Editore"s Note
Tilting at Windmills

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November 4, 2004
By: Kevin Drum

CLOSE ELECTION....I'm not trying to minimize the tough electoral road ahead for Democrats, but even so I get awfully annoyed by analysis like this:

"Democrats face this terrible arithmetic in the Electoral College where if they don't carry any of the 11 Southern states [of the Old Confederacy] they need to win 70% of everything else," says Merle Black, an expert on Southern politics at Emory University.

No kidding. But try this on for size instead:

"Republicans face this terrible arithmetic in the Electoral College where if they don't carry any of the 13 Northeastern states they need to win two-thirds of everything else," says Kevin Drum, an expert on simplistic arithmetic at the Washington Monthly.

Note to the media: it was a close election, just like it was four years ago. There were only a dozen swing states, and Republicans had no more chance of winning in California, New York, and Illinois than Democrats did in Georgia, Alabama, and Wyoming. A trivial swing of a hundred thousand votes in half a dozen states and you'd be writing pretentious thumbsuckers about how cultural issues were losing their ability to attract votes for Republicans. So knock it off, OK?

And as for the culture wars, more on that later.

Kevin Drum 6:44 PM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (0)
 
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