Proud to Be A Democrat

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Two-term PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA !

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SENATOR Elizabeth Warren!

“It was exactly fifty years ago tonight that Ted Kennedy was first elected to the U.S. Senate… “
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Is Nate Silver A Witch? (Probably!)

Professor Krugman takes a victory lap:

… For a long time, right-wingers — and some pundits — have peddled the notion that the “real America”, all that really counted, was the land of non-urban white people, to which both parties must abase themselves. Meanwhile, the actual electorate was getting racially and ethnically diverse, and increasingly tolerant too. The 2008 Obama coalition wasn’t a fluke; it was the country we are becoming.

And sure enough that more diverse and, if you ask me, better nation just won big….

At the moment, the NYTimes has temporarily suspended its paywall. If you want some schadenfreude with your morning coffee, here’s Timothy Egan on the “Revenge of the Polling Nerds“:

In the last days of the election, Peggy Noonan had a “feel” that things were moving Mitt Romney’s way. George Will was more cerebral: his brain told him it would be Romney in a rout. And Michael Barone, who used to have a good divining rod to go along with an encyclopedic knowledge for all numbers political, also predicted a Romney landslide.

What they had in common, aside from putting up a brick Tuesday that completely missed the electoral net, was a last-hurrah push for the old-fashioned prediction by gut…

People who are surprised by the election – and Sarah Palin looked like she was close to tears as the obvious became obvious even to those who live in the Fox bubble – were probably listening to people who are paid to fantasize….

And Salon thoughtfully scoured Twitter to collect “The 20 Biggest Sore Losers of Election Night“, from all the predictable suspects. “We also don’t know 4 sure that the public is as pathetically wrongheaded as it appears. It really could be they rely on a corrupt media” — that’s media person David “Everything I Have, I Owe to My Brother’s Audience” Limbaugh. Actually, it’s only 19 losers — one particularly egregious blowhard stole the top two slots…

Early Morning Open Thread: Raise Your (Juice) Glass!Post + Comments (92)

Paul Constant at Seattle’s Stranger, rebutting the National Review revanchists, writes “Crush Them Back, Harder“:

Liberals have a rare opportunity today to do something they signally started in the landslide election of 2008: finish the job. Bill Clinton’s victory was vitiated by the inclusion of Dick Morris and quickly revenged by Kenneth Starr, leading to his replacement in 2000 by George W. Bush, a man who exactly nobody thought was qualified to be president of the United States, probably including Bush himself.

In retrospect, of course, George W. Bush was Pericles of Athens compared to Mitt Romney, who far more than Bush has revealed the true face of contemporary American right-conservatism in all its coercive ugliness: a blizzard of shifting policies; the deployment of ignoramuses to spread disinformation and discontent on cable airwaves; and the naked Randian appeals to race and class hatred. The most anti-American of American presidential candidates has run the most un-American of campaigns.

And that, by rights, should be it. Romney’s campaign has been so ugly, so founded on lies and nothingness, that nobody should want to vote for the man. But somehow, it’s a close race. From Day One of the Romney campaign, real conservatives pretended there was an explicit threat from Obama’s “fundamental change.” They imbue whole conspiracies into Obama’s offhand “voting is the best revenge” remark, when for the Right, “revenge” is precisely what this election is all about. For them and their constituents, it’s payback time: payback for the thought that taxes should be fairer; payback for the death of Osama bin Laden; payback for the policies of FDR; payback for America’s changing demographics. They’ve long used the civil-rights movement — which after all was directed precisely against bigots– and the Vietnam-era “pro-war” movement — which arose in opposition to the foreign policy of the Democrats led by George McGovern— as wedges with which to crack the larger social structure and now, so close to realizing the ultimate expression of their “critical theory” — that everything about un-wealthy America stinks — they and their media allies are doing their best to swing an last election for Romney…

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ETA: Second favorite — “Is Nate Silver A Witch?”
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Further ETA, for the lulz: John Cassidy at the New Yorker:

On Sunday, as a blizzard of new polls confirmed the lack of a last-minute bounce for the Mittster, I tweeted out: “Apart from George Will, does anyone still think Romney will win the electoral college?” Apparently, they do. Here are the names of the Romney optimists: Karl Rove and Dick Morris, who need no introduction; Michael Barone, the veteran political analyst; John Ellis, a media pundit who used to be a senior executive at Fox News; Jennifer Rubin, neoconservative columnist at the Washington Post; and Donald Trump.

