10 Things I Learned From Tuesday

1. The big split in the electorate isn't conservatives and liberals, or blacks and whites. It's young and old. Teens and twentysomethings broke blue at a 66 percent clip, while voters 30-64 (that's two-thirds of the electorate) backed Obama by a narrow margin. Only the 65-and-older group supported McCain.

In other words, Republicans didn't just lose an election. They're losing the future.

2. The "Solid South" is history. GOP strategists need look no further than those blue maps of Virginia and North Carolina to understand that their old electoral strategy has expired.

The conservative base in all these Southern states is increasingly isolated to rural areas. Six urban counties in North Carolina (Mecklenberg, Forsyth, Guilford, Orange, Durham and Wake) delivered Obama a margin of 325,000+ voters -- just enough, it seems, to provide him a 12,000-vote victory. The trend continued in South Carolina, where Charleston and Richland counties went for Obama.

3. Somebody needs to do something about Charleston County's election bureaucracy. Year after year, counting the votes in Charleston is a contentious mess, and election day is just the tip of the iceberg. Why can't we get our votes counted on election night like other counties? I suspect it's because running smooth, high-turnout elections isn't the top priority for the political appointees who run our election commission.

4. Our ideas about race are weird. Science suggests that what most of us think of as "race" is much more of a social/cultural construct than anything related to biology. Which is why Obama is a great cipher for us: He's an African-American whose family has no roots in American slavery, a first-generation "mixed-race" child who was raised by white people in multi-ethnic Hawaii. Whatever lesson you want to project on his story, let's start with this one: "Race" is a lot more complex than the terms most of us use for thinking about it.

On a related note, I call bullshit on people who say that Obama's victory proves racism is dead. I've read this in a few places and it feels like a sour-grapes get-back: "OK, libtards, enough with the whining and excuses about racism!"  Sorry guys, but electing Obama doesn't erase the slate.

5. Americans are actually ready to move on. They're not interested in the bizarre culture-war narrative that Palin and Joe the Plumber represented, they're tired of debating the 1960s, and the rise of the Web is changing the way we fight the media "bias wars."

6. People from the right who are arguing that "America is a center-right country" are doing so without strong supporting evidence. I'm not sure what America is, but it just elected "the most liberal man in the U.S. Senate (I don't believe that btw)" and gave Democrats more seats in the House and Senate. That's a leftward shift no matter how you slice it.

7. These gains are not, in any way, permanent. Remember: Karl Rove was talking about creating "permanent Republican majorities" just four years ago. History argues that the incumbent party will lose seats in the mid-term elections of 2010, and I suspect our political identities will become more portable, not less, as we get deeper into the 21st century.

8. The right has more trouble with its fringe than the left does ... at the moment. The problem with Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers is that you have to tell people who they are and explain why they might be worrisome. I don't need to introduce you to James Dobson and Dick Cheney and Michael Savage, and they really turn off centrist voters.

9. The U.S. just returned to majority governance. I'll let others argue over "mandate," but a clear (if modest) majority of the popular vote + an electoral landslide + majorities in both houses + a redrawn political map means we're moving past that debilitating sense that the country is too divided to do anything important.

10. This year's big winner? The World Wide Web. An Obama presidency would be impossible without it. It changes our possibilities, our relationships, our horizons. And I think for the better.

Comments

[Guille]

Your sister studies race as a cultural construct and even though skin color is an easy visual cue, race and identity are so much more.
You also bring up an interesting point about Barack's background. As the son of an African immigrant his experience may have been very different than the son of an African American. Both cultures hold very different values. Therefore, his understanding of slavery, for example, is incredibly different. His African origins may also have had an influence on his own perceptions of education, success, etc as he was growing up.
To give a an example, Latinos in the US tend to have higher drop out rates (different values around education?) but have some of the lowest unemployment rates. My social circle in Ecuador, on the other hand, gives great importance to education but are less likely to leave their hometowns so as not to separate the family. Mix in a bit of catholic guilt and I get frustrated with what seems to be complacency.
There is a big difference in this country between the culture of recent immigrants and those folks who've been here for generations. It would be interesting to understand how this difference led to Obama's type of success. There are many immigrants who have been successful on their own, but Obama's success in this moment seems to be quite a bit different.

PS Thanks for the great material on the blog and on twitter. I was a passive participant in Sam's tweets.

[Agricola]

I don't think it's just Charleston County that has a staffing situation that is less than optimal. I do agree that party hacks low on the totem pole of patronage seem to be over-represented at this level of governance/administration all over the fruited plain. Did you see the ballot in Florida that required the voter to color in the connecting arrows? (Democratic commission, I believe) We need a complete overhaul, hopefully completed before 2010.....