"The Last Time We Vote For Bigotry"

My title is from a Huffington Post article in which the author argues that gays should never again back a presidential candidate, like Obama, who doesn't support gay marriage. While you can debate the effectiveness of such a strategy, it looks like it's already happening. Exit polls from November's election show a startling trend: Gays have deserted the Democratic party at rates far higher than any other group.

The chart below, from pollster.com, shows shifts in presidential voting patterns compared to 2004. Groups below the horizontal line voted more Republican in 2008 than in 2004. While Obama did amazingly well with almost every demographic, there are three groups where he lost votes compared to Kerry: "Small town" (-6%), "Decide last three days" (-8%), and "Gay" (-11%).

(Click on the chart for a version you can actually read)

Although I don't have the data to prove it, my guess is that this is a result of Democratic-leaning gays not voting, rather than gays as a group becoming more Republican. If so, this likely occurred more in safe states like California than in swing states like Wisconsin.

This trend will probably continue, and perhaps even accelerate, until the Democratic Party finally elects a presidential candidate who openly supports gay marriage. While it's unlikely to affect the top of the ticket, it could have an impact in close races further down the ballot.

In the past Democrats have almost always paid a price for supporting gay rights. In the future they will increasingly pay that price for not doing so.

Obama's Lieberman Gamble

On the flip side, the best argument I've seen for being nice to Lieberman is this Time Magazine article. Only time will tell if Obama made the right decision, but I sure hope it was made very clear to Lieberman that if he steps one inch off the ranch in the future he'll instantly be demoted to bellboy with a brand new office somewhere in the boiler room of the Senate Office Building.

Why I Love Dailykos

Markos tells it like it is...

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VA-Gov: Would you buy shit from McAuliffe?

by kos, Mon Nov 17, 2008 at 03:00:04 PM PST

Huh?

[Terry] McAuliffe’s pals dismiss such criticism and say his unique blend of charm and cash will prove irresistible.

"Terry could sell shit to the zoo," explains longtime pal Paul Begala. "He’s the best salesman in the world."

Right. Is that why Democrats made huge gains during his tenure as DNC chairmanship in those ass-kicking 2002 and 2004 elections? Is that why Hillary Clinton is President of the United States?

Terry McAuliffe can obviously sell shit to Paul Begala. He has a harder time selling it to people outside his circle of shit-buying friends.

2008 Presidential Results and Analysis - Part 2

This map shows the number of votes Obama or McCain won each county by. You can clearly see the electoral importance of the larger urban areas in Wisconsin, particularly Milwaukee and Madison. Three-quarters of Obama's 412,000 vote margin came from Milwaukee County and Dane County alone. But even if you ignore those two counties completely, Obama still would have won the state by more than 100,000 votes, ten times Kerry's total margin in 2004.

(For higher resolution versions of any of my maps please contact me)

Obama ran a truly statewide campaign, with almost sixty campaign offices, some in parts of Wisconsin that had never before seen a presidential ground presence. Many of those offices were cooperative efforts between the campaign and county parties, and the eagerness of so many county parties to grab the ball and run with it was amazing. Those local grassroots efforts will result in a bigger and stronger Democratic Party, and bode well for even more success in the future.

Obama's victory represents, in a very real sense, the culmination of Howard Dean's fifty-state strategy. You can't win if you don't play, and Obama played, and won, almost everywhere. I was an early Dean supporter because I recognized that Dean's vision for the Democratic Party represented our best hope to turn around three decades of Republican domination. Although Dean didn't win the nomination in 2004, his willingness, as DNC Chair, to push for new ideas and strategies, despite relentless opposition from the party establishment, paved the way for what happened on November 4th.

Democrats have an awful lot to be thankful for this year, and we owe most of that to two extraordinary leaders: President-elect Barak Obama, and DNC Chair Howard Dean.

2008 Presidential Results and Analysis - Part 1

The map below shows the Wisconsin county-by-county percent margin in the 2008 presidential race. I'm working on several additional maps that will show vote totals by county, and trends since the 2004 election, but that will take a bit longer so I wanted to get this one up now.

(For higher resolution versions of any of my maps please contact me)

To me the most interesting thing is that although Wisconsin is far more blue than in 2004, the overall pattern is amazingly similar. Partisan identities are remarkably stable, and although swing voters may trend one way or another in any given election, the underlying demographics change quite slowly. Anyway, this will all be easier to see when I finish the maps and get the rest of them posted.

The Palin Formula

McCain's logic:

"Let's see, my veep has to help fire up my base and pick up Democratic votes. Obama won the Democratic primary because he's young and pretty, and Hillary almost won because, well, she has boobs.

So Democrats will vote for me if I pick a young (hell, everybody is young compared to me), good looking women, but she has to be really conservative to keep the religious nuts happy.

Maybe Palin? No experience, but if she has to take over I sure as hell won't be around to worry about it...

Gotta give her a call ASAP.

Damn cell phone, how do I turn it on?"

Trophy Wife, Trophy Veep

John McCain sure seems to have a thing for ex beauty queens...

Ireland!