Two days on, with Election Day upon us, not much has changed. The vast majority of pundits, academics, and forecasters agree that Obama will win. Indeed, there is a broad consensus about his likely margin of victory in the electoral college: 303 to 235. In addition to myself, a number of prognosticators have settled on these figures. They include the Democratic strategist Joe Trippi; the Slate blogger Matt Yglesias; the Huffpo’s Pollster tracking model; the Web site PredictWise, the consulting firm CabPolitical. Most other forecasts are grouped around the 303-235 projection. Early Tuesday morning, Nate Silver’s 538 model was predicting Obama 315, Romney 223; Sam Wang’s Princeton Election Consortium had it at Obama 309, Romney 229. Larry Sabato and his colleagues at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics were predicting that Obama would do slightly less well but still win. Their figures for the electoral college: Obama 290, Romney 248…

My Choice for Lede of the DayPost + Comments (164)

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H/t commentor TaMara. Yup, too long to watch over coffee, but now you’ve got something to keep you entertained while you’re waiting in line to vote. For the impatient, Michelle Obama is announced at approximately the 2:10 mark, and President Obama comes on at 11:10 (and starts speaking at approximately 12:30).

Meanwhile, all your early-morning lamestream media pundits will be gumming over OMG DIXVILLE NOTCH, tied 5-5, not bad for a precinct that skews Republican. But let’s hear a little love for the other tiny NH bellwether, Harts Location:

President/Vice President
Barack Obama/Joe Biden (D) 23
Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan (R) 9
Gary Johnson/James Gray (L) 1
Virgil Goode/James Clymer (C) 0

So… final prediction time! Nate Silver at 538 calls it 315.2 for President Obama, 92% chance of winning. Latest word from Sam Wang at the Princeton Electoral Consortium:

I make two electoral predictions.

ELECTORAL PREDICTION (mode): Barack Obama 332 EV, Mitt Romney 206 EV. The mode is the single most frequent value on the histogram. It corresponds to the map below, and has a chance of being exactly correct.

ELECTORAL PREDICTION (median): Obama 309 EV, Romney 229 EV, Popular Vote Meta-Margin Obama +2.34%. This is the automatically-generated snapshot for November 5th 8:00pm. This prediction is almost guaranteed to be off, since 309 EV is not a common combination.

And here is the prediction of our own PsiFighter37:

Obama gets 332 EVs. I think the popular vote will come in between 3-4%, with rounding causing it to be 4%.

Mitt gets 47% of the vote and will forever have that tattooed onto the magic underpants.

Democrats will pick up Senate seats relative to the 53 they have now. Joe Lieberman will wonderfully be but an irrelevant assclown in less than 2 months when Chris Murphy takes his seat.

But we don’t take the House, but I predict Eric Cantor makes his move and sticks a shiv deep into Orange Julius’ back to become Speaker. God help us all.

So… what are your predictions for close of day tonight?

Early Morning Open Thread: Election DayPost + Comments (124)

(Ben Sargent via GoComics.com)
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Wise words, as always, from Mr. Charles P. Pierce at Esquire:

In an election year, the elite American political correspondent lives in a wilderness of the mind made up only of turning points. Tonight’s primary. The next primary. Today’s poll. The next poll. The convention, when every candidate has to give The Speech of His/Her Life. Tonight’s debate. The next debate. The spin function of the modern American political party is designed solely to lead the elite American political correspondent deeper and deeper into this wilderness until all the turning points are strange, concocted shadows that make the wary traveller jump, like broken trees in the forest at night that look like witch’s fingers against the rising moon. Generally, the conservative spin machine is better at doing this. Its woods are darker and deeper, and its concocted shadows are generally more interesting, which is why they frighten the correspondent more profoundly, and generally get a longer run in the mainstream media.

The real cognitive dissonance comes when an actual, real-world turning point occurs — a hurricane, say, ravages the nation’s major population center, obliterating the distinction between the president’s being president and the president’s being a candidate to the point where one of the president’s most implacable opponents is hugging him out on the tarmac. Confronted by this obvious change in the prevailing dynamic of the campaign, and the way in which the actual turning point shines a light on all the phantom turning points, revealing the scary monsters in the wood to be trees and rocks and lines of shivery undergrowth, the elite political correspondent gets briefly disoriented and wonders how things could look so strange in the light of a new day….

Open Thread: Irony BitesPost + Comments (116)