While the attention of most American journalists and politigeeks on Tuesday was justifiably focused on the state-level races in Virginia and New Jersey, there was an array of other state and local elections in the US too, including mayoral elections in range of major cities. Even further down into the weeds, however, was an unlikely feature.

Socialists.

Real, dyed-in-the-wool, third-party revolutionary socialists, almost winning office in major cities. When’s the last time that happened? Sixty years ago?

In Seattle, a Socialist called Kshama Sawant came very close to winning a city council seat, getting 47.6% of the vote (some 56 thousand of ’em) in the race for City of Seattle Council Position No. 2. In the lead, as the counting of mail-in ballots continues, is a Democrat, Richard Conlin, but right now he’s winning it with just 52.2% of the vote. The margin (which was 53.6% vs 46.1% on election night) has been somewhat narrowing since as mail-in ballots that were sent in closer to the election are counted, and Sawant has not conceded yet. [Update, Nov. 7: Sawant is now up to 48.3% and some 62 thousand vote, and her campaign is actually claiming that “victory is within reach”.] [Update 2, Nov.12: Eight days after the elections took place, with the counting process still continuing, Kshama Sawant has for the first time actually pulled into a lead. Even if it’s the narrowest of leads. The tally is now: Sawant with 49.91% – 79751 votes; Conlin: with 49.88% – 79710 votes. The counting isn’t done yet; the vote won’t be certified until Nov. 26. But this is an impressive feat – and a crazy race.]

In Minneapolis, a Socialist called Ty Moore received 37.5% of the vote in the elections for a city council seat there. It was a much smaller race, though, with Moore getting 1,565 votes. Democrat Alondra Cano is ahead in that race, having received 40.7% of the vote (1,696 votes). Since neither won over 50% of the vote, this means nobody was elected yet, though Cano looks best positioned to win it.

These are not some kind of Francois Hollande-type ‘Socialists’ either. These are revolutionary socialists, affiliated to a Trotskyite party. They mean it, man.

Photo: @VoteSawant

In Seattle, the Democrat who did win the seat [or did he? See update above], Richard Conlin, is apparently pretty progressive himself – a local station calls him “a darling of the Democratic party with left-leaning views”. Which makes it all the more surprising/impressive that Sawant got as far as she did. According to the city’s archivist, no socialist ever was this close to winning a city council position in Seattle – even including the halcyon days when Eugene Debs won 10%+ in the Western states (and over 20% in Snohomish County, next door to Seattle).

No wonder, maybe, that it’s not just those who actively supported her, but more neutral observers too, who argue that she might have won even if she loses. A sitting councilman quoted in the KUOW link above remarked that “My hope is that she doesn’t disappear after the election if she loses; she represents the poor, the immigrants, the refugees – the folks who are not in our City Council offices lobbying us.”

In Minneapolis, officially the race is still open. Instead of organizing a second round election, in the city’s Australian-style system of instant-runoff voting the vote counters will now redistribute the votes for each of the minor candidates who pooled the remainder of the votes, according to the second preferences indicated by their voters. And they’ll keep doing that until one of the frontrunners hits a majority.

Since all but one of the also-rans were Democrats, however, I guess that makes it likely that Cano will win. The exception is a progressive-sounding candidate running under a “Politics with Principle” label – there was no Republican in the race – and he received 8% of the vote. But if his voters were perhaps inclined to give Ty Moore their second preference, they will in turn probably be outweighed by those of Abdi Abdulle, who received 7% of the vote and whose website touts Cano’s recommendation to give Abdulle second preference votes. I assume it would be hard to guess where voters go since Cano is no conservadem either, even if she was endorsed by the local Start Tribune for being “the pragmatist” in the field; she presents herself as a union-endorsed progressive.

Photo: @JuveMeza

We will know soon enough – right now, the city is retabulating the mayoral election results, and Moore’s Ward 9 will be the second race being tallied up in full after that. (Update: retabulating the results of the 35 candidates who took part in the mayoral election took so much time, work on the remaining races will be continued on Friday.) But considering that Cano has more second preferences as well as first choices than Ty Moore, there would have to be some kind of very lopsided proportions in how the voters of the two candidates exchanged second preferences for each other’s candidate for Moore to pull it out.

[Update: The second and third preferences of the also-rans have now been retabulated, and Cano won, padding her lead over Moore a bit more: the end result is 47.6% vs 42.1%.  The remainder consists of ‘exhausted ballots’ from voters who had neither Cano nor Moore as second or third preference, or didn’t indicate any. The retabulations were all done in one go, so we don’t know how the votes for Curtis (the “Politics with Principle” guy), Abdulle and the others divided up individually, but altogether Cano got 289 of them, Moore 189, while a rather massive 434 of them were ‘exhausted’.]

Personally, I am no particular fan of Trotskyites; I have little sympathy for communists in general. They have done untold harm in my adopted home country, and many other countries alike. I personally feel that “1917” subverted and misdirected much of the socialist movements that had been growing in influence, and plagued it ever since. But it’s not like the Trots will soon be taking over the US. Conversely, the long trek through the desert which the once-proud socialist American tradition has gone through this past century has been dispiriting enough that the success of any kind of socialist, no matter of what orientation, is a little exciting.

It is, at the very least, interesting to see self-avowed, third-party Socialists being able to raise credible electoral challenges again in major cities – even if it’s just on a city council level – in what I’m guessing is the first time in many decades. The last mayor in a major city to hold office for a Socialist Party, in any case, was Milwaukee’s Mayor Frank Zeidler, who left office in 1960, though he was no revolutionary. (Even delving into smaller cities and towns, Wikipedians can only find one mayor who was elected on a socialist party ticket since: University Heights, Iowa – population 1,051 – had a Socialist mayor in the 1980s.) I’d suppose individual city council members might have survived longer, but presumably not very long?

Both Sawant and Moore apparently ran wholly grassroots-focused campaigns, rooted in personal histories of local activism. Moore must have benefited from running in a small and something of an outlier ward even by Minneapolis political standards, but Sawant ran for an at-large seat for the whole city. Seattle may be a liberal city, but it’s not Madison, WI. So who knows, the near-success of these candidates might show that the Overton window could be slightly shifting back, when it comes to talk of socialism and leftist ideas. Meanwhile, in two years’ time Seattle is changing from a 9 member at-large city council to a 7-district +2 at-large one, which would allow Sawant, if she does lose, to try again in a specific, very liberal district within the city, much increasing her chances.

Excel sheet: US Senate candidates 2008 - results and efficiency of financial investment

Chris Bowers last week linked through to a site I hadn’t seen yet, noting that The Green Papers has the final popular vote and fundraising totals for all 2008 U.S. House of Representatives election campaigns. They cover all candidates too, not just those of the main two parties.

Bowers does a good job analysing the numbers, and above all, brings the good news:

The final popular vote percentages were 53.08%-42.55%, giving Democrats a 10.53% victory. This is the largest popular vote percentage victory for either party in either a Presidential or Congressional election since 1984 (the next largest victory was Bill Clinton with 8.51% in 1996). It is the first double-digit victory for any party in a national election in 24 years. That, truly, is a historical butt-whooping.

Turns out the Green Papers site has the same data for the Senate races. Fascinating stuff for political geeks. What caught my attention in particular is how the money the candidates raised compared to the votes they got. In short: how did their investments pay off?

So what I’ve done, in turn, is add a couple of columns to the data table, to calculate how much the candidates raised for every single vote they received, and for every single percentage point they won. The file is up at Google Docs. (It would arguably have been better to use the data for how much money they actually spent, but that would involve making a similar effort to The Green Papers’ and gathering the data for 2-4 candidates in each of 50 races from the FEC site onself).

Time then, to declare some winners!

