Election Analysis and What's Next

Right now there are approximately two bazillion talking heads on television offering their analyses of why the election went the way it did. The election of Obama wasn't that surprising, but the landslide victory he won was, and I think that's why we're all so eager to figure out what went wrong for McCain. I now offer my own analysis of why Senator Obama won, and at the end I'll discuss what should be next for both Republicans and Democrats as we move into this new phase of our nation's history.

First off, I think it's important to remember what exactly has happened here. We just elected a multiracial man named Barack Hussein Obama who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, attended Harvard Law School, and worked as a grassroots community organizer. He won a race against a respected war hero and formerly moderate Republican who had as his running mate an ex-beauty queen who loves guns and becomes increasingly adorable when cornered. And Obama won, not by barely scraping by or by eking out a tiny majority of the electoral college, but by an electoral vote count of 349 to 163 [NOTE: at the time of this article's publication, North Carolina and Missouri were still uncalled by CNN.com; with nearly all precincts reporting, Obama is ahead in NC and McCain is ahead in Missouri].

Also, it's important to note that this win was achieved, not on the backs of Baby Boomers or the elderly, but through outreach to groups that have traditionally been considered unreliable in terms of get-out-the-vote efforts— minorities, women, and young people.

So this election wasn't typical in any way, and it's interesting to see how things played out this year, but we can't really apply all of the lessons we've learned in 2008 to every other subsequent election cycle.

That said, I've grouped my analysis of why Sen. John McCain lost into two groups of factors: situational factors (which result from the political and emotional situation of the country) and McCain campaign mistakes (which reflect what the campaign could have done better to encourage a Republican victory).

Situational Factors

Everyone is saying it, but I just can't echo it enough: it's the economy, stupid. Voters often tend to punish the party in power when the economy goes south, and therefore this year it would have been extremely difficult for ANY Republican to win the White House. Couple America's tendency to blame the sitting president for economic woes with its nearly automatic association of economic recovery with the party of Franklin Roosevelt, and you've got yourself a pretty toxic environment for anyone favoring the Bush tax cuts.

Of course, I also think the war was pretty important here, as well. While McCain garnered some favor for his support of the surge, he couldn't hide from the fact that we're currently mired in two unpopular wars that the Republican Party started. People wanted to give the other party a chance to fix the war back in 2006, and when it became apparent that they needed more support to end the war, people were willing to give it.

And then there was the elephant in the room: our lame-duck president, whose approval ratings basically show that only his immediate family has any faith in him anymore. It wasn’t just Bush's policies that irritated the American people; it was his attitude, his insistence that his opinions came from God and he didn't need to listen to anyone else. Very few people agree 100% with everything George Bush believes, so even moderates found his refusal to listen to their concerns (on the environment, on the war, on looking for bin Laden) frustrating. And the fact is that McCain, even though I think he personally dislikes the president and rather resents him for the smear tactics that torpedoed the 2000 McCain primary campaign, cozied up to Our Dear Leader when he began to have presidential aspirations for 2008. I remember thinking in 2005, "Why is McCain so buddy-buddy with the president? I thought they didn't like each other."

But I don't think we can see Obama's victory as merely an inevitable reaction against Republican policies or a general search for stability in a time of economic and political turmoil. I genuinely believe that some of the choices McCain's camp made after the primaries hurt him, particularly with regard to the consistency of his image.

Campaign Gaffes

Throughout the campaign, McCain's aides confused voters and presented conflicting images of the candidate: McCain is moderate...but no, he's hard-line conservative! Experience is important...but not for Sarah Palin! McCain wants to retain the Bush tax cuts...but he also wants to help your family! McCain wants to freeze spending...but keep the war going!

The most obvious mistake the campaign made was suspending activity during the financial crisis. It made McCain, who had been trying to cultivate his "maverick" image, look like a political insider playing election games, and it made his claims of wisdom and experience inconsistent with the poor judgment and impatience he displayed by suspending his campaign.

But to me, nothing epitomized the campaign's inconsistency like the choice of Sarah Palin as VP. First of all, it made McCain look old, and of course Palin wasn't vetted properly, so it made McCain's campaign look foolish and bumbling. But it also solidified McCain's move to the right, a move that anyone could have told him was foolhardy. The reason the Republican Party chose him in the primaries was his moderate stances and his appeal to independent voters; if they wanted a scary conservative they would have chosen Mike Huckabee, for goodness sakes. McCain should have pretended to be conservative during the convention in order to shore up support from evangelicals, then sprinted back to the center. Instead, Palin signaled that he was moving right, which I don't think was ultimately his fault (I think the blame for this rests on Republican Party higher-ups), but which I think he ought to have halted.

Because here's the real truth, guys: you can't appeal to evangelicals and moderates equally, because moderates are smart and know that evangelicals are CRAZY. Moderates don't like rapid change, but they don't bear gay people any particular ill will. They don't like abortion, but they don't want women to die or be forced to bear children they'll resent. They think America should defend itself, but they don't think it ought to bomb Iran.

Moderate Republicans and moderate conservatives are NOT evangelical or hard-line conservatives, and there is no way to make them compatible. The email rumors of Obama's supposed Muslim sympathies would have been just stupid enough to gain evangelical support anyways— and by "support", I mean to get out the evangelical vote, since few evangelicals would actually support a Democrat even if that Democrat was Jesus Christ, so the worst they could have done was stay home and not vote at all. McCain should have relied on evangelical fear and bigotry to insure that he got their votes, and concentrated on appealing to sane moderates. Instead he tried hard to "shore up the conservative base", and that cost him the votes of a lot of working-class and middle-class moderates, particularly in Ohio.

What's Next?

So where do we go from here? First, I'd like to address Republicans:

Guys, don't sulk. It could have been worse. And this will cheer you up: yeah, we control Congress and the presidency, but remember, there are THREE branches of our federal government, and the third, the judiciary, is totally under your control. You've got a hard-line conservative majority in the Supreme Court, and that isn't reliant on popular support at all. And since most of the really old guys on the Court already died during Bush's presidency, we Democrats might not even get to appoint anyone at ALL.

There. That makes you feel a little better, eh? And remember, you've still got a host of state legislatures and state supreme courts under your collective thumb.

Now, for 2012: want to know my honest opinion? Drop Sarah Palin like she's hot. That woman is crazy, and now everyone knows it. She's goofy and ignorant in a George Bush kind of way, and that's not going to be widely popular, even in 2012.

Want to go with a woman for a nominee? You could do worse than Olympia Snowe. She's moderate, she's got a heck of a personal story, and she's waaaaaay smart. If she became the Republican nominee, I'd honestly be hard-pressed to say for whom I would vote.

If it's youth you're looking for, Bobby Jindal might be your man. I dislike his politics, but he certainly is young, and definitely seems smarter and more capable than Palin. I wouldn't vote for him, but there are many who would.

To Democrats: we're celebrating now, and that's great, but later on down the road there will be temptation to view this as our moment for revenge. And we can't succumb to that temptation, because that's not what Obama's victory is about. We need to reject the Bush way of governing and start listening to and helping others.

Which is why our priorities, after we fix up the economy and get out of this dumb war, should be education and reducing poverty. These are things we all can get behind, regardless of party affiliation. Plus, it helps Republicans out (the South is one of the places most in need of education reform and poverty reduction, and those two initiatives will almost certainly cut down the abortion rate without resorting to messing with Roe v. Wade) and it helps Democrats out (who doesn't want their kids to go to better schools and see poor people get the help they need?).

And of course, we liberals still have a lot left to accomplish. California, Arizona, and Florida have just banned gay marriage, and Arkansas has been silly enough to prevent gay people from adopting children. Obama is going to be president, but we still have a long way to go before everyone is treated equally in America.

So let's do this thing, people!