It should be clear to almost everyone by now that the normal rules of operation in Congress will be ignored for at least the next four years. The Democrats are not going to be partners in government and they have to learn to act with that in mind. They have to forget about crafting coalitions and working with the President and start acting like an opposition party.

What does being an opposition party mean? An opposition's job is not to stop the government from doing things. An opposition has only one job--to sell a set of alternative policies to the voters. Why? Because your goal is to win the next election. And the only way to win the next election is to learn how to lose battles.

In a parliamentary democracy, like Canada, the role of the Opposition (Official and otherwise, and yes, we do have an "Official Opposition") is very well defined. Opposition parties know, most of the time, that the government doesn't need them in order to get its policy through. The government will do whatever the hell it damn well pleases.

Accepting this gives you an odd kind of freedom. If you know that you're going to lose no matter what, then you can concentrate on the real question--how you want to lose.

Why? Because you need to do two things.

The first, and most important, is to develop and articulate a critique of the current government. You need to explain why what they're doing is wrong, especially when the government appears to be in good shape and nobody's listening. Think of it as an investment. The idea is that you're banking political capital, so that it can build up enough interest between now and the election to buy you a win.

As the opposition, you need the government to fail, and to be responsible for that failure. If you didn't oppose them, then you can't later hold them responsible. If Texas gets obliterated by a giant space rock, you want to be in a position to say "I told you we should have sent Bruce Willis", not "you cut the budget for searching for giant space rocks". Sure, maybe sending Bruce Willis wouldn't have worked, but that's only a theoretical not working as opposed to the actual not working.

People might have been more prepared to blame Bush for Osama bin Laden remaining free if senior Democrats, ones with actual positions in Congress, had kept pointing out that Osama bin Laden is, in fact, still free. But if it doesn't appear to bother you, you can be sure that it's not going to bother the electorate. A consistent pattern of criticism gets out a steady stream of low-level news stories that then have people ready to listen to you when the election comes around. Remember the "America Held Hostage" counts, and what they did to Carter? Think about what it would have done to the Bush administration to have the Evening News lead off with a "Days bin Laden has evaded capture" count, night after night.

Sure, under this kind of pressure Bush might have actually caught bin Laden. You know what? If he'd done that, he'd have won whether Kerry attacked him on it or not, so who cares?

Yes, sometimes the government's policy will succeed. While you may look bad for opposing a policy that eventually worked, that's less of a risk than not opposing failures. It's better to err on the side of criticizing too much than too little. A successful policy is, by definition, not an issue and thus is unlikely to come up during a campaign. I'm not recommending knee-jerk oppositionalism here--if you think a policy is really, truly a good idea, then endorse it. The point of articulating clear opposition is to give people a sense of how you're different than the government, and shape people's perception of what's going on in ways that are favorable to your party and your candidate.

A secondary benefit is that you get to articulate, by default, what your own policies are. While less important than tearing down the government, it is still an important goal of an opposition party. That means you have to develop your criticisms along specific themes. Don't launch every possible attack under the sun. If the message is that the Bush Administration has undermined the economic strength of America, abandoned the average person, and left al Qaeda to grow stronger, then frame every criticism along those lines. If an issue doesn't fit your message, let it go.

You need to think both tactically and strategically about how you're going to lose each fight. Always think about the message you want to convey about the government's shortcomings. Forget scorched earth, forget the idea that you'll make them fight for each inch of political territory--instead select two or three messages that you want to hammer into the news cycle. The Alberto Gonzales nomination is a perfect example. He gives Democrats a perfect chance to talk about Abu Ghraib, the torture memos, and criminal investigations of the Bush White House. They don't need to be the same messages each time, but they should reinforce your overall themes.

Republicans aren't inherently more skilled at defining themselves than Democrats. For the most part, the clear sense of what Republicans are is the result of the influence of two men--Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich. Yes, there's a large conservative infrastructure that developed and nurtured the message and the policies the Republicans embrace, and it was and is a vital part of their machine. But Reagan and Gingrich moved that message out of the party and into the population.

Reagan did it largely by virtue of his position. The President, like it or not, is a single figure whose choices, personal style, and policies rapidly become seen as being those of his party. Even if Congress is fractious or opposed to him, he's the person Americans think of when they wonder what a party stands for. Reagan was particularly effective at communicating a message and creating a sense of resolution, and his Republican successors have succeeded or failed electorally in direct proportion to their willingness to match their behavior to that image.

There was one point in recent history when the Republicans risked losing that natural definition, and the Democrats had a chance to gain it--shortly after Clinton's election. Newt Gingrich prevented that by developing the "Contract on with America". It bound the party to Reagan's legacy, in the public eye, and kept them running as the party he had created.

