Storming towards the finish line….

Early voting Democrats have been given a further fillip by Mother Nature. There’s a monster storm gathering on the Eastern seaboard and which may make landfall a week before election day.  It has already been named ‘Frakenstorm’ by the media. It threatens to end this electoral cycle in the chaos of a natural disaster which may truly impact the result in all sorts of ways that are wholly unpredictable. And voters who have not voted early may not be able to vote at all. There is already frantic polling going on to see to whose advantage this possible stormy weather may play.

It certainly brings a dramatic end to a campaign which may be described by many experts in many words but amongst them I doubt you’ll find the word exciting. This has been a dull business.  That Romney’s mock-aggressive style in the first debate over-turned so many settled calculations only confirms how dull it has been. Looking back over the year I’ve followed this campaign it seems to me it has been all along an election in search of a decent script and a candidate to speak it; an argument waiting to catch fire; a process waiting to find the words to engage the voters. And as Nature abhors a vacuum what the SuperPACS and the candidates could not furnish Nature has now provided.

There are doubtless already Evangelical Christians smacking their lips in anticipation of this awesome demonstration of God’s wrath – in the storm of hyperbole there will be no metaphors left standing in the rush to judgement. Trial by meteorological simile waits us as the last trumpet sounds. And if any election deserves to end like some disaster movie I fear this is the one. Of course it may all just blow over and blow itself out and everything will be fine on election day. But for the moment hatches are being battened-down and there’s only one show in town – the coming storm. This will also impact – should it happen – both on the polls and possibly also on the polling. If a storm takes out say Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio what will the government do – cancel the election in all states or only in those affected by the disaster? After 2000 fiasco of hanging-chads and a legal circus leading to the Supreme Court calling the election for G.W. Bush – yet another voting debacle may leave the whole US electoral system exposed to ridicule.

Barak Obama has seemed over the latter part of this long campaign curiously uncertain as to why he wants that second term. The intellectual detachment which should be a strength has become a weakness. It long has appeared that no candidate has been better tuned to the language of modern politics than Obama but since the summer he has appeared unable to clearly articulate his message. Indeed it was Bill Clinton who at the nominating convention at last put into words the easy message of the Obama re-election campaign. That Clinton should be Obama’s most articulate defender is not without its own ironies. But Obama has at times been unfocused –  more like Wilson than FDR.

So surprisingly, at least to me, we are placed in the position where we may have to look back at the past for some better guide to where we might be a week next Tuesday. There are two obvious precedents and one perhaps less obvious. The first is Reagan versus Carter in 1980. That too was a neck and neck race with the incumbent holding a slight edge until the last two weeks when Reagan finally pulled very decisively clear. Reagan won big; like Obama in 2008,  it was a semi-landslide. Will this be Romney’s trick – he certainly has read the manual and he has certainly being using Reagan’s same phrases from that campaign in the last seven days. The recent  Republican surge in Wisconsin gives that hope strategic focus.

However, the problem thus far is that the surge in the polls after the first debate slowly but slowly…as the late Kenneth Williams might have said…has been ebbing way. And only once in that surge did Romney actually tip over the necessary 270 electoral votes  needed to secure election. He is now back down to about 220 with Obama on 288 and the rest tied.

The second precedent comes from two other recent close elections: those of Bush v Gore in 2000 with Gore winning the popular vote by a clear half million but losing the Electoral College by a whisker; and, Bush v. Kerry in 2004, when Bush won both a narrow popular and Electoral College vote. There is a third that comes to my mind in this compare and contrast the road to the victory in US elections. It is that of JFK in 1960 who barely won the popular vote but won handily enough in the Electoral College 303 to 219. It is perfectly possible for Obama to better JFK’s Electoral College vote and still lose the popular vote. The reason for that is merely to do with the demography – the distribution of Democrats and Republicans.

Above is the electoral college Map from 1960: Senator John F Kennedy ( blue states) v. Vice President Richard M Nixon (red states). You can see despite the closeness of the popular vote Kennedy won a comfortable victory in the Electoral College. It was a victory that provided a perfect illustration of the advantage that accrues to being the majority party in the US.

The saying goes – a picture is worth a thousand words. This is the cliché was the sales pitch of a business that today governs our lives – in many differing ways – through all media – and yet about whom we never think very much. This saying built the modern advertising agencies beloved of Bewitched and Madmen. It is the industry we love to hate; disdain to believe but which nevertheless governs much of what we think. It is also the same industry that has spent just over 2 billion dollars on what is lovingly described as the most important exercise of  democracy on the earth. One might say it is the business that governs us all.

The Electoral College map from 1960, above, illustrates as well as anything that one hundred years on from the civil war that the two main US political parties were still regional coalitions: one, the Democrats, shaped by slavery & the old confederacy re-aligned by FDR’s New Deal with the blue collar voters of the big industrial, unionised, heartlands of the Northeast. The other – the Republican Party – the party of Lincoln – known after the Civil War as the Grand Old Party (GOP) – once dominant in its victory in the Civil War in the closed politics of Washington DC as it was in the open plains west of the Mississippi, the Rocky Mountain states and those of the Pacific coast. Post War and post FDR it had rebuilt its base anew in the leafy suburbs of America built on the model of Levitt’s town.

Times change and parties must needs change with them if they are to survive. In the late nineteenth century the Republicans on the East coast married the corporate bosses, whilst in 1930’s the small time farmer workers out in the prairies married the Unions who in turn married them to the Democrats. Both parties rootless of political ideology were always on the look-out for a constituency that would build them into a majority, county by county, city by city, state by state.

