Beyond Red & Blue

Gay marriage was roadkill on I-95 in Maine

Matthew Gagnon has put together some cool maps showing the difference between the last gay-rights victory in Maine (when an anti-discrimination law was upheld in 2005) and last week's defeat for gay marriage. The dark-brown communities on this map are places that switched from "pro" to "anti" gay. (I know it's not that simple, but I agree with Gagnon that these cities and towns made the difference in the outcome.) The red line represents Interstate 95.

As Gagnon notes, "The people who were receptive to voting for gay rights in 2005, and thus open to a good argument, but voted against gay marriage in 2009 were middle class suburbanites in the small to medium sized satellite towns that were within striking distance of larger cities and transportation corridors." It's great analysis; go read the whole thing.

IRV has rocky start in Colorado

Aspen, Colorado, has had a bit of trouble adopting an instant runoff (IRV) election system -- the same system that will be used to determine Oscar winners next year. According to the Aspen Daily News, election officials erroneously used the vote-counting formula favored in a fellow leftist enclave:

"- On election night, TBI [True Ballot Inc., which tabulated votes on election night] used a tabulation program configuration that was different from the one it had tested in the public Logic and Accuracy Test and that reflected the IRV tabulation rules of Cambridge, Massachusetts, instead of the IRV rules approved for Aspen's election by the Aspen City Council. As a result, the vote tally reported in the Plaintiff's mayoral race on election night was incorrect.

Will Grandma get her revenge in 2010?

Political pundit Charles Cook warns Democrats that 2010 may be the "Year of the Angry White Senior," leading to big Republican gains in midterm congressional elections. His reasoning is that younger voters (particularly those under 30, who went for Barack Obama by almost 2-to-1 last year) and minority voters tend not to bother going to the polls without the dangling carrot of a presidential race:

Put simply, older voters dominate midterms and have consistently been Obama's weakest age group... [M]idterm electorates typically skew older and whiter than those in presidential years.

According to exit poll data, voters over 45 comprised 54 percent of the total electorate in 2004 and just 53 percent of the electorate in 2008, but they were 63 percent of all voters in 2006. And diminished turnout on the part of African-American and Hispanic voters, which was a factor in 1994, looks like a double whammy for Democrats.

Now, an older electorate isn't always deadly for the Democrats. In 2006, there were several states in which Democratic Senate candidates actually did better among older voters (see Minnesota and Ohio) or, at least, suffered no major age gap (see Missouri and Tennessee, the latter contest featuring a black Democratic nominee).  

Still, Obama's "change" campaign may well have opened up a generational rift that will continue into next year -- especially now that the GOP is apparently abandoning its historic skepticism toward Medicare and is now arguing that health care for "the greatest generation" is its top priority.

UPDATE: New poll gives the Republican Party a 13-point lead among seniors. (The Democratic Party leads by a single point in the overall population.)

Instant runoff voting comes to Hollywood

Next year's Oscar winners will be decided, for the first time, through an IRV (or instant runoff voting) system, replacing the winner-take-all system that predominates in American politics.

The idea is to prevent award winners that are championed by a small sliver of voters but disliked by a majority of Academy members. (With the number of Best Picture nominees going from five to 10 next year, it would have been theoretically possible for a movie to take the prize -- and to become an answer in trivia contests and crossword puzzles for decades to come -- with only 11 percent of the vote.)

This could be an opportunity for the IRV system to gain some traction with the public and perhaps be implemented by some more local governments -- except for the fact that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has always been secretive about its election results. I would love to know which Best Picture winners actually won a majority of the vote, and which ones took a plurality while two better films split the vote, but I've never seen this data anywhere. I presume that the Academy is protecting the reputation of the "accidental" winners, like the one from 1976.

Virginia Democratic primary results: No Clinton coattails for McAuliffe

The Electoral Map has a great map, with analysis, of this week's Democratic gubernatorial primary in Virginia. Former Clinton advisor Terry McAuliffe was trounced in the counties where Hillary Clinton did best against Barack Obama in last year's presidential primary.

Caroline Kennedy's less-than-ideal Senate candidacy

Larissa MacFarquhar's profile of Caroline Kennedy in the New Yorker includes several signs that Kennedy, as knowledgeable and public-spirited as she is, might not have been the best choice for US Senator.

Lawrence O'Donnell, "a friend of [Kennedy's] and a political analyst for MSNBC," is quoted several times at length (for reasons explained below). Sounding like Deval Patrick on a bad day, O'Donnell says that the press has it out for anyone who would actually be a good senator:

“The politics of campaigning are so simple: I’m going to beat you and leave you dead in a snowbank in New Hampshire and never look back. But in the Senate you can be trying to prevail over another senator on Tuesday afternoon whose vote you know you’re going to need on Wednesday afternoon for something else... So the personal qualities necessary for Senate work are politeness and charm and graciousness and generosity, which New York tabloids have no comprehension of."

The timing seems a little off for that complaint, given that Barack Obama emphasized much the same qualities in his winning presidential campaign (especially in constrast to the "leave you dead in a snowbank" reputation of Bill and Hillary Clinton). And when Obama -- and to a lesser extent, Patrick in Massachusetts -- decided that the press was too cynical to get with their message, they went around the traditional media by posting videos and senting messages directly to potential supporters over the net.

Caroline Kennedy, especially in light of her admiration of Obama, might have been better served by emphasizing that approach, instead going on a old-fashioned tour of upstate New York that was largely panned by the press. Trying to win a gubernatorial appointment through some high-profile endorsements and a few days of front-page newspaper coverage is a 20th-century strategy, and I don't think it's the only way to prove the qualities of politeness and graciousness.

O'Donnell also snipes at the woman that Gov. David Patterson tapped instead of Caroline, US Rep. Kirstin Gillibrand:

What you have is the daughter of a lobbyist, instead of the daughter of a former President or the son of a former governor. This is the hack world producing the hack result that the hacks are happy with.

I don't know Gillbrand enough to determine whether she's a hack. But where I come from, giving a job to someone because his or her parent was an elected official could be interpreted as hackery. At least, it's every bit as hackish as giving a job to the daughter of a lobbyist.

Finally, anyone who would condone the following might not be a good fit for public office:

Caroline Kennedy has always appeared to dislike the press. (She declined to be interviewed for this article.) Her friends understand that to speak about her in public would mean banishment. When she announced her bid for the Senate, she gave a few of her friends permission to speak with reporters, but several of those friends, after making the most anodyne or laudatory comments, panicked and withdrew them, or demanded anonymity. (This was no more than prudence: according to one biography, when a few of her brother’s friends spoke fondly of him to reporters, in the wake of his death, they were told they were no longer welcome at his memorial service.)

Test your luck: Vote in Minnesota!

Best quiz of the day: Minnesota Public Radio has posted actual ballots from the Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken that have been challenged by one or both campaigns. Vote to see how each should be counted, and see how other people have responded.

Spoiler below: