Wednesday, November 5, 2008

More registered voters than 'of age' residents

Can you Spell M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I
More than a third of Mississippi counties have more registered voters than residents old enough to cast a ballot, according to an Associated Press analysis.

In addition to providing ammunition for people who say the voting system is vulnerable to fraud, the flabby voting rolls may make it difficult to accurately determine turnout for the Nov. 4 presidential election...see excerpt form Oct 24th story below.

"

There is no reason in the world why some of these counties should have more registered voters than they have living, breathing people," Mississippi Senate Elections Committee Chairman Terry Burton said.

Twenty-nine of Mississippi's 82 counties had more registered voters than people of voting age. Alabama has a similar problem _ The Birmingham News found that six of 67 counties there have more registered voters than people of voting age.

see AP story at link below:

http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?nid=125&sid=1503877

So the parties love to blame one another for vote fraud and election irregularities. In this one registering enough voters to hike the percentage of black voters by 2% POINTS was a master stroke sine nearly all of these new voters went for Obama.

McCain ran better than his party?
I still think, though, if you dissect the numbers you find McCain ran better THAN HIS PARTY. For example, despite all the disgust with Bush, the Anti-Bush, liberal talk show host former SNL comedian, Al Franken in Minn, was not able to get himself elected.

Key tactics:

Race and Youth
Race and youth oriented registration seem to explain a lot of the election gap.

MONEY
MONEY explains a lot too. One political analyst who ran campaigns said having a lot of money makes the job so much easier.

SARAH PALIN'S ELITE LIBERAL PRESS
Then there is all the press coverage that favored Obama and that was FREE. the media loved him and promoted him. That was yet another uphill climb for McCain.

TIMING!
Finally there was the timing of the financial crisis. Smartly Democrats made it work for them. But they held chairs on the senate and house financial oversight committees. Dodd a democrat had balked at Fannie Mae reform for years. Fannie Mae grew large and had accounting and executive pay excess problems under Bill Clinton's administration and his choice to run it was Franklin Raines. Raines in 1999 went to head Fannie Mae as CEO, and became known as "the first black man to head a Fortune 500 company." And it was Raines who made the fortune.

Strategy
In the end the Democrats were more successful in using the financial meltdown as a tool than were Republicans. Democrats blamed the Bush Administration while in truth the responsibility/failure was shared with Congress. Moreover Democrats had important troubled antecedents at Fannie Mae.

Press & Policy
Barack Obama's campaign drew a lot more press than did McCain. McCain was back on his heels from the start. He did not press on about the importance of national security even in the face of the domestic meltdown. His housing strategy seemed poorly conceived. Yet Obama's was hardly any better. McCain's DEFINING mistake was acceding early on that he was not an economic expert- as though Barack Obama was!

In retrospect: It's less of an ideological victory than it has been portrayed
So as we look back at the elections, what I see is a lot less landslide and mandate. I see tactics, money and voter registration as the keys to success much more than ideology despite the role ideology supposedly played. Remember th bush was elected twice once by an an electorate angry over the war. In the end the race card played and played in favor of Barack Obama.

DEMOCRATS RULE...such as they are
We will now have a Congress and Senate that is more overwhelmingly Democrat and will be held accountable to make change. But times are tough for that. Moreover, a lot of the newly elected democrats are not very liberal. The good news for the democrats is that the economy is so bad that in two years then four years when they run run again they will be able to lay claim (right or wrong) to how much the economy improved.

The voter registration drive could give them a leg up for years to come...if they registered real people. See the AP story and the link above.



1 comment:

QUALITY STOCKS UNDER 5 DOLLARS said...

Theirs some other reason for that wrong count.