This American Moment — The Surprises
November 5, 2008, 9:00 pm
Outposts by Timothy Egan
egan.blogs.nytimes.com
Guess who won Joe the Plumber’s vote. Not Joe the symbol and unlicensed tax-dodger coming soon to a garage sale near you, but real people who make about $42,000 a year, the median income for plumbers and pipefitters.
Barack Obama carried hard-working Americans of that income stripe by 10 points, according to exit polls.
And the only voters who were told directly that their taxes would go up under a new Democratic president? Obama took the rich as well, winning by six points that small sliver of the electorate that makes more than $200,000 year. Soak ’em.
As for the Bradley effect, there was none. Perhaps a Reverse Bradley – in which more people actually voted for the black guy than they told pollsters.
Witness Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan, three prime states where working-class whites were supposed to be saving their true racial feelings for the privacy of the voting booth. Obama won Michigan by 16 points, Pennsylvania by 11 and Ohio by four. In each case, the vote was well above the election eve average of all polls. Hillary Clinton voters came home. Ditto Reagan Democrats. Did I mention that Obama won the Catholic vote — and Scranton, the iconic blue-collar town?
Overall, the pollsters mostly got it right — and a tip of the hat to Scott Rasmussen for nailing the popular vote, 52 percent to 46, and to my friend Johnny Verhovek, age 15, for predicting the exact number of electoral votes in my local betting pool.
In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice on the question of what to do when your dreams come true: don’t tell anyone.
Conversely, what do we do when our darkest fears, our hardened conventional wisdom and our historic homilies are all found to be hooey? Shout it from the rooftops.
This was a transformative election, but not because there was some big lurch to the left or an unequivocal rejection of the right. The culture is confused, as always. Gay marriage lost in liberal California, in Florida and Arizona. But abortion restrictions were voted down in conservative South Dakota. And 73 percent of voters in Colorado disagreed with a longheld Republican contention that human life begins at conception.
This was the first real 21st century election — rejecting the incompetence of the Bush years, the race-baiting of Karl Rove’s majority strategy and the poison of media-driven wedge politics. As a nation, we rejoin the world community. As a sustaining narrative, we found our story again.
Obama’s ascendancy is likely to have the ironic effect of ending affirmative action, and the old identity politics. He became only the second Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to win more than 51 percent of the popular vote not because he’s black, but because he is smarter, with better ideas, and showed leadership under fire. This was a victory for meritocracy.
If affirmative action survives, it will be more class-based, as Obama suggested on the campaign trail.
In losing the urban vote and the suburbs as well, the Republican party is now a shrinking regional party of older white males, represented in the media by talk-radio kooks and far-right women dressed in high couture to sell low-culture friction.
Obama won the New South of Virginia, Florida and perhaps North Carolina. He flipped three states in the New West, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. He won the fastest-growing ethnic group, Latinos, by better than a 2-1 margin. As for the young, nobody since modern polling of age groups began has racked up a better percentage of the 18- to 29-year-old vote. Obama won 66 percent of the kids.
And sure, the youth vote is only 18 percent of the total electorate, but that’s still a bigger slice than those over 65 years of age (one of the few McCain cohorts).
See the trend: new, emerging, growing, tomorrow, young. Dormant for the darkest years of the Bush presidency, the oldest strain of American DNA is evident again.
For Republicans, the trouble is deep and spreading. They nearly lost Montana, Missouri and the most populous county in Idaho, a state where a Democrat was just elected to Congress. When this kind of thing happens in Idaho, it’s time to start reading up on the Whig party for history lessons.
Even Texas tightened from four years ago. But do 23 percent of Texans really think Obama is a Muslim, as a recent poll found? If reality indeed has no home on the Texas plains, it’s the perfect place for Bush to retire.
One of the better lines in Obama’s election night speech was a slap to the rejectionist politics of Bush. Rove always insisted a president only needed 50 percent plus one to win. And Bush governed that way, permanently angering half the population.
On Tuesday night, Obama reached out to the other half. For those who did not vote for him, he said, “I will be your president, too.”
What an idea — simple and obvious. But like so much American common sense, it’s been missing for too long. |