Most expensive Senate race of 2008

As you’ll have guessed, that was the Minnesota race between Al Franken and Norm Coleman. The two men raised $20.5 million and $18.0 million, respectively. That translates to $488 thousand and $430 thousand for each percentage point of the vote they ended up winning – which ranks Al and Norm as #1 and 2 when it comes to raising the most money per percentage point won.

Don’t forget that Minnesota’s a fairly populous state, though. When it comes to how much money they had to raise for each individual vote they won, they rank a more modest #10 and 11. Meaning that they had to raise “only” – ponder this for a second – $17 and $15 for every single vote they won.

Most money spent on each individual vote

You’d think that states with small populations would also cost less to campaign in. This is true – up to a point, apparently. The top of this list is filled with candidates from “small” states, who made Franken and Coleman look practically callous about the individual voter’s worth.

Your vote was worth most up in Alaska. Mark Begich raised a total of $4.4 million – which translates to a royal $29 for every single vote he received. His opponent, Ted “bring home the pork” Stevens, was right up there too and raised a stunning $26 per vote – in vain.

Max Baucus from Montana and the two contenders in the New Hampshire race, John Sununu and Jeanne Shaheen, also ended up raising at least $23 per vote.

Dennis Haysbert as David Palmer, President

The New York Times has an article today called, “How The Movies Made a President,” (which includes a cool slide show). It examines various black archetypes in movies and TV and how they may have helped to prepare the ground for the ascendancy of Barack Obama. I had similar thoughts a few months ago but never got around to making a blog post out of ’em (I know, all the bloggers say that, right?). The article mentions Dennis Haysbert and the show “24” in passing — that was the starting point of my train of thought earlier.

I think the significance of that show is not only that it was popular and that the black President Palmer was a good guy, someone the audience is rooting for, but that Keifer Sutherland’s character Jack Bauer is a pretty Republican character, at core. He’s all about stoppin’ those damn terrorists by any means necessary. This wasn’t some lefty liberal show, at all.

I started thinking about this after seeing a Dennis Haysbert commercial for State Farm. He’s all calm, reassuring authority. I saw the commercial soon after some sort of political television — a debate, perhaps — and I thought at the time that it had to help Obama. There are just all sorts of resonances there. The phrases I transcribed from the commercial at the time were, “If this isn’t a recession, it sure feels like one,” (spoken wryly but seriously by Haysbert, standing in a grocery store) and then the standard State Farm tagline; “Are you in good hands?” Haysbert’s hands, the commercial clearly implies, are very good ones.

As of a year ago, Dennis Haysbert was willing to take some of the credit, too:

“As far as the public is concerned, it did open up their minds and their hearts a little bit to the notion that if the right man came along… that a black man could be president of the United States,” Haysbert, who believes that Obama is the “right man,” said in the January 21 [2008] issue of TV Guide. “People on the street would ask me to run for office… when I went to promote [24].”

[…]

“I think we both have a similar approach to who and what we believe the president is,” Haysbert said in another interview with the Los Angeles Times. “Barack doesn’t get angry. He’s pretty level. That’s how I portrayed President Palmer: as a man with control over his emotions and great intelligence.”

I don’t think anyone’s claiming that there is a direct line from one to the other; that if these black fictional representations hadn’t existed, Barack Obama wouldn’t have won, or that the fictional representations meant that any black politician could make it that far. Obama’s achievement is significant and singular. I do agree with Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, though, authors of the NYT article, that

The presidencies of James Earl Jones in “The Man,” Morgan Freeman in “Deep Impact,” Chris Rock in “Head of State” and Dennis Haysbert in “24” helped us imagine Mr. Obama’s transformative breakthrough before it occurred. In a modest way, they also hastened its arrival.

(Another thought I had while reading the NYT article — Michelle Obama is SO Clair Huxtable, isn’t she? Smart, polished, down-to-earth, nurturing, funny…. Is this not a total Clair Huxtable moment?)

