Rove in WSJ: Tuesday Will Be a Democratic Apocalypse

Karl Rove sounded the warning bell for the Democratic Party in Tuesdays elections: It will be a crushing rebuke of first two years of the Obama administration.

He writes this morning in the Wall Street Jounral:

Midterm elections are almost always unpleasant experiences for the White House, especially when the economy is weak. But key races that should have been safe for the party in power demonstrate the extent to which President Obama and his policies have nationalized the election.

In Nevada, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has a huge war chest in a state Mr. Obama won in 2008 by 12 points. Mr. Reid trails Sharron Angle by four points in the latest Rasmussen poll.

In West Virginia, Joe Manchin, a popular Democratic governor, is running for the Senate, yet he lags behind John Raese by two points in the Oct. 23 Fox News Poll, largely because of Mr. Obama's 30% approval rating in the state. Mr. Manchin is running away from the president, telling Fox News that Mr. Obama is "dead wrong on cap and trade," and that he would not have supported ObamaCare had he known everything that was in the bill.

Or take the Illinois Senate seat held by Mr. Obama before he was elected president. It should be safely Democratic. Instead, Republican Congressman Mark Kirk has led Illinois Treasurer and Obama basketball buddy Alexi Giannoulias in eight of the 10 polls taken this month. It will be a terrible embarrassment if the president's former Senate seat flips.

Elsewhere, some powerful Senate Democrats were either forced out by popular Republican challengers (North Dakota and Indiana) or they trail badly because their races became nationalized over the Obama agenda (Arkansas, Missouri and Wisconsin).

One of the more interesting Senate races is in Ohio, where Rob Portman, a former trade negotiator and budget director for George W. Bush, leads Democratic Lt