Clinton, by contrast, largely failed to define anything resembling an ideology. We can talk about Reaganism or the Reagan Revolution and have that convey some meaning about policy and ideology. But "Clintonism"? Clinton's decision to pursue a policy of small, incremental changes, his failure to achieve any transformational goals, meant that Gore and Kerry have had to define themselves on their own terms rather than having their party affiliation automatically provide them with positive associations. The result is a window of opportunity for the Republicans to define them negatively--which the Republicans took.

If the Democrats want to turn this around, they need to work to create the perception, well before the election, that they think America's current course is a bad one. The Presidential candidate in 2008 will need to be able to shape that message to fit the needs of his (or her) campaign, but it is vital that he (or she) not have to build the critique from scratch. There should be a message already out there, one which has been proven to resonate with the voters and the media, that the candidate can tailor to fit the specific demands of the campaign. Kerry worked hard to make the argument that Bush had blown it in Iraq and ignored bin Laden, but the problem was that not enough Americans were prepared to believe it--because most of the media hadn't been discussing it.

This is going to be a hard switch for the Democrats in the House and Senate, who still seem to believe that it's all about collegiality, working together to craft compromises, and not incidentally bringing home the pork. It's very likely that they'll continue to do exactly that. But if they want to win the Presidency in 2008, they have to stop--and if each and every Senator really fancies him- or herself a future President, they'd better start acting like one.

Scoop.co.nz is delighted to be able today to publish a full set of 4pm exit poll data for the first time on the Internet since the US election. The data emerged this evening NZT in a post on the Democratic Underground website under the forum name TruthIsAll.

The new data confirms what was already widely known about the swing in favour of George Bush, but amplifies the extent of that swing.

Click for big version
Figure 1: Graph showing the "red shift" between 2004 US General Election exit polls & the actual 2004 US Election results

In the data which is shown below in tabulated form, and above in graph form, we can see that 42 of the 51 states in the union swung towards George Bush while only nine swung towards Kerry.

There has to date been no official explanation for the discrepancy.

Ordinarily in the absence of an obvious mistabulation error, roughly the same number of states should have swung towards each candidate.

Moreover many of the states that swung against Democratic Party hopeful John Kerry swung to an extent that is well beyond the margin of error in exit polls. Exit polls by their nature - they ask voters how they actually voted rather than about their intentions - are typically considered highly accurate.

Last week in an analysis of a similar, but incomplete set of data, Dr Stephen F. Freeman from the University of Pennsylvania calculated that the odds of just three of the major swing states, Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania all swinging as far as they did against their respective exit polls were 250 milllion to 1. (See…"The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy" – Dr Stephen F. Freeman - .pdf format)

Dr Freeman's academic paper contains a thorough description of why and how exit polls are conducted (in some countries they use them to prevent against vote fraud), and considers a number of hypotheses for why this year's polls could have been so dramatically wrong. He concludes that the reasons are unknown.

CAUTIONARY NOTE: The data that is released today shows the 4pm data run from the Edison-Mitofsky polling company. This run was based on 63% of the full 13660 sample in the poll. However as we also have a set of data from around midnight with which to compare this data, we can tell that the final exit poll results were not that far different than these early results. This in itself tends to suggest that the polling system did not have a systemic bias in its early data as suggested by some commentators in early reports on this puzzle.

(For a more detailed description of the limitations of this data and the claimed gender bias in the early data see.. EXTENDED FOOTNOTE ON THE LIMITATIONS OF THIS DATA - By Jonathan Simon )

BACKGROUND

Ever since the first analyses (See... "Faun Otter: Vote Fraud - Exit Polls Vs Actuals ") showing the swing in favour of US President George Bush between the exit polls and the actual results were published, the internet has been swimming with rumour and speculation about what the results meant.

These initial internet news reports were debunked in a report from the CALTECH/MIT Voting Technology Project which was widely distributed to the media in the days immediately following the election. The unnamed authors of this report stated:

"If we look at the 51 separate exit state polls, we see that 30 predicted more votes for Kerry than he actually got, while 21 predicted more votes for Bush than he actually got. Therefore, at the state level, the polls favored Kerry less than the sum of all the polls aggregated up to the national level. Furthermore, if we do a statistical test to see whether the differences between the exit polls and the official returns are significant, only three out of 51 are.5 Therefore, while it is fair to say that the exit polls predicted a significantly greater vote for Kerry nationwide than the official returns confirmed, it is not immediately apparent that any systematic biases are revealed when we take the analysis down to the state level."

This report was subsequently quoted in a November 12th New York Times front page article ("Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried") that purported to debunk Internet conspiracy theories and misconceptions about the 2004 election, including those about the exit polls. The New York Times stated:

A preliminary study produced by the Voting Technology Project, a cooperative effort between the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to a similar conclusion. Its study found "no particular patterns" relating to voting systems and the final results of the election.

