Obama easily collected enough electoral votes to win without any Southern states. But that Senate seat in North Carolina sure is useful for the new president to have, and those Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida victories certainly reduce the sense of civil war. Tom’s corollary was that Democrats should concentrate on the Mountain West instead of the South, but it turned out there was no tradeoff — Obama won all the viable states in the Rockies, even giving McCain a brief scare in Arizona, while still taking three states of the Confederacy.

Larry Bartels, reflecting on Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? thesis and the electoral propensities of white people, pontificates:

In the former Confederacy [Obama] gained only slightly over Kerry among white voters, despite making big gains in two key swing states, North Carolina and Virginia. The only states in the country in which he lost more than a point or two of white support were Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi.

The notable resistance of southern whites to Obama’s candidacy continues a half-century trend sparked by the demise of the unnatural southern Democratic monopoly of the Jim Crow era. From 1952 through 2004, the average level of support for Democratic presidential candidates fell by more than 15 points among white southerners while increasing slightly among whites in the rest of the country. This year’s pattern reinforces that long-term shift, underlining the extent to which the Democratic Party’s much-discussed “culture” problem is really a regional problem rooted in white racial resentment.

…

Judging from last week’s election results, then, not much seems to be the matter with Kansas; but Louisiana may be another story.

(I love that last line).

As to the 2008 election’s implications for the relative importance of the southern electorate, it’s a complicated mix of things:

• Barack Obama would not have been the Democratic nominee if not for the South. He racked up delegates by winning massive victories in Alabama (+14), Georgia (+35), Louisiana (+21), Mississippi (+24), North Carolina (+14), South Carolina (+28), and Virginia (+29).
• Obama would be president without winning any southern states. Give Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida to John McCain, and Obama still wins in the Electoral College, 310 to 228.
• It’s still possible for Democrats to win Senate and House seats in the South, something that is probably significantly less likely if they don’t compete there at all on the presidential level. Mark Warner would have won regardless of Obama’s Virginia push, but how would Kay Hagan have done without national party interest in the usually red state of North Carolina? And does anyone seriously think Saxby Chambliss would be heading to a runoff against Jim Martin in Georgia if not for what was an at least somewhat real, albeit exaggerated, sense that Obama might just win Georgia? So far, it’s clear the road to 60 cuts at least partially through Dixie and likely will for the immediate future.
• It’s clear there are important differences between Deep South and Peripheral South states. While the former gave Obama a necessary push in the primaries because only Democrats were voting, the latter show signs of potential victories in general elections. As parts of the South with middle-range black populations and increasing numbers of white migrants from the Northeast start breaking off from “Real America,” they might just fall into Democratic hands.
• But Bartels is right: The Deep South is basically hopeless. Schaller’s sports metaphor of Democrats starting at the 33 yard line because of the black vote but still not being able to make it that 17 extra yards on the backs of white voters sums it up pretty well. What’s the matter with Louisiana, indeed.

I can already hear folks saying, “Sure, but how long did it take you?” Yes, it took a little longer than the drive-thru, but it is important to recognize the value of spending time preparing a good home-cooked meal. How is it, after all, that with all the modern conveniences afforded us in the 21st century, we still don’t think we have the time to do something everyone had time for until the middle of the 20th century?

In America, if we are what we eat, most of us are fast, cheap, and easy. We should aspire to be more, and gathering the family around the table is the best way I know how. Bring your family together around a home-cooked meal. Get them involved in the preparation. Do it so often that it’s no longer an unusual thing in your house. It’ll beat the drive-thru every time because it has the most important ingredient: love.

Just to make myself clear on one thing: I’m sure he means well. But it’s hard not to cringe at this sort of critical rhetoric aimed at Americans writ large. Why don’t most people have time to do “something everyone had time for until the middle of the 20th century”? Well, maybe because things have changed since then. People are busier. People work further from home. Most women work outside the home, which didn’t happen as much before the middle of the 20th century, a time period Friese sentimentalizes while overlooking its obvious social deficiencies. But even more broadly, maybe this mythical time period where families gathered around the table to share in the communal experience of cooking natural foods with tenderness, love, and care never actually existed in the first place, at least not in the way he describes. This is where the progressive food movements veers off into an uncomfortable closeness with social conservatism and traditionalism: Even in the instances where what Friese describes did happen before the middle of the twentieth century, it mostly happened because of women’s unpaid household labor, not exactly something worth returning to just to avoid the horrors of eating Kentucky Fried Chicken.

2. My predictions actually weren’t wildly off-base, but I did receive a little lesson in humility when the Georgia results were much less Obama-friendly than I suggested. That said, it’s worth noting that Obama performed 6 points better than John Kerry in Georgia, while McCain’s performance was down 6 points from George W. Bush’s showing in 2004. Given the Electoral College, the end result is still the same, but a +12 point swing is impressive nonetheless. I also missed the mark on Indiana, suggesting it would go McCain, when in fact Obama pulled out a victory. I probably didn’t win the election pool in my department, but we’ll see about that when the results are released.

3. LGBT, GOP, BLT, OMG: Barack Obama seems to have received a lower percentage of the gay vote than John Kerry (70% vs. 77%). Along with the heated debate surrounding the role black homophobia played in passing Proposition 8 in California, expect to see some controversy surrounding the relative significance of homophobia in the black community vs. racism in the white gay community. I don’t really feel qualified to comment on it, but it should be interesting.

Oh well.

Yet this is what people are saying about the race there: “I don’t believe there’s a double-digit lead.” “The history of the presidential elections here is different.” “The polls don’t necessarily reflect what will happen on Election Day. We’re not a state that’s accustomed to huge blowouts.” And so on.

It’s not entirely clear to me why these feelings are enough in themselves to cast significant doubt on the predictability value of the current poll results. In the article linked above, John Brabender states, “In the governor’s race in 2002, there were polls just a few days out showing [Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell] with a 25-point lead and he ended up losing 50 of 67 counties and won by nine points.” Yet, again, is there an argument here that the problem in that race is bound to resurface in this one? What, exactly, were the flaws in those polls that caused them to mislead people about the status of the race? Has anyone checked to see if those flaws exist in the polling being conducted right now?

This is not to say the polls are 100 percent not wrong. Just that I’m left puzzled as to what strong evidence exists that they are.

So a canvasser goes to a woman’s door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she’s planning to vote for. She isn’t sure, has to ask her husband who she’s voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, “We’re votin’ for the n***er!”

Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: “We’re voting for the n***er.”

(from Sean Quinn)