I don't know where goferit2's numbers come from, but they are incorrect and his conclusion is misleading. Perhaps he's comparing preliminary numbers (without mail-in or early ballots) with 2004's final tally. The referenced article by Gans indeed notes a record absolute number of voters, but because the population grows over time, the percentage is not a record.

The numbers I've seen have 65.3M votes for Obama, and 57.4M votes for McCain, excluding undervotes and third-party candidates. And even these aren't final. That totals almost 123M - indeed higher than 2004 and indeed a record.

No ... America's a center right nation. Only in America is the word 'liberal' ('tolerant, wanting free trade') an insult, giving healthcare to people who are actually likely to get sick (the unemployed, poor, old) seen as 'communism' or using tax income to address social inequality 'Marxism'. None of these are even debating points in most other developed countries.

Virtually every European country has civil partnerships or marriage for gays, abolished the death penalty, enacted equality legislation for all minorities, regulated industry, enshrined employment rights (five weeks paid holiday, equal rights for temps, sick pay, *paternity* leave), a working minimum wage ($21K a year in the UK, $12K in the US), liberalised abortion, enacted affirmative action.

Obama's platform, every part of it, would place him comfortably in the right wing of every mainstream right wing party in Europe.

Those things aren't necessarily good or bad, there are certainly advantages to the way that the US operates compared with Europe ... but they are facts, and the only possible standard for deciding where the US is on the political spectrum is looking at the spectrum. The US is a center right country.

Most media outlets are getting this wrong, because the report spins it this way, but after looking at the report (since I was suspicious), there is nothing in there that is able to support the conclusion that republicans failed to turnout.

What the headlines imply is that the report tells us what fraction of Republicans and Democrats voted. It doesn't. In fact, there is no way to calculate this figure from anything other than exit poll data. The only partisan figures the report http://timeswampland.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/election_turnout_08.pdf presents are on page 7, And they are something else. They are the fraction of the eligible population who voted for each candidate. There are several problems here.

1. Partisan vote choice is not the same thing as partisanship. People who voted for either candidate also include independents and even members of the other party.

2. What the spin has is number of republican voters at the polls divided by number of republicans in the population (and ditto for the Ds). The denominator here is unknown. You could get some notion of it from polls (But as far as I can tell they don't) but we don't really know reliably how many republicans and democrats are really out there.

All this finding does is weight vote choice by turnout. the sad thing is, there has never been a president that has received the support of even half of eligible voters.

One of your readers provided you with essentially this same analysis in comments to War Room (albeit with preliminary vote results, see copies of posts below) on Wednesday. Hmmmm, that would have been me.

(Cut to pic of reader patting himself on the back in an unseemly manner).

I feel vindicated.

==============================================================

Record Voter Turnout?

By the way--for all of this unchallenged talk about record voter turnout yesterday, please consider the following:

2004

Bush 62 mil

Kerry 59 mil

Total 121 mil

2008

Obama 63 mil

McCain 56 mil

Total 119 mil

There is some rounding, but it doesn't materially affect the results above. Also, this does not take into consideration third party candidates, but still...

The simple truth would appear to be that the voter turnout was neither astonishing nor reord-breaking as far as the major party candidates were concerned yesterday.

So why does this lie get perpetuated? It really is pretty simple to check.

-- goferit2

[Read goferit2's other letters]Permalink Wednesday, November 5, 2008 12:10

==============================================================

Further Comparing 2008 To 2004...

Looking at the popular vote, and comparing 2008 to 2004, Obama certainly was a far stronger candidate than Kerry, outpacing him by 4 million votes (63 million to 59 million). Impacting the result even more, however, was the failure of McCain to approach Bush's 2004 numbers by an even larger amount--6 million votes (56 million to 62 million).

Even if you assume that Obama attracted all of his 4 million additional votes by convincing 4 million of the former 62 million Bush voters to switch and vote for Obama, at least 2 million other former Bush voters were AWOL.

Indeed, a more likely explanation than all of Obama's additional 4 million voters coming from the former Bush column, is that a very large number of Obama's increase in votes over Kerry came from new voters on the Democratic side (new Democratic voter registrants, or previously registered Democratic voters who simply did not vote in 2004 but voted in 2008), which means that the AWOL GOP voters would have to be much greater than the 2 million former Bush voters mentioned previously. That would seem to support the view that McCain was viewed as a particularly unattractive candidate from a former Bush voter point of view, despite (perhaps because of?) McCain's obvious pandering to the GOP Far Right, and despite the Palin sop to the Evangelicals.

(This all assumes, as I believe is largely correct, that relatively few former Kerry voters crossed over to vote for McCain, and that the large majority of former Kerry voters voted for Obama).

-- goferit2

[Read goferit2's other letters]Permalink Wednesday, November 5, 2008 01:13 PM

For the meme that we're a center-right nation.

Hmmmm. Fuel for the Palin debate.

I think this balances out in her favor. Clearly, one

problem the Republicans had this time was making sure

their guys got out and voted. Clearly, Palin energized

the Republican base - or at the very least some factions

within it.

Using Rove logic, the problem was what they're saying

on Fox - not enough Palin. Because on those numbers,

if the Republicans who voted last time had voted

this time, it would have been a fight. As with the

UK Conservatives in 1997, the landslide wasn't people

rushing to switch sides, it was people sitting on

their hands.

It would be very interesting to see precisely in which

parts of the country the Republican base did get out

and which they didn't. I'm guessing that it breaks

down pretty neatly by education and income ... the

smart, rich Republicans ran a mile, the poor, dim

ones thought she was great.

Run the numbers, and Palin/Cheney 2012 might well

be competitive when compared with Romney/Jindal.

Find out which parts of the country went for Palin and

then come up with a vaccine or distribute free condoms or

something. Or, y'know, just build some schools there.