"The 'facts' that are being circulated on the Internet," the study concluded, "appear to be selectively chosen to make the point."

However CALTECH/MIT's analysis had already been proved flawed on November 11 when Scoop.co.nz published the first iteration of a set of data that was fortuitously captured by VerifiedVoting.org activist Jonathan Simon in the early minutes of Nov. 3 (See… "47 State Exit Poll Analysis Confirms Swing Anomaly"). Dr Freeman's report was also based on this data. However Jonathan Simon had not managed to capture data for all states - hence the hunt for the full set of data continued.

Interestingly after the Simon data was widely circulated in the blogosphere the authors of the CALTECH/MIT report edited their footnotes (see footnote 2 & compare with the version cited above & hosted on Scoop) making it clear that the source of their data was the publicly available Exit Poll reports on CNN.com which were "rebalanced" in the early hours of Nov. 3. This data which has effectively been recast to fit the final results cannot really be termed exit poll data at all and has been the source of a great deal of confusion.

What Are Democrats About?

Once more, the theme of themelessness. Cover the Democrats for any length of time and you become expert in campaigns that don't seem to be about anything. They have policies; Democrats are good at policies. But all too often the campaigns lack a message -- a sense of what the candidate's about and what he aims to do.

The insider accounts of the Kerry campaign that are emerging have a sickening familiarity to them. The Boston Globe tells of Paul Begala, who helped Bill Clinton win two presidential races, descending on Kerry headquarters, white board in hand, scribbling a dozen suggested lines of attack against George Bush on it, and imploring the campaign to choose one and stick with it. The papers are full of Kerry aides attesting that they never knew what the campaign's message was, and there are accounts of Kerry himself chafing at the confusion. …

The themelessness isn't simply Kerry's, however, any more than it was simply Gore's or Dukakis's. Time was when the Democrats were the party of economic justice and opportunity, the party that championed emerging constituencies as well as classes: Catholics, blacks, women. They were the party of the many against the powerful, which played a lot better in the electoral arena than being the party of the one against the many. But, with the signal exception of Clinton's '92 campaign -- a brilliant mix of economic progressivism and cultural centrism -- the Democrats haven't been able to persuade enough voters to choose them as their champions for a very long time. And Clinton's ability to deliver on that promise once in office was a sometime thing. Full employment made life better for the people at the bottom of the economy. But the erosion of the decent jobs of the old industrial economy never really stopped (and, of course, has escalated greatly under Bush), and the jobs that replaced them more often than not offered lower pay, fewer benefits and less security. The Wal-Mart economy has grown on both the Democrats' and Republicans' watch. …

Historically the Democrats have been the party of security, but that's an identity they need to reclaim. The challenge of radical Islam demands more of them than a foreign policy of realpolitik; empiricism -- while a welcome counter to Bush's indifference to fact -- is not enough. The challenge of a global labor market demands more of them than a commitment to mid-career retraining; defending the American middle class means creating the kind of global standards that the Democrats created on the national level during the 1930s and '40s, the time of their greatest popularity. That's a daunting challenge, one that requires the Democrats to think and develop a story about the new threats to the American dream. If they do they'll come up with a more plausible list of culprits -- and solutions -- than the Republicans ever will. They may even come up with a new sense of self, with a purpose, with a theme.

Democratic Party leaders said Wednesday they want to know why Sen. John Kerry ended his presidential campaign with more than $15 million in the bank, money that could have helped Democratic candidates across the country.

Some said he will be pressured to give the money to Democratic campaign committees rather than save it for a potential White House bid in 2008.

"Democrats are questioning why he sat on so much money that could have helped him defeat George Bush or helped down-ballot races, many of which could have gone our way with a few more million dollars," said Donna Brazile, campaign manager for Al Gore's 2000 presidential race.

Brazile is a member of the 400-plus member Democratic National Committee, which meets early next year to pick a new party chairman. One high-ranking member of the DNC, speaking on condition of anonymity, said word of Kerry's nest egg has stirred anger on the committee and could hurt his chances of putting an ally in the chairmanship.

$15 million may have netted us a couple Senate seats, more than a few House seats. For example, $1 million would've allowed the cash-strapped Mongiardo campaign to compete against Sen. Bunning's air attack the last two weeks of the Kentucky Senate contest.

Instead, Kerry hoarded the cash for his 2008 run.  

I am a reform Democrat.

One interesting item the report found from Gonzales' time in Texas: "Gonzales was instrumental in getting Bush excused from jury duty in 1996 -- a move that allowed the governor to avoid having to disclose that he had been arrested for drunken driving in Maine in 1976, the Houston Chronicle reported. Bush was able to keep it a secret until the final days of his 2000 presidential campaign."

