Talk Elections

Obama looks like he will win the popular vote by 5-6 points while losing Missouri, the state that is supposed to back the winner. Would have to guess it being a rural state makes it tough for any Dem to win, let alone a black one. At least the chattering class will shut up now that Missouri's streak of picking a winner since 1956 is over.

The South-eastern quarter of the state is like Arkansas and the South.. maybe comparable to Kentucky and Tennessee.  The Southwestern quarter is like Oklahoma.. so these two are comparable to the two highly racist areas that returned McCain his biggest margins compared to Bush (OK,TN,KY).  So, even though Obama did very well in St. Louis County, the two cities, and a couple of other populous counties near StL, he couldn't overcome the benighted Southern half of the state. 

I guess the most interesting comparison is to Indiana - both were at about the same level of Republicanism in the last couple of elections, but Indiana wasn't actually trending that way, while Missouri has been.  So now we see Indiana much more Democratic, even in a racial election.  Although southern Indiana is comparable to southern Missouri, and St. Louis is better than Indianapolis, a considerably smaller percentage of Indianans are, apparently, the hard-core OK-KY-TN style of right-winger (either that or it could be just more blue-collars desperately impoverished in IN than MO).

Evangelical base.

Sorta like here in Carolina the "bible base" is pretty strong.

Yes, it needs to lose its bellweather status. Other contenders before this election included New Mexico and Delaware, and yes, they failed, too.

     OH & VA were the real bellwethers here. They voted almost exactly the national average.

Virginia wasn't a bellwether for Clinton's elections.
Ohio has a better track record, but they're just too Republican in some elections, like 1960 and 2000.

Today's VA would have gone to Clinton easily in 1992 and 1996.

     Yeah, VA has changed a lot in recent years. OH could be a viable candidate for the "official bellwether" though. That aside, I wonder where Goldenboy is. ;D

Btw, Dems seem like they need a 7 or 8 pt edge in the pV to win MO. Its no longer a bellweather and I called it in 2004.

The use of a relatively ideological term to describe something that happend in this election seems like a strange thing to do.

Nevada might be another good candidate for bellwether, having adhered pretty closely to the national margin recently.  In addition, if I'm not mistaken, it has voted with the winning candidate in every election since 1912 except 1976 (when it wasn't too far off the mark in voting for Ford by 4 points).

Look, what people don't seem to realize is that the only thing that kept McCain from being landslided (in the real meaning of the term) was racial voting in the eastern half of the country, especially the South and Appalachia.  More on this later...

Let us know when you finish this write up, Sam. I'm interested in hearing it.

Well New Mexico did vote for winning candidates Gore in 2000 and Bush in 2004 so they have a legitimate claim to the bellweather title. But due to rising Hispanic voting #'s they will most certainly trend left.

Why isn't MO being called for McCain with 100% percent precincts reporting.  Perhaps absentee ballots are coming in.

It has been called.

Still waiting on North Carolina.

Well, it looks like Indiana, Missouri and North Carolina were all on a razors' edge. NC and IN went *barely* for Obama and MO seems to have gone by an even tighter margin to MO.

Missouri does have a 3-4 point Republican lean at the presidential level these days.

However, Nader may have cost Obama the state -- Obama seems to have lost the state by about 7000 votes, and Nader won 20,000.

Most news outlets have called it. There are a bunch of provisional ballots left, however, so it may end up closer than the current results. North Carolina is much odder, actually; also 100% reporting, but with a wider margin for Obama than Missouri gives to McCain. And Democrats tend to gain marginally on the post-100% reporting results because provisional ballots always lean Democratic.

I think Iowa is a good bellwhether state.  While not always being spot on, they are certainly a better indicator of the mood of the country than Missouri