T-shirt made by a bar in Georgia

I’m starting to see Obama being held up as an indication of how advanced America is compared to other countries when it comes to race relations. On the one hand that’s so awesome! Yay us! I do still get this little shock every time I realize that it’s actually true, and what it means.

On the other hand, it’s a bit too easy and pat. The fact that Obama was elected doesn’t mean that America no longer has any problems with race.

I took this photo of a voting information flier on the ground on election day.

I’ve been interested in politics forever but this election year was one for the ages. And all of that excitement wasn’t even crammed into a single election year — candidates announced that they were running for president about two years before election day (of the major candidates, John Edwards was first in December of 2006, and Barack Obama was last in February of 2007), and there was speculation and buzz well before anyone announced anything.

All told, this election cycle took up about three years of my life, with the intensity ratcheting up and up and staying at fever pitch from about the Iowa primaries (January 2008) through election day.

So perhaps it’s unsurprising that after the initial euphoria of election night, I’ve settled into a period of politics detox. I no longer obsessively click on the acronymed sites crowding my bookmarks toolbar (TPM, FR, DD, WM, 538) — several of them haven’t been touched since November 4th. I still read my daily New York Times but I glide over the politics and intrigue and pay more attention to the arts section and special sections like Science Times. The TV stays away from CNN and MSNBC and C-Span.

I believe this has been better for my mental health — but man, that was sure a fascinating election cycle.

I can sense that things are starting to change already. For one thing, I am so watching the inauguration. My daughter has the day off of school (hooray!) and we’re gonna make a day of it. That’ll invite CNN back into my living room, and I’ll want to see what Kevin Drum and Andrew Sullivan and Matt Yglesias and Hilzoy and everyone are saying about it. And I’ll disagree with some of it, probably, and write them emails and write stuff here and then see the counterarguments and that’ll probably be that. Detox completed, politics part of my brain re-engaged.

But for now, I’m still really enjoying ignoring politics in favor of things like the Science Times. Did you know that it’s been proven that lack of sleep is closely related to catching a cold? I thought so…

Yesterday, that is. Commenting on a TNR blog post about Terry McAuliffe’s “pre-announcement announcement video” for Virginia Governor, Ken Grant writes:

In TNR, Clay Risen revisited the question of voting patterns in the South in this year’s presidential elections, and responded to a point of criticism I raised here on his previous take. Being an incurable nitpicker, I’m still not altogether convinced.

In his previous take, Risen justifiably sounded critical notes about how the South was presented in some of the electoral analysis, which was all about how its “backward ways are increasingly irrelevant to the American scene”. He pointed out that hey, in much of the South Obama actually did better than Kerry had done, thank you very much. The “red splotches” on the electoral map that showed a shift to McCain only covered a specific band of counties stretching from Kentucky to Oklahoma, while “across the “Deep South” [..] the map is almost entirely blue.” Ergo, what the map showed was “not a waning South, but a fissured and rapidly changing one”, and “what is really surprising is not how stalwart the South is in its ways” but “that broad swaths of the region look just like the rest of the country.”

The former is certainly a good point. My own stab at electoral analysis here highlighted how the Gulf states and Atlantic states seem to be heading down different paths altogether. But the latter point has a problem or two.

Gallup has a new poll up already about the presidential elections of 2012. Which will be sure to either make you run off screaming, or sigh contentedly at the brief respite from post-elections detox.

It asked Republicans and Republican-leaners, “Now, thinking ahead to the 2012 presidential election, please say whether you would, or would not like to see each of the following Republicans run for president in 2012”. I turned the results into this graph:

Poll: Which of these Republicans would you like to see run for President in 2012?

I don’t know about you, but what struck me most about these numbers is just how disgruntled Republicans are right now about the choices they have at hand. There’s not one person in this list that is not dismissed by at least about a third of Republicans. Of the ten potential wannabees, just three at least enjoy a reasonably significant positive balance. 

