Now that the campaign is over, we’re hearing more about the Sarah Palin fiasco. Fox News has the goods – Sarah Palin didn’t know that Africa was a continent. She thought it was a country!
How many Republicans will defend her now that the election is over?
After becoming acquainted with Sarah Palin over the past two months, we should be surprised by anything that happens in Alaska politics.
Convicted felon Ted Stevens, quite possibly the nation’s worst Senator, is currently leading his Democratic opponent, Mark Begich, by over 3,000 votes. The polls suggested that he would lose by around eight points.
According to polling guru Nate Silver, however, it might be too early to call Stevens the winner.
Although Ted Stevens holds a small lead in Alaska and is the favorite to retain his seat, the outcome is not as inevitable as it might appear to be. Stevens currently holds a lead of 3,353 votes, or about 1.5 percent of the votes tallied so far. But, there are quite a large number of ballots yet to count. According to Roll Call, these include “at least 40,000 absentee ballot, 9,000 early voting ballots, and an undetermined number of questionable ballots”.
Hopefully Begich can pull this off.
It looks like the Democrats will pick up another seat in te Senate.
Democrat Jeff Merkley has ousted Republican Gordon Smith from his U.S. Senate seat, The Oregonian projects.
Merkley, a five-term state lawmaker and former Habitat for Humanity director, took advantage of a surge of Democratic support to win a close, bitterly fought battle with Smith, who has served 12 years in Washington.
Neither candidate, however was willing to rule the race over until more votes are tallied.
“More good news,” said Matt Canter, spokesman for Merkley, “but we’ll just continue to watch the ballots come in and wait to claim victory.”
If this holds up it brings the Democrats up to 57.
Barack Obama beat John McCain among Hispanics by more than a 2-1 margin. This fact helps explain why Obama was able to thump McCain in New Mexico and Nevada by double digits and handily win Colorado as well.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. Watching the Republican convention, I was struck by the crowds at the convention. The words “melting pot” did not come to mind. This continued at campaign events in states like Colorado.
Republicans in Colorado pointed to other GOP mistakes.
“I have gone to a few Republican campaign events, and you don’t see a brown face or a black face in the crowd,” said former U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a Republican who retired in 2004.
“The Republican Party, they are not inclusive,” Campbell said.
He would not say which candidate campaigns he attended, but offered, “the last couple of statewide races.”
During the primaries, the pundits said Latinos would not support a black candidate. After the conventions, many of them stopped talking about the Hispanic vote. It turns out this was one of the most under-reported stories of this campaign.
The Republicans are in trouble if this trend continues.
For the most part, the pollsters did a very good job in this election. Barack Obama appears to have won the popular vote by six points, which pretty much matches the polling averages. Rasmussen got the percentages exactly right, and Nate Silver’s projection was also accurate. Even the polls that were off a little were very close on Obama’s totals.
This should not be a surprise. With few exceptions (like New Hampshire), the polls were pretty accurate during the primaries. The pundits needed to fill air time, so many of them had to speculate about the Bradley Effect, but we now see that it no longer applies.
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