You've got to reward such resourcefullness with a Supreme Court nomination!

But more substantively, Gonzales has been on the front lines of this administration's efforts to hide the inner workings of their government from the people.

A new report from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press paints a picture of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales -- who has been nominated to replace U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft -- as someone who has worked tirelessly to keep information from the press and public if he believes it could hurt the president, and does not appear ready to change [...]

Gonzales has "played a key role in keeping presidential records out of the public eye and asked for several extensions to deadlines for turning over papers of past presidents," the report says. "Earlier this year, Gonzales also pressured the nation's archivist, John Carlin, to resign, according to Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.). Carlin's departure -- he resigned without giving a reason -- sparked speculation that he was forced out in order to protect the records of the first President Bush."

The report also cited Bush's efforts to protect his advisors from being forced to testify, saying, "Gonzales picked one battle in particular to doggedly fight: that the president and those working closely with him must be able to receive counsel from advisers without public inquiry. Gonzales argued throughout the summer of 2002 that Vice President Cheney and the records of his energy policy task force should not be subject to open-government laws."

by Chris Bowers

Counting and recounting is still taking place in a few elections across the nation. Here are the most prominent ones:

WA-Gov
Today is the final day of counting in this race, which currently has Rossi-R ahead of Gregoire-D by a preposterous 19 votes out of more than 2.7 million cast:

What they will find out this afternoon, when the counties are required by law to finish counting ballots and certify their results, is who won the most votes. But a mandatory recount is almost certain, so the outcome probably won't be official until at least next week. And before either candidate is declared a winner, they may have to survive legal challenges to the result.

After yesterday's counting, Rossi had a 19-vote lead over Gregoire. In other words, after nearly 2.8 million votes have been tallied, the race is a virtual tie.

About 6,100 ballots remain to be counted today; more than half are in counties where Rossi is leading.

While it is true that more than half of the remaining ballots come from counties where Rossi is leading, his lead in these counties is smaller than Gregoire's lead in the other counties with ballots remaining. Still, there seems to be a very slight edge to Rossi in this race. We will find out more tonight.

NY-27
In the struggle to up the Democratic total in the House from 200 to 201, Democrat Brian Higgins looks to win an open seat currently held by a Republican. He is being challenged by Nancy Naples, who has not yet conceded, even though things look grim for her:

Chautauqua County officials have about 4,500 paper ballots to count. Counting Erie and Chautauqua Counties, there's a combined 13,000 paper ballots to be counted.

Naples is expected to pick up a majority of those Chautauqua County ballots, but she'll need close to 70-percent of those ballots just to close the current gap with Higgins.

"Hopefully by the end of the day Tuesday, we'll have a good sense of where the votes are in both Erie and Chautauqua Counties. And we'll be able to give candidates some guidance as to what we project the winner to be," added Mohr.

Yesterday, officials from Erie County's Board of election counted ballots. By the end of the day, Higgins had gained 258 additional votes, giving him an overall lead of 3,385 votes.

Naples only leads in Chautauqua county by a 57-43 margin, so the 70% she needs is a longshot. Higgins is clearly favored here.

IN-09
Recount ahead:

The Indiana State Recount Commission on Tuesday approved a recount in the 9th Congressional District, expected to be the largest and most expensive recount since the commission was created.

The Democratic Party and Rep. Baron Hill, who lost to Republican challenger Mike Sodrel by 1,485 votes in the southern Indiana congressional district, filed for the recount after questions arose over whether optical-scan voting systems recorded straight-party votes erroneously.

The Palladium-Item last week first reported that optical-scan equipment problems led to a recount in Franklin County and changed the outcome of a county council race.

A story on page A3 of today's Palladium-Item reports that Franklin isn't the only Indiana county that had programming troubles with optical scan voting equipment this year.

Ripley, Brown and Carroll counties each had a different problem, ranging from handcounting a race because the software program didn't comply with Indiana law to 63 unvoted ballots in one precinct, according to the scanner's tally tape.

In the 9th district race, Sodrel said a "substantial number" of ineligible voters may have cast ballots in Monroe County, and that it could be impossible to determine who received the most votes in that county.

The commission approved a recount that will cover the 613 districts and 280,000 voters.

Realistically, the only way Hill has a chance to overcome 1,485 votes is if there were substantial problems with the voting machines, as per his claim. If Democratic claims on this matter are accurate, then this race is a toss-up. Otherwise, Sodrel has the advantage.

NY-35, State Senate
Incumbent Republican Nick Spano holds a 100-vote lead over Andrea Stewart-Cousins going into a recount. I guess this one isn't as big a deal as the other three, but being from New York, I love the idea of Spano going down. Maybe there is still hope.

Time Once Again to Be America