There seems to be a broad rejection of both the recent and further past of the party. Poor Jeb Bush faces the second largest deficit of all, presumably mostly because of the burden of his family name. Newt Gingrich, painful to his renowned ego it may be, is rejected by a plurality of Republicans. Congressional veteran and McCain sidekick Lindsey Graham is the least popular of the lot. Even General Petraeus, so passionately defended by conservatives against his MoveOn detractors, is rejected by almost 40%. Republicans love a military bigwig to defend, but apparently really want to move beyond the associations with Iraq.

It’s maybe no coincidence that the top three choices – Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee – are all very much newcomers to national Republican politics. Huckabee was derided by practically the entire Republican establishment, including the traditional leaders of the religious right, but there he is, the third most viable candidate on the shortlist. Hell, in this context Rudy Giuliani merits a fifth place, even after his disastrous crash-and-burn primary campaign.

Notably, two of the top three are conservative hardliners, with little appeal to the middle-ground of US politics. Democrats will be glad: it seems that the road back to power will be long and winding for the GOP.

On the occasion of Veterans Day, Facing South last week had a post up about veterans in the South and veteran care. Part of the post was a list of the “10 Cities with Highest Percentage of Veterans”. Nine turn out to be in the South. 

It made me curious: Southern cities with a high percentage of veterans, those can’t have been the most promising locales for the Obama surge, can they? The lone non-Southern city was the conservative redoubt of Colorado Springs, after all.

Looking up the results for the counties in question yielded an unexpected mish-mash of votes, however.

First, here is the list of the top 10 cities and the counties they are in – note that in Virginia, the cities are their own counties. (For a methodological note, see footnote 1).)

Table 1: Top 10 cities with highest percentage of veterans in 2000

Now for the election results from 2004 and this year in those top 10 cities that had the highest share of veterans in 2000 (respectively the counties they are in). As said, it’s a very mixed picture:

Table 2: Top 10 cities with highest percentage of veterans in 2000 (resp. the county they are in): how did they vote in 2004 and 2008?

The other day I clicked to Comedy Central, just to see what was on. Barack Obama’s smiling face filled the screen. The camera panned to show fireworks behind him, then out to show that he was on a porcelain plate. The words “Change Has Come” in scrolly gold letters were lingered on lovingly. Everything was soft-focus and precious.

There were no captions and I squinted at the screen in confusion… was this some sort of Jon Stewart parody? What was going ON?

Eventually it became apparent that despite the insipid-looking white people gazing happily at the plate and the lo-budget schmaltz, this was the real thing. They’re actually selling porcelain plates commemorating Barack Obama’s victory.

This can be YOURS for the low, low price of $19.99!!

There is a whole site set up for selling these plates (and coins!), where you can watch the video (slightly altered from the one I saw — fewer insipid people, more coins).

I remember when I ordered my “ObamaMama” t-shirt, more than a year ago. It’s a very nice t-shirt, as t-shirts go; black with red white and blue lettering and an Obama logo.

I never seemed to make the decision to wear it lightly. I’m relatively new in town and I had serious concerns about whether wearing that t-shirt would close some doors for me.

When I did wear it, the reactions tended to be strong (especially once the primaries got started). I wore it to the Ohio State Fair in July and a young black guy grinned at me and said “I like your t-shirt…!” while a middle-aged white woman glared at me with such heat that I prepared to physically defend myself — she eventually moved on, though.

Residents of Blandville, USA raise a toast to the new president (seen, tinily, on a plate in the background)

This commercial somehow brought home for me that Barack Obama is not the risky candidate that I started supporting almost three years ago. He’s our President-Elect. Three quarters of Americans think he will be a good president. His face is on tacky porcelain plates, for chrissakes. This is real.

A toast to our President-Elect, Barack Obama.

… in Kenya, that is.

On election night, or rather the morning after as it was 7 AM in Kusumu by that time, reporter Shashank Bengali witnessed the local Luo erupt in celebration:

The young jobless men, the bike taxi drivers who may be Obama’s strongest constituency, the women who clean the place – all cheered and hugged each other. [..]