Between 1952 and 1988, California voted Republican in nine out of  ten presidential elections. In the same period New York state  voted Republican in five of ten presidential election; Illinois, Lincoln’s home-state voted Republican in six out of ten elections. Mitt Romney has not campaigned in any of these states this year. There have been no Republican advertisements in these states.

In the same period Ohio was Republican on eight of the ten occasions. Hence the belief that of all the big states it has been the most likely to vote Republican; no republican nominee has won the presidency without Ohio. Now it is the most contested swing state.  Both candidates have spent more time, more effort and, more on advertising in Ohio, than in any other state. But it may turn out that for all the expenditure of both candidates and their Super PAC surrogates that most effective expenditure was made in 2009 when President Obama decided to shore up the auto-car industry that employs millions of voters in these mid Western states.

The notional flip side of this story is the Deep South, which the Democrats owned for a century (because it was the Republicans who freed the slaves). When Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act he noted that he was handing the South to the Republicans for at least a generation and he was right. The civil rights movement which was made in the image of Martin Luther King won its victory in 1964 but its civil victory also helped make the Republican party the majority party once again in the USA.

That hegemony had lasted until the 2008 election and it had mattered. It largely accounts for both George W. Bush’s narrow victories in the 2000 and 2004 elections. For the Republican grip on the south made it harder for the Democrats to find a pathway to victory in the Electoral College and the only two successful Democrat nominees after 1964 were Jimmy Carter (Georgia) in 1976 and Bill Clinton (Arkansas) in 1992 and again in 1996. In both cases they won in part because they were able to break the Republican stranglehold on the south.

During that same time however, out on the white sands of the sun-drenched West, something was happening on the ground, again city by city and county by county. White collar and University educated middle class voters whose parents identified with the Republican party began to vote for Democrats – coincident with the rise of women in the work-place – voters who were more driven by social issues than economic ones.  At first it led to the election of mavericks, men in the mould of Gary Hart or Gerry Brown – but serious women followed  – Diane Feinstein; Barbara Boxer; Nancy Pelosi. Gradually this movement of the demographic tectonic plates shifted the math of the US election in the favour of the Democrats. The Pacific Coast states – California, Oregon and Washington – turned from red to blue. And then that GOP allegiance long carved into the Rocky Mountain states of  Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada also began to crumble. The only solidly GOP state in this region is now Mormon Utah.

As any voter in the UK knows – increasing votes in safe seats doesn’t actually increase the number of seats you win in an election. The demographic arithmetic that distorts out-comes in our smaller-scale Westminster constituencies using the first-past-the post system of election works upon a Continental scale out in the USA where the movement of population has gradually concentrated Republican voters where they’re least needed and Democrat votes where they’re most useful.

And that is the ball candidate Governor Romney has had to roll up-hill successfully all this electoral season. And even now as he is ahead by 2-4% in some national polls it remains his problem. Ohio stubbornly clings to the President as Obama  has clung to it all year. You may recall from earlier in the season of these election reviews that the bromance with Dave and Barak was sealed on a day-trip to Ohio in Air Force One where our PM watched some basketball with the President. Ohio loves winners; and Ohio will make the winner in this election. For without Ohio, Romney has to pick up almost all the other close states and that is a huge ask – particularly in states where early voting favours the Democrats.

I wish I might pretend that watching this election has been an edifying or indeed engaging experience. I’m as pleased as the average voter in the US to see an end to it. It has been a grueling, long business that promised to lead us somewhere but has left us standing where we were when it all started. Tuesday 6th November 2012 may resolve who sits in the White House for the next four years. But it will resolve little else. Neither candidate will win a decisive victory and that must now been seen in the context that for the last twenty five years or more neither party has managed a decisive victory that has endured beyond two years. The unending schedule of elections has made politicians more prolix; more reliant upon money; more reliant upon the dark arts of Madison Avenue. This cycle will end where it began: the Republicans will control the House of Representatives and more state Governor’s mansions; the Democrats surprisingly will retain control of the Senate – largely because of poor Republican candidates than by their own good judgment. And the big one – must I predict – if I must at this stage the election is still the President’s to lose.  It may be all evens in the national polls but the odds of the Electoral College are stacked in Obama’s favour. But my what a messy victory he has managed to contrive from his advantage. And that, much as it has haunted his recent political past, will now haunt the next two years. If we’ve learned one thing about Barak Obama it is that he’s no give ’em hell Harry Truman and to be honest that is really what was needed to shake up the establishments in both parties and bring some sense of purpose back into the politics in America. But as in Europe, and as here in the UK we have the politicians we deserve. They’re shaped in the image of our supine convenience – as is the food we consume; the energy we consume and the resources we consume. As a society we have grown fat on our consumption; we lazily throw aside what doesn’t suit our fancy; the only thing we endure is whim.

Hard Times are History; History is bunk. We’ve come to believe we deserve better because we’ve had it good. And our politicians shy from telling us hard truths because they know it’s not what we wish to hear. Moreover, the hardest truth is that they are, by virtue of how they’ve won power, incapable of wielding it effectively.

The economic forces of globalisation have made pygmies of us all- and like the most powerless we have become relentlessly self-absorbed by trivia that changes nothing. It is a polity made for diminutive…a quantum polity… one where great agitations changes little on the surface. Who will rise to the challenge? The only thing that seems to move us is celebrity and who will win X Factor or Strictly Come Dancing. These are fertile fields for disillusion and the illusions of extremists with their bags of tricks – magic solutions that defy the senses and beguile the eye. So accustomed are we to a fast fix we may readily seize the potions of the Mad,  the Bad or the Dangerous to know. Revolution is born when anarchy no longer seems such bad option. And as a world we are skating on ice as thin the Arctic polar cap in the Mid summer sun.