Brendan Nyhan

The hunt continues — here’s Amy Sullivan on the Washington Monthly’s blog:

COULD DELAY BE THE NEXT DASCHLE?….Although Tom DeLay’s Texas redistricting plan succeeded in knocking off some veteran Democratic congressmen, he should be more than a little worried about the safety of his own seat in the next election. Democrats have already fixed on the fact that DeLay won reelection with a mere 55 percent of the vote. Compare that to the average 40 point margin of victory for all Texas congressional incumbents. DeLay has never had a real challenge at the polls since first coming to Congress in 1984. This relatively close call gives Democrats hope that they can knock him off in 2006.

An email from the Washington Monthly with the subject line “Obama, ’08?”

The desperate search for a silver lining to today’s result begins — here’s Howard Dean in an email to the Democracy for America list today:

[A] record number of us voted to change course — more Americans voted against George Bush than any sitting president in history.”

Here’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a long time.

Listening to NPR at about 6:30, Andrew Zolli, a so-called “futurist”, endorsed Joe Trippi’s idea that in 2008 we could have three presidential candidates – a Democrat, a Republican and “an Internet candidate.”

I have to ask: what the hell does that mean? Almost everyone who’s had significant online fundraising success in politics has done it by appealing to partisans, who by definition are loyal to a party. And even if the “Internet candidate” could raise $100 million, we have this little thing in political science called Duverger’s Law. As the introductory political science text I teach to freshman puts it, “In any election where a single winner is chosen by plurality vote (whoever gets the most votes wins), there is a strong tendency for serious competitors to be reduced to two because people tend to vote strategically.” Why would we expect a third-party challenge to overcome this dynamic? The two parties have vast advantages in financial resources, mobilization, and voter loyalty. To convince people you could win, you’d have to create an inordinate amount of momentum. And to do so, you’d have to have a constituency that supported you — the Internet is not an ideology or a voting bloc. What Zolli is saying is equivalent to claiming in 1960 that the next election would feature a Republican, a Democrat, and a TV candidate.

In fact, the lesson from this election is that the parties and major party candidates are adopting the Internet into their playbook, just as big business did a few years ago. Technology hasn’t repealed the laws of politics, just as it didn’t repeal the laws of business. Zolli is essentially selling the Internet bubble in a new guise.

The moral of the story: don’t hire a futurist to do a political scientist’s job.

(PS It is true that the Internet makes it easier to create parallel quasi-parties like America Coming Together – a phenomenon Matt Bai covered in The New York Times Magazine back in July.)

All signs are pointing to a surge in turnout today. One obvious conclusion is that tough, vigorous and, yes, partisan campaigns about important issues are in some ways a very good thing. There’s just no question that colorful, high stakes races like Kerry/Bush boost turnout. The emotional politics of the Gilded Age, for instance, helped fuel the highest voting rates in US history. But the problem is that it’s easiest to mobilize people with scare tactics and vitriolic partisanship that ultimately damage the legitimacy of the system as a whole. So how do we square the circle? That’s the question we face going forward.

Matt Bai has pledge for more on this.)

An utterly disreputable Rush Limbaugh rant trying to link Kerry and the Democrats to OBL:

We are under attack. The truth is that we have been under attack for many years by the same type of people who think in the same way fanatic Islamists have been attacking freedom and Americans for over 20 years.

It’s only in the last three years that we’ve decided to do something about it. We now find ourselves at a crossroads. Are we going to continue to do something about it or are we going to rent peace for awhile and allow Osama bin Laden at the end of the day tomorrow to go ahead and claim that he and he alone influenced the outcome of the United States elections? Are we going to have a victory for Osama bin Laden tomorrow and give him bragging rights across the Middle East and in the worlds of the left and in the process create a whole new generation of terrorists? Here is a man who is so incapacitated because we’ve made the decision to fight and defend our freedom that all he can launch as an October Surprise is a tape that appears to come right out of the text of the movie Fahrenheit 9/11.

Osama bin Laden cannot launch an attack on the United States of America. Osama bin Laden can only deliver a tape, and on that tape, bin Laden appeals to the very appeasers in this country who would allow him to gain strength by agreeing with what he says and voting for the man who is being quoted by bin Laden. John Kerry, as much as Michael Moore, was quoted by Osama bin Laden in that video that we all saw Friday and over the weekend, and I have eight audio sound bites here that I’m going to get to later in the program to prove this to you. You can say it came out of Fahrenheit 9/11, but so did the Kerry campaign. Michael Moore is not on the ballot; John Kerry is. Osama bin Laden parroting John Kerry in his tape on Friday.

…Returning to the days of appeasement, trying to meet a “global test” of world opinion, ignoring threats from hostile nations and groups is a deadly mistake we simply can’t afford to make. Those are the stakes in this race, but it goes beyond simply ignoring threats from hostile nations and groups. It’s gotten to the point now where the Democratic Party is actually echoing the words of a man who happily murdered 3,000 Americans on September 11th. The Democrat Party in this country is eager to point to the things bin Laden said and suggest that he is right — a man who happily murdered 3,000 Americans and is eager to do so over and over and over again! You say, “Rush, I haven’t heard the Democrats say that.” Oh, you can find it on their websites. You can find people who are going to vote for John Kerry who have said this. You can find people on various Democrat websites who are excited bin Laden said what he said. They’re hoping for an Osama smack down of Bush if I may quote one of the things I saw.

Just to state the obvious, this is a classic example of tactics designed to create associations between political opponents and hated figures. First Limbaugh says Osama is copying Kerry, and then he says Democrats are echoing Osama. The proof? They’re all criticizing Bush! You can’t do that without being like Osama! Of course, none of this makes any sense at a rational level.

No matter who you support or what you believe, it’s your right as a citizen of this country to cast your ballot tomorrow. This is what politics is all about. Go to it.

Using the methodology he developed for combining polls to find systematic trends in the data (which I recommended last week), UNC political scientist Jim Stimson now estimates that Bush has 50.04% of the two-party vote and Kerry has 49.96% – unbelievable. Once again, if anyone tells you they know who’s going to win, they’re lying…

In the Wall Street Journal today, Fred Barnes claims the following:

More important is its appeal to women [Bush’s opposition to gay marriage]. This year the gender gap is all but gone. Women, once decidedly Democratic, are now almost evenly divided between Bush and Kerry. And while men tend to be terrorism-centered voters, women disproportionately favor conservative social values. “So much for ‘security moms’ as an explanation for Kerry’s unexpected weakness among women,” insist consultants Jeffrey Bell and Frank Cannon of Capital City Partners. Somebody please tell the national press corps.

ABC News yesterday:

After fading last week, the traditional gender gap has reappeared: Bush leads by 10 points among men in this survey, Kerry by eight points among women.

Those figures are not far off from 2000, when Gore led among women by 12 points but lost among men by 10 points. The CBS/New York Times poll also has Kerry up six points with women and Bush up 13 points with men (see today’s print edition). And Democracy Corps (a Democratic firm) showed Kerry up nine points among women and Bush up six among men in a poll released Thursday. Did Barnes speak too soon?

Post-election update: The National Election Pool exit poll shows Kerry only led among women 51%-48%, so it looks like Barnes was right in the end.