All Posts Tagged With: "2008 election"

Jim Martin continues to push the fallacy that the country is more “red” than “blue,” pinning his entire argument on “non-skewed” maps that skew the picture of the electorate, giving more weight to land area than actual votes. Furthermore, he continues to push numbers that have already been debunked: “Red Blooded Americans occupy 2,427,00 acres and the Blue Bloods occupy only 580,000.” This oft-repeated meme is something I posted about earlier this month.

First, the figures in FGO’s own maps are measured in square miles, not in acres. More importantly, the figures are just plan wrong. FactCheck.org, asked to check into the veracity of an email touting these same numbers that had been circulating the Internet, corrected the record:

The total area of states won by Obama is actually 1,483,702 square miles, significantly more than the 580,000 stated by the e-mail. McCain’s states have an area of 2,310,315 square miles, not the 2,427,000 claimed.

The numbers aren’t quite as lopsided as Mr. Martin would have you believe. Regardless, it is indeed true that Barack Obama won less square miles than John McCain. However, the last time I checked we don’t elect presidents based on how many square miles they win but on how many votes by people they win. So, let’s check those numbers out:

• Population of counties carried by Obama: just under 183 million
  Population of counties carried by McCain: just under 119 million

• People casting actual votes for Obama: 66,882,230
  People casting actual votes for McCain: 58,343,671
  

• Number of electoral votes for Obama:  365
  Number of electoral votes for McCain:  173

Perhaps in FGO world, Mr. Martin would prefer a system of one vote per acre rather than one vote per person. But that’s not the American system of government — at least right now.

Additionally, Mr. Martin and many other diehard red-staters continue to cling to the fact that Oklahoma was the only state to have all its counties “go red,” wearing it as a badge of honor. Perhaps for them it is. But for Oklahoma? It continues to show the rest of the nation (and the world) just how out of step our state is.

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P.S. I’m still humored by continued embracing of the “red” status while “rejecting the small pink tinged change.” What could be more “pink tinged” than something that’s completely red?!?

Sarah Palin addresses sexism, media malpractice and classism in a new conservative documentary.

(Note: Video may take a moment to load)

This blog post is dedicated to David McAfee and his fellow crusaders:

ABC News’ Dean Norland reports: Members of the Senate marched to the other side of the Capitol just before 1 p.m. to meet in a joint session in the House chamber with their House colleagues to witness the quadrennial counting of the electoral votes. …

Vice President Dick Cheney, acting in his capacity as president of the Senate, presided as clerks opened the sealed certificates.

Cheney then handed them state by state in alphabetical order to one of four tellers, two members of the House and two members of the Senate, who announced the results.

After the declaration and counting was over, Cheney proclaimed to the cheering chamber what the world has known since Nov. 4, that Barack Obama and Joseph Biden had been elected the next president and vice president of the United States.

As a follow up to my post from earlier today, here’s more post mortem analysis of the recent election by Guardian writer David Wiegel in which he states, “the Republican party can no longer fool itself into thinking that the US electorate is naturally slanted towards it.”

The map is breaking down, and Republicans – outside of the south and a few areas of Appalachia – can no longer count on the old red/blue district lines.

What this means in the short term is that Republicans have to give up the rosy predictions of Barone and Fund. They can no longer go after “red” districts with Democratic incumbents and hope to win a majority. In just the preliminary numbers put together by Swing State Project, there are 24 Republicans whose districts voted for Bush in 2004 and Obama in 2008. Lee Terry, a Nebraska Republican, now represents a “blue” district. So does Mary Bono Mack, whose Palm Springs, California district has not been at risk since her late husband, Sonny Bono, won it 14 years ago.

And Obama’s victory turned many swing seats into safer Democratic strongholds. In 2006, liberal newspaper publisher John Yarmuth scored an upset victory in Kentucky’s 2nd district, which contains the city of Louisville and had voted only 51-49 for Kerry. This year Yarmuth won a rematch with his 2006 opponent as Obama carried the district by 13 points. Freshman Democrat Chris Murphy represents a Connecticut district that split 49-49 between Kerry and Bush but went by 14 points for Obama. Seats like these fall off of Republican target lists – strategists from both parties mark them “safe” and move on.

What does it mean in the long term? After all, can’t the pendulum swing right back? Of course it can. But it doesn’t swing by itself. It needs to be pushed by something – by a crisis of faith in the ruling party, by reforms in the opposition party, by demographic shifts that give one party a leg up.

Republicans can no longer fool themselves into thinking the country is naturally slanted toward them, or that they have a built-in majority. If the Democrats can win Hastertland, the Republicans need to figure out how to take it back, or how to win somewhere else.

I’m not sure if it was this post or this post or some other catalyst that got Jim Martin’s dander up about election maps and 2008 election results, but he continues to blather on about how the electorate was evenly split and the last several Presidential elections being “with a margin of error of a few idiots on the far left side of reality.” In his post’s headline, he asks, “How many times do I have to show the 2008 election map?”

The answer, quite simply, is until he gets it right.

In the post, two of the three electoral maps he cites are projections from March and July — not even the final, actual election results. The last map he includes is the familiar, but deceptive county-by-county map that paints the country in a sea of red, where land mass is given more weight and importance than actual votes.

