Elections

When the State of Virginia seceded from the union just prior to the Civil War, the northwestern counties of the state disagreed and felt that the sitting Virginia Government had acted illegally in seceding from the Union.

West Virginia became a state on June 20, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War. West Virginia is the only state in the Union to have acquired its sovereignty by proclamation of the President of the United States. Statehood was proclaimed by President Abraham Lincoln.

Anthony Farrington, a four-time Lake County Supervisor, announced to the Vanguard that he is running for the Democratic nomination in California’s 4th Assembly District.  The 4^th District, which will be open as Mariko Yamada is termed out, encompasses most of Yolo County except West Sacramento, most of Lake and Napa counties, and parts of Colusa, Sonoma and Solano Counties.

Recently, Yolo County Supervisors Don Saylor and Jim Provenza announced that they would not be running for the Assembly seat that has been held for 18 years by Democrats from Davis.  Mayor Joe Krovoza and Mayor Pro Tem Dan Wolk are rumored as possible candidates, in addition to Mr. Farrington.

I was reading a letter to the editor of the local paper who wrote in response to the recent controversy by Davis Ace owner Jennifer Anderson – a controversy interesting enough to make the Huffington Post a few weeks ago.

It is perhaps difficult to remember that California was largely a reliable Republican state.  From the 1952 election of Dwight Eisenhower until the 1992 election where California went for Bill Clinton, the state went for the Republicans in 9 of 10 presidential elections.

Only in Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide did California go blue during that period.  Now, some of those years it was close, like 1968 where Richard Nixon won by 3, Ford in 1976 won by 2 and George HW Bush in 1988 won by 4.  Moreover, there was a Californian (Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan) on the ballot as President or Vice President 7 of those 10 years.

I hope this is going to be the last column on the Presidential Election.  We will start with a bit of local flavor.  The city of Davis went for President Obama by a whopping 81 to 18 percent margin.

President Obama received 18,397 votes to 4,284 for Mitt Romney.  The county of Yolo went for the President, as well, by a more modest 65 to 31 percent margin.  Without Davis, President Obama still wins the rest of the county, but narrowly, by a 20,000 to just under 15,000 vote margin.

Conservatives for weeks were convinced that there was going to be a Romney landslide, or at least victory, based on a bunch of flawed assumptions and a final decision that when science tells you something that you don’t want to hear, the science is wrong – which has some serious implications for climate change at the very least.

In turns out we can reasonably predict even close elections based on careful polling.  But some did not want to believe it.  After all, they would convince themselves that the economy is horrible, that President Obama was to blame for the economy, and the public would see it their way if they just repeated themselves enough.

For at least the past year, I have believed that this election would be a repeat of 2004 except in the other direction, and for the most part all year that has played out.  Never has that been more evident than the initial post-election analysis, where we see that the Obama team utilized their ground game to perfection to do what everyone believed impossible – pull in new voters and similar numbers of blacks and youths as 2008.

In 2004, it was Karl Rove who was the master, able to rework an electorate in key battleground states like Ohio and Florida, to pull off a victory in the face of heavy disenchantment with the war in Iraq and in the fact of a 2000 election in which, not only did President Bush lose the popular vote, but many believed he would have lost Florida without the intervention of the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore.

The Much Lambasted Polls Were Right – For the last week, even as polls seemed to shift decisively back to President Barack Obama’s favor, the poll deniers – unskewers if you will – came out in force to argue that the baseline Party ID numbers were wrong, that there would be a tsunami of support by Republicans angry about Obama’s presidency, that the enthusiasm gap would win out.

Nate Silver -a Bayesian math geek – would somehow be one of the more reviled figures at the end of the campaign, for sticking to his mathematical formula that once again proved out, as he nailed the calls on all states despite their closeness.

I spent far more time than perhaps I should have yesterday, reading not only polls but arguments on both sides of the issue about whether the polls are right.  The bottom line is that those who claim that the polls are wrong and that Romney will win, may not be wrong necessarily.

Within the 30 to 40 percent chance I would give Romney is contained a lot of the scenarios that Republicans and a few prominent Republican strategists have suggested.

Vanguard Analysis of Presidential Election – For as long as I have been writing on the subject, I have believed that this was 2004 in reverse.  I remember believing up until the very end, when it became clear that Cuyahoga County was not going to be enough that John Kerry would defeat President George Bush.

I was wrong in 2004, I had underestimated Karl Rove and overestimated the willingness of people to make a leap of faith.  But it was a critical point in my understanding of politics.  I have felt since last year that conservatives had made the same mistake as liberals in 2004.

FACT CHECK: There has been an ongoing debate in the letters to the editor about Medicare and Congressional Representive John Garamendi’s support for the Affordable Care Act.

A letter writer starts out arguing, “I heard many Democrats trying to scare seniors into thinking that Republicans would destroy these programs.  As a senior, frankly, I find this tactic by the president and John Garamendi to be offensive.”

ANALYSIS: Climate Scientists Disagree on Impact of Climate Change – A week before a seminal presidential election, a powerful storm has already crippled a huge section of the east coast, bringing the nation’s financial markets to a halt, shutting down federal offices in DC along with public transportation across the east coast, and threatening the unthinkable if the storm damage is bad enough – altering the course of the nation’s elections.

Just how powerful is this storm?  Well, the hurricane portion of it is *just* a category one storm, with sustained winds at 85 mph.  But forecasters are alarmed, first by the record low pressure and also by the convergence of a strong midlatitude storm along with a blast of arctic air which, along with the moisture from Hurricane Sandy, figures to bring blizzards and five feet of snow to inland areas.