The South Riding RV Travels

751

6th November 2012 - US Election Night

To my American readers, I am British and therefore have no vote so this is my European take on things.

The US 2012 election for the President, the House of Representatives, and about a third of the Senate took place on 6th November - while the world watched with bated breath.... (ITV is a major English TV channel).

The electioneering has been going on almost continuously since the last election four years ago. In the last year it has become extremely bitter and partisan with up to $6 BILLION being spent, much of it on TV advertising. There are limits on what the parties and candidates can spend although these are several orders of magnitude larger than those in the UK. But in addition private entities can spend unlimited amounts, which they have done. The end result has been a blizzard of TV ads particularly in those states regarded as being 'swing' states, notably Ohio, Virginia, Florida but also Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, Indiana and North Carolina (Obama took them all except the last two). Almost without exception these adverts have been negative in nature. Neither candidate for president has said anything about what THEY will do only the bad things if the other one gets in power. This has been supplemented by thousands of calls, texts and tweets such that everyone we met no longer answers their calls and mutes the television most of the time. The people are tired of it.

The last two years of government with a Democratic president and Senate and a Republican House has resulted in almost nothing being done, with brinkmanship over the debt ceiling and refusal to agree budgets and appointments. The government has become non functional. President Obama has done some things by direct action such as implementing the DREAM act which gives the children of illegal immigrants a route to citizenship. He has also made several appointments while the House was in recess. This has only inflamed the Republicans. They have their own problems with the rise of a right wing element known as the Tea Party which has forced the candidates for Congress to sign up to not permitting tax rises under ANY circumstances. They have also ousted many moderate incumbents so forcing the Republican party to the right.

The Democratic incumbent President Obama is standing for a second term amidst high unemployment and a low approval rating. The Republican challenger Mitt Romney has fought off many others to become the nominee but he is not universally popular, a multimillionaire venture capitalist and a Mormon (not deemed a proper religion by the evangelical Christians), he is deemed not conservative enough.

The country is very evenly divided and extremely partisan, a view being reinforced by the media especially Fox News and MSNBC. These channels are very highly regarded despite being extremely partisan and blatantly incorrect on occasions. Both are so popular because they say what their audiences want to hear. This is to my mind potentially very dangerous. There are mutterings in the UK about bias in our media but frankly we don't have any idea what bias is in comparison.

The main issues are:

The economy - with 8 million unemployed, 15 million underemployed and growth of GDP at under 2%, it is not in good shape but is doing better than most of Europe. Mitt Romney argues that as a businessman he knows what is needed and he will create 12 million jobs because he knows how to do it. The little which comes out suggests that this will be done by reducing taxes for the wealthy job creators and eliminating regulation mainly that related to employment law and the environment. Specifics are non-existent! This is President Obama's weak point since he can only argue that it is getting better, reinforced by Bill Clinton's famous quote at the Democratic convention - 'Even I could not have fixed it in four years'.

The balance of payments and the debt - these have now reached monumental proportions, beyond what most of us can comprehend.  The US is now spending $500 billion/year more than its income and the debt is over $16 trillion. The problem comes in the analysis of this which is clouded by the partisan reasoning. The government needs more income and/or less expenditure. Half the shortfall is currently down to the tax cuts implemented under President Bush. The rest is split between increased social security payments because of the unemployment, healthcare costs rising at 3 times inflation and military spending. But there are other interpretations and thus solutions, the principle idea being that the US can grow its way out the problem - by exporting to Europe - I think not.

Healthcare - President Obama introduced Obamacare which come into operation over the next few years. It has been and still is being fought every inch of the way. Mitt Romney said he would repeal it on his first day in office. Many Republican states have not done anything towards implementing it assuming it will disappear. It has been fought all the way to the Supreme Court who upheld it. It is seen as a monster which will drastically increase costs. The principle provisions it tries to implement are that healthcare should be available to all and there should not be up to 40 million Americans not covered (depending upon who you believe). However most Republicans accept the need for society to cover those not able to cover themselves, the only debate is about those who choose not to. The spiralling cost is a different issue and both sides accept that the cost needs to be sustainable. US healthcare costs are about double those anywhere else in the world.

Immigration - particularly that of Hispanics, is a very contentious issue. Romney's assertion that they should self deport themselves probably lost him the Hispanic vote (a rapidly increasing element of American society). In practice the influx of Asians is probably now larger. Finding a route to citizenship for these people is a high priority for both parties.