As I pointed out shortly after the election, this nation is not quite as red as it appears. When you look at a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states are rescaled according to their population, the electoral map looks significantly different.

Even more, when you take the actual proportional voting margins rather than the all-or-nothing extremes shown on Mr. Martin’s cited map, you get an even more accurate picture of where the country stands — even in Oklahoma (not quite so starkly red anymore).

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To get to Mr. Martin’s claim of an evenly split electorate that was, as he called it, “with[in] a margin of error of a few idiots on the far left side of reality,” the 53% to 46% — a 7% spread — is certainly outside of most credible polls’ margins of error. It is certainly a wider margin than the 52% to 47% — a 5% spread — in 2004 and even more certainly greater than the incredible negative win margin of 47.9% to 48.4% — a negative 0.5% margin — in 2000.

Furthermore, Obama’s electoral win of 365 to 173 (+192 margin) is a significantly more decisive victory than either of Bush’s 2000 or 2004 victories — 271-266 (+5 margin) and 286-252 (+34 margin) respectively.

In both electoral college margins and actual voting percentage margins, the country was much less divided — especially given the significant Democratic gains in both houses of Congress — and certainly much less “evenly split” in 2008 than in the prior two elections.

So, Mr. Martin, you can keep showing your maps, but it doesn’t change the reality. Perhaps you aren’t factoring in the much larger margin of error of a not-so-few idiots on the far right side of reality.

FactCheck was asked to check into the veracity of the following email making its way around the Internets:

INTERESTING FACTS —– NOTICE LINK AND MAP AT BOTTOM

Some unreported stats about the 2008 election

Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning the 2008 Presidential election:

-Number of States won by: Democrats: 20; Republicans: 30

-Square miles of land won by: Democrats: 580,000; Republicans: 2,427,000

-Population of counties won by: Democrats: 127 million; Republicans: 143 million

-Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Democrats: 13.2; Republicans: 2.1

Professor Olson adds: “In aggregate, the map of the territory Republican won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens. Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in rented or government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare…”

Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the “complacency and apathy” phase of Professor Tyler’s definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation’s population already having reached the “governmental dependency” phase.

Notice that only in the states of Alaska and Oklahoma: All counties were won by McCain/Palin.

The original posting with this information is below this Newsweek article at this link: http://www.newsweek.com/id/163337.

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Here’s what FactCheck found Continued

It’s truly a sad (and pathetic) commentary on the American voter. Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Brooks Jackson at FactCheck.org examine the phenomenon of disinformed voters:

We saw more aggressive fact-checking by journalists in this election than ever before. Unfortunately, as a post-election Annenberg Public Policy Center poll confirms, millions of voters were bamboozled anyway.

• More than half of U.S. adults (52 percent) said the claim that Sen. Barack Obama’s tax plan would raise taxes on most small businesses is truthful, when in fact only a small percentage would see any increase.

• More than two in five (42.3 percent) found truth in the claim that Sen. John McCain planned to “cut more than 800 billion dollars in Medicare payments and cut benefits,” even though McCain made clear he had no intent to cut benefits.

The first falsehood was peddled to voters by McCain throughout his campaign, and the second was made in a pair of ads run heavily in the final weeks of the campaign by Obama.

These aren’t isolated examples. One in four (25.6 percent) of those who earned too little to have seen any tax increase under Obama’s plan nevertheless believed that he intended to “increase your own federal income taxes,” accepting McCain’s repeated claims that “painful” tax hikes were being proposed on “families.” Nearly two in five (39.8 percent) thought McCain had said he would keep troops in combat in Iraq for up to 100 years, though he’d actually spoken of a peacetime presence such as that in Japan or South Korea. Close to one in three (31 percent) believed widely disseminated claims that Obama would give Social Security or health care benefits to illegal immigrants, when in fact he would do neither.

We’re not surprised. As we wrote in “unSpun: finding facts in a world of disinformation,” the same thing happened in 2004 when majorities of voters believed untrue things that had been fed to them by the Bush and Kerry campaigns Continued

Tags: 2008 election, Annenberg Public Policy Center, beliefs, Brooks Jackson, disinformed, electorate, FactCheck.org, false beliefs, Ignorance, ignorant, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, political ads, Politics, voter

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The Electoral College has formally elected Barack Obama as the next president of the United States, the Associated Press (via MSNBC) is reporting.

The Associated Press is reporting that the U.S. Supreme Court has again turned down an appeal of an Obama-is-not-a-citizen conspiracist.

The court did not comment on its denial of the challenge by Cort Wrotnowski of Greenwich, Conn. He believes that Obama did not meet the requirement for becoming president because he was a British subject at birth. He was hoping to convince the high court to halt the Electoral College from meeting to formally elect Obama as president.

That didn’t happen. The Electoral College is meeting today.

The following map has become quite popular amongst right-wing bloggers, seemingly to demonstrate that the country is more “red” (or right-leaning) than the last election’s results would indicated.

It looks pretty impressive, doesn’t it? But it really doesn’t tell the whole story. The above map is a winner-take-all representation for each county, which is okay except it’s not a very accurate gauge of the “temperature” of the nation. Here’s how the map would look based on actual voting percentages.

Not quite so stark anymore is it. No longer are there large areas of red with only blue fringes. But wait, there’s more. Mark Newman, Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan, explains. Continued