran to the courts in the first place:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/00-949.ZPC.html
Tony J
Ahhhh, now I know who the US Correspondent from The Independent was talking to before penning an article in today’s newspaper saying basically the same thing.
The part that jumped out and tickled my fancy the most was the claim that Chambliss’ win proves that Democrats will find it increasingly difficult to – and I paraphrase here – continue claiming that America’s current economic problems are the fault of the Republicans.
Because, y’know, a sitting GOP senator in Deep-Red Georgia won a runoff election. Oh, and it was Sarah Palin what won it for him by walking into rooms and making people go "Wow!", also.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the so-called ‘Centre-Left’ Press on this side of the Atlantic are guilty of practicing journalism through the medium of cocktail party chit-chat with any Republican who’ll deign to favour them with an opinion. It’s all they know, and they can’t be arsed changing their ways.
DougJ
Is it too early to declare the Obama administration a failure?
Comrade Stuck
@DougJ:
Yes, it is too early. We should give him until Inauguration Day. By then, it will obviously be too late for him to turn things around.
Pug
Is it too early to declare the Obama administration a failure?
It’s still a little early, but you and Sean Hannity can proclaim failure on January 21st of next year.