(Boats on the River Corrib near Galway Bay. Click for larger image)

I haven't been doing much political stuff lately because I'm in Ireland. Right now we're in Galway on the west coast. Beautiful area! The locals tell me that this has been the wettest summer in Ireland's history, but that doesn't seem to slow the Irish down. Check out the guys below who were out swimming yesterday even though it was sixty degrees, raining, and blowing so hard that the raindrops hurt. I know the picture could be better, but even for a photographer the conditions were rather tough...


(The diving platform, Galway/Salthill. Click for larger image)

Bartoshevich Bites Back -or- Spite Makes Right!

Debra Bartoshevich is the Clinton delegate from Waterford who was (rightfully) stripped of her credentials for saying she would vote for McCain. Now Bartoshevich is starring in the new McCain ad below.

I understand Bartoshevich's pain and frustration, but not her willingness to try to extract revenge by selling out both Hillary Clinton and the Democratic values that Bartoshevich claims she believes in. I suspect that this is an act that Debra Bartoshevich will look back on with well deserved shame.

Classy

So I was watching the Olympics opening ceremony with my family last night, and on comes the McCain ad you see below. An attack ad! On the first night of the Olympics!

I used to have some respect for McCain, but he's turned into a real piece of crap. Seems the only thing he learned from the vicious smears about his adopted daughter in the 2000 campaign was to hire the guys who did them this time around.

John McCain: Proving that if you're old enough, integrity is just another word you can't remember.

Another One Bites the Dust

The Republican effort to kill the UW system seems to be working. Another prominent scientist just left UW-Madison for greener (in more ways than one) pastures.

Jon Foley, the founder and director of the UW-Madison's Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, was earning about $115,000 here at the UW. Not bad, but the University of Minnesota offered him a position as head of their Institute on the Environment, at twice his UW salary, plus a cool 1.2 million dollars of start-up mad money. Pretty sweet! UW-Madison wasn't able to come anywhere close to matching such an offer, so we lost one more of our heavy hitters.

Usually when a superstar like Foley gets lured away it's difficult to pin the blame on anything specific, but in this case we have a pretty good idea what happened. Seems Foley explained the situation in an email that he sent to friends, and that email was leaked to the State Journal. Here's part of what he had to say:

"It is remarkable how big a difference having a constructive and supportive legislature — even when money is still tight — makes in campus morale and attitude. There is a startling difference between the two universities (UW-Madison and the University of Minnesota) right now."

Perhaps influenced by their party's growing antipathy towards science and education, Republicans have spent the past two decades trying to turn Wisconsin into an intellectual and economic wasteland by cutting money out of higher education and putting it into prisons. Our great universities may be rotting from the inside out, but being Tough on Crime^® has sure helped a lot of Republicans get elected. Besides, we've locked up a heck of a lot more scary black folks, and who could complain about that?

Check out the chart below showing how state funding for UW-Madison has changed over the past twenty years. Pretty sad, although there has been a slight improvement recently. No doubt just a coincidence that the upturn occurred as Democrats took more power in the legislature. Click on the chart for a larger version. Email me if you'd like the data in a spreadsheet.


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Full disclosure: My wife is a professor at UW-Madison. Coincidentally, she was also recently offered a significantly higher salary to take a high-profile position at a school in another state. Although she turned it down, we probably would have left if our kids weren't still in primary and secondary school here.

My wife is prominent enough in her field that she'll continue to be recruited by both private industry and other universities in the future, and in a few years our kids will be old enough to no longer be a factor. Unless state funding priorities change drastically, it's likely that she'll become one more symptom of the brain-drain that threatens the UW system.

Money isn't everything when it comes to academia, but only fools, and some Republicans, seem to think that it doesn't matter.

Is Coal the New Oil?

Something very strange is happening to coal prices in the US. A massive discrepancy has opened between prices east and west of the Mississippi, with the far west flat at around $12 to $15 per ton and the east soaring to nearly $150 ton, triple last year's prices.

Because coal is expensive to ship, and rail and barge transportation is limited, coal is usually three to four times more expensive in the east than in the west. But as you can see from the chart at the bottom, the current trends are extraordinary.

Coal matters because most of our electricity comes from coal. Higher coal prices inevitably mean higher electricity prices, which we all pay. But what could be causing such an odd and dramatic price increase? The usual market forces don't seem to explain things. Demand for coal in the US has been flat, exports haven't increased significantly, and inventories are reasonably high. This leaves market speculation as a real, and likely, possibility.

Speculation in energy markets tends to occur where there's the least regulation and, perhaps even more importantly in the Bush era, the least regulatory attention. After Enron it became very hard to manipulate the electricity market. Too many nosy people keeping an eye on things. As a result, over the past five years or so, speculators moved into oil, but given all the attention they've been getting in that market, perhaps they're starting to put their money elsewhere. Coal would be a logical choice. The coal market is much more geographically fragmented than oil, making it easier to control and manipulate. And, at least in the eastern US, the coal market is also fairly inelastic, again making it easier to manipulate.

Looks like coal could become the new oil. Enormous profits for the few, much higher energy costs for the rest of us. It's the American way.


Click on chart for a larger version. Source: EIA. The Powder River Basin is in Montana and Wyoming, and the Uinta Basin is in Colorado and Utah.