People are saying, “We won.” Talk show hosts are joking that the fish in Lake Victoria are getting stake because all the fishermen are watching TV. The radio is playing Obama songs in Luo [..]. “George Bush said only John McCain could lead America,” goes one particularly jaunty guitar-and-drum tune, “but the rest of the world said no.” [..] President Mwai Kibaki declared Thursday a national holiday.

But it’s a globalised world, as Bengali realised when watching Al Jazeera in the Kisumu fairgrounds and hearing the pundit say, “I can’t offhand recall how many electoral votes Indiana has.” And the consumer society works just the same the world around:

This is starting to get ridiculous.

Less than a week after the election, you can’t walk 10 feet in Nairobi without seeing Obama’s name. [Y]ou can buy Obama campaign buttons in the supermarkets, beaded Masai bracelets with “Obama” stitched into them [..], souvenir Obama hundred-dollar bills, mini U.S. flags bearing Obama’s face, [..] electronics at one store’s “Obama sale” (not sure what this means exactly) — and the list goes on.

I was at an opening Saturday in Nairobi’s Industrial Area for a talented young Luo artist named Kota Otieno. [..] Kota, 28, was exhibiting about a dozen original works. At least three featured Obama’s name. [..] The one at right is called “The Proffet.”

While I appreciated Kenya’s election-day euphoria as much as the next guy, with the inauguration still 10 weeks away Obama already risks becoming a cliche here — not unlike the endless Man U and Arsenal logos that plaster all the minibus taxis. This is what’s almost happened in South Africa to Nelson Mandela, whose family has tried unsuccessfully to keep his face off of every T-shirt and backpack going. Obama’s not there yet, but it’s coming.

Hey, it’s better than Che tees …

If you’re an election geek like us, you’ll have seen this electoral map from the NYT. It shows which counties in the US actually shifted toward McCain, in comparison with how they voted in 2004. (The map showing which counties shifted by how much to Obama is interesting too.)

Since the country as a whole saw a 9% swing to the Democrat, it’s just a small part of the country that moved toward McCain, obviously. Just 22% of counties, as the Times helpfully notes. But their geographical concentration is noteworthy, as apart from obvious bits in Arizona and Alaska, the candidates’ home states, most of the counties in question form a perfect arc in the Highland South, from Oklahoma eastwards to Tennessee and then upwards through the Appalachians.

Striking as the pattern is, however, it’s become fodder for some misinterpretation as it did the rounds on the blogs. Some of it may just be a matter of emphasis. Some of it, however, has to do with the way the differing racial demographic balances in red states cloak the true concentration of McCain switch voters.

In terms of general emphasis, I’d be a bit wary about impressions when these counties become dubbed “the McCain belt” — you’d almost think that these were the best counties for McCain, rather than just the ones that moved toward him most. For example, McCain won Alabama and Louisiana by about 20 points, a more ample margin than he got in Tennessee, Kentucky or West-Virginia. So what’s the real McCain Belt?

The more interesting point is about race. The NYT map showing the electoral shifts to McCain obviously does not take into account the role of race, it just maps the overall results. One thing, however, that distinguishes the Appalachians is that they have a very small black population. In the Deep South, on the other hand, you have some of the largest black minorities around. Those black populations turned out en masse for Obama — and so their extra votes for Obama effectively canceled out the shift to McCain among whites there.

Do Southern whites constitute the real McCain Belt?

Compare the Electoral Shifts map above, with its “McCain belt” stretching from the Oklahoma to the Appalachians, with this one:

How has the white vote shifted between 2004 and 2008? In this map, McCain getting 25% more of the white vote in a state than Bush got in '04 would colour the state a fiery red; McCain getting 25% less would make it the coolest blue. The map shows that whites in much of the Deep South swung to McCain, while whites in the Mountain and Pacific West, the Midwest and the Atlantic South swung strongly to Obama.

This map shows, state by state, how much the white vote, taken separately, changed since 2004. It looks very different, doesn’t it?