News Cut: November 5, 2008 Archive

Why Franken (maybe) lost

Posted at 10:05 AM on November 5, 2008 by Bob Collins (13 Comments)
Filed under: Politics

Check out the Washington County election returns.

It's generally considered a Republican county. Obama narrowly carried the county by a little under 5-percent. That's quite an accomplishment.

Franken, on the other hand, lost the county by almost 10 percent of the vote. That's a 14-percent swing down the ticket, in what is literally a "swing county." It's difficult for a DFL candidate to win when so many jumped ship to either Coleman or Barkley.

They thin switched back to the DFL, giving El Tinklenberg a narrow win in Michele Bachmann's home county.

No coattails here.

Oh, by the way, look for Washington County to pull out of the agency that's pooling the county's sales tax increase for transportation. Lisa Weik's victory in Woodbury appears to shift the County Board on the issue.

Let the campaign begin

Posted at 11:07 AM on November 5, 2008 by Bob Collins (16 Comments)
Filed under: Politics

The estimated 2012 Iowa caucuses begin in:

(Update: IE7 users may not see that but that's what you get for using IE7.)

Proposition R fails

Posted at 11:36 AM on November 5, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Politics

It was an under-the-radar measure around the country. Proposition R in San Francisco would've renamed the sewage treatment plant the "George W. Bush Sewage Treatment Plant."

Alas, the measure failed. "Some critics had pointed out the name switch would have been unfair," the Associated Press said today, "to the hard-working sewage plant."

Where are the missing Senate votes?

Posted at 1:57 PM on November 5, 2008 by Bob Collins (17 Comments)
Filed under: Politics

There's an unusual math problem I'm having as I look at MPR's election results.

Twenty-five thousand Minnesotans voted for the top of the ticket and left the second race blank? It's possible. But why?

(More calculations to follow)

(2:39 p.m.) The AP has a slightly different Senate total: 2,880,764. I believe the AP's vote tallying is independent of the Secretary of State.

(2:52 p.m) The AP has 2,898,691 votes cast for president. That's a difference of 17,927 votes. Still that's quite different from what the Secretary of State has, leading one to believe the AP might be closer to accurate, except that the Secretary of State has 100% of the votes counted, and the AP still had precincts outstanding.

It's also quite possible the AP numbers don't include absentee ballots.

(3:06 p.m.) Not surprisingly, the biggest drop in votes is in Hennepin County (I'm using the AP figures at the moment) where the difference in votes cast in the two races was over 4,000.

Percentage-wise, the biggest drop was in Lake County (4%), followed by Houston (2%), Lake of the Woods (2%), Traverse (2%), Wilkin (2%) and Winona (2%). Sen. Norm Coleman won four of those six counties.

(3:27 p.m. ) In comments, people smarter than me say this is a normal thing. I downloaded the spreadsheet for the 2000 race -- the last time we had a presidential contest and a Senate contest) and I get virtually no difference in the vote. In fact, I get that there was just 1 more vote cast in one race than the other. I may be making a mistake there so double-check the math.

The religious vote

Posted at 4:23 PM on November 5, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Politics

A new survey by Pew:

President-elect Barack Obama made a concerted effort to reach out to people of faith during the 2008 presidential campaign, and early exit polls show that this outreach may have paid off on Election Day. Among nearly every religious group, the Democratic candidate received equal or higher levels of support compared with the 2004 Democratic nominee, John Kerry. Still, a sizeable gap persists between the support Obama received from white evangelical Protestants and his support among the religiously unaffiliated. Similarly, a sizeable gap exists between those who attend religious services regularly and those who attend less often.

See more.

Ralph Nader's day after

Posted at 6:32 PM on November 5, 2008 by Bob Collins (25 Comments)
Filed under: Politics

I'm not sure which is more eye-opening in this video: that Ralph Nader referenced "Uncle Tom" in referring to Barack Obama or that a FoxNews anchor called him on it.

Nader got 30,155 votes in Minnesota