Ralph Nader’s final poke in the eye to the Democrats – it looks like he cost them Missouri.
McCain leads in Nebraska’s second congressional district by 589 votes, yet there are 9000 early and provisional votes to be counted. The extra single Electoral College vote might not be known for weeks.
So it looks like 364 EVs for the Dems at the moment, but could easily be 365. Unless there is a swathe of votes hiding in Missouri somewhere, once the provisionals come in McCain will probably win the State by about 2000 votes.
Newsweek had a Special Election Project running where their reporters were travelling with both campaigns, but had an embargo on publishing their wares until the day after the election. There’s some funny bits coming out of it. Palin’s wardrobe bill was bigger than first reported and the whole thing was described by a McCain aide as “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast.”.
This bit from Obama is a cracker:
“The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, “I don’t consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that's green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I fucking changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.”
UPDATE:
It looks like Obama will win the second congressional district in Nebraska. That will mean 365 EVs for the Democrats as being the extremely likely final result.
14 Comments
What a brilliant quote from Obama! How amazing that we have someone about to enter the White House who understands that fundamental fact!
Possum, I’d love to see you and Nate have a methodological discussion
What is it with Nader? I just don’t get his reason for being? In the world of narcissists that is politics, is he the most narcissistic of all?
Nader still thinks he had nothing to do with the Gore mess in 2000.
Thanks for pointing out the SEP doobie at Newsweek Possum, it’s quite a good read. It came at an especially good time for me as well, you see there’s been something missing of late, some kind of void within me and then I discovered what it was!
I haven’t been getting enough US Elections stuff into my life lately
BTW, now my wife really hates you
I can fully understand Obama’s thoughts there: when watching interviews, I can’t help myself from saying out loud that a question is stupid…
And there’s usually a lot of them.
“Ralph Nader’s final poke in the eye to the Democrats – it looks like he cost them Missouri.”
The current numbers in Missouri:
John McCain, Sarah Palin REP 1,442,613 49.4%
Barack Obama, Joe Biden DEM 1,436,745 49.2%
Bob Barr, Wayne A. Root LIB 11,355 .4%
Chuck Baldwin, Darrell Castle CST 8,181 .3%
Ralph Nader, Matt Gonzalez IND 17,769 .6%
Cynthia McKinney, Rosa Clemente GRN 958 .0%
Since the Constitution Party is basically a moderate Republican Party and the Libertarian candidate was a former Republican Representative, shouldn’t they cancel out the left/right wing divide in the minor party vote?
Of course, Nader would be a plus to the Democrats if they had preferential voting…
As much as I was pissed at the 2000 result it must be said that the Democrats policies were hardly those of radical reform.
Would Nader preference the Dems if they had a 2pp system?
One would imagine An Cu
The question assumes that you’d have party-directed preferences. You might well not – if they had OPV, would a large proportion of Nader votes exhaust? (A question which is pretty much impossible to answer sans access to a working crystal ball, of course).
Are we still going on about Nader costing Gore the Presidency? Apart from being boring, it’s a silly excuse.
The fundamental reasons Gore didn’t take the Presidency back in 2000 were:
1) he failed to campaign well enough to have the convincing win he should have had; and
2) he and the other gutless wimps in the Democrats back then didn’t have what it took to stand up and claim the slimmest of victories which they (and everyone else around the world) know they actually achieved.
You can blame Nader, you can blame electronic glitches in Ohio, you can blame deliberate tactics to stop African Americans from voting, you can blame the Supreme Court. All of these have an element of truth to them, no doubt. But fundamentally, the Gore team didn’t have what it takes to take the Presidency back in 2000.
I’d also agree with mad cow @ 8. If Gore had won, he would have struggled with an opposing Congress and gotten very little done, then probably lost to Jeb Bush in 2004. Would we now have seen the extraordinary transformative win by Obama this year? Would we have An Inconvenient Truth, and the excellent work Gore has done in the intervening years? I doubt it…
Maybe things wouldn’t have gotten so bad. But then maybe they wouldn’t now be (hopefully) about to get so good!
tim @ 12, i’m not so much intrested in the Nader/Gore issue, but why Nader is still in the system, it’s a bit odd, and not at all boring, to consider what motivates him to keep going and getting an ineffectual amount of votes – sez me anyhow
I know a few Nader voters. All have said that if Nader did not run, they would not have voted at all. One reason Nader gets so few votes is that anyone who sympathises with Nader but wants their vote to count votes for a major party. The relatively few who vote Nader anyway are largely those who do not, under any circumstances, want to vote Democrat OR Republican.
Same goes for Bob Barr.
The whole idea that Nader costs the Democrats votes is predicated on assuming that the entire US population is ignorant of their own voting system. They KNOW it’s first past the post, and they vote accordingly. I’d say that’s even more true of Nader voters than the population at large