Abortion - which causes the most intense reactions in people on both sides played a small but significant role. Two Republican senators made crass statements (by their own party's admission) and it cost them their seats and possibly their party the election since women in particular took exception to their statements and, by association, their party's policies.

The election itself was not a pretty one and not a good example of democracy in action. Many states tried to introduce laws on voter id as thinly disguised attempts to disenfranchise opposing groups. Some states manipulated constituency boundaries to achieve similar results.

CNN had the Empire State Building lit up to show the current position of each candidate in the count as the results came in.

On the night the count went very smoothly and very much more quickly than I expected. This was mainly due to the use of electronic voting machines which facilitated a very rapid count despite the huge size of some of the ballots. In some states the ballot paper was twelve pages long with elections for president, senators, representatives, state senators and representatives and then propositions on all sorts of subjects including legalising marijuana for recreational use (it was passed).

CNN had a map of the states which broke down into counties and they plotted events as they were reported. The graphics were impressive but the logistics even more so. They used this to forecast results often with only a small percentage of the count in. Fox News had something similar, as did NBC. There were pundits and party advisors on hand to comment, much as in an English election. The states finish voting in time zones although people already in the queues are permitted to vote. Some of these were as much as six hours later by which time it was all over.

Early states went to Romney who was ahead in both the popular vote and in the electoral college vote until California was annnounced. The president is elected by an electoral college of 540 votes allocated by population in each state on a winner take all basis (mostly). Thus California has 55 votes (Democrat) and Alaska has 3 (Republican) The first signs of problems were when North Carolina was shown as too close to call. It had been seen as solid Republican and subsequently went that way - just! When Florida was forecast Democrat the fat was really in the fire and it was all over when Ohio also went Democrat. Note that these were predictions by the networks with maybe only 50% votes counted. But they are not often wrong. Florida wasn't finally announced until 3 days later but by then it didn't matter.

The moment when it was all announced by the networks.

The big problem is that each party had its favoured polls and just decried any poll which did not agree with their wish. So an independent pollster Nate Silver on his 538 blog for the NY Times was thought to be barmy - but he got the closest by a mile. The Romney camp basically believed its own propaganda. The Obama camp actually had a superb machine of volunteers getting out the vote and their feedback was working so they remained quietly confident.

The popular vote was split 50%-49% in Obama's favour but the electoral college was 332 to 208 - a huge mandate or none depending on your viewpoint. It is certainly a divided nation. Hispanics, blacks, Asians, women and the young voted democrat 75-25. Only older white males voted Republican in large numbers.

There were some fun moments such as the presenter who went to the toilet and announced on her return that a state was too close to call, not realising that her colleagues had called it in her absence. The funniest was when Carl Rove who was on Fox News said they were wrong when Fox itself had announced that Ohio had gone to Obama. Carl Rove headed up one of the largest SuperPacs and had spent over $300 million in anti Obama ads on TV. The final irony was that Romney had not prepared a concession speech because he was so certain he did not need one. But my favourite for the whole election was the 4 year old who, when shown a picture of Barack Obama and asked if he knew what the man did, replied 'He approves this message!' Oh the power of advertising.

When it was all over the building went all blue for the Democrats..

The end result is a government which is basically unchanged. The Republicans still control the House and the Democrats control the Senate with a Democratic President. It is to be hoped that there is a little more cooperation between them but the early signs and pronouncements do not bode well. Four more years of conflict would not be good for America nor for the world.

So where does this leave the Republican party? Well, at the moment, one week after the election, there are two camps. The first I term the analysts. They read the data and realise that the demographics of the population are not in their favour. There are more minorities in America than there were in 2008 and there will be more still in 2016. By then several more states will be predominantly Hispanic. There will be more young who tend to be Democrat and fewer of the existing old white voters who vote Republican. So they need to appeal to the young Hispanics by doing something about immigration reform and by choosing more sympathetic candidates or even Hispanics. There are other aspects of social conservatism which need to be addressed as well, such as getting politics out of the bedroom with their attitudes on abortion and gay marriage.

In contrast the other wing of the party (predominant at the moment) are the deniers. The problem was they didn't have a conservative-enough candidate, they didn't get the core vote out, they must reinforce their principles, no compromise etc. Next time round they won't be facing a black candidate, the best they can hope for is a woman. At the moment the only thing going for them is a wealth of good candidates in Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal and others. I have yet to see the same on the Democrat side. At the moment there is Joe Biden and Hilary and I don't fancy their chances against the young Turks. But if the Republicans oppose everything as they have for the last two years then I think the electorate will punish them, especially if  America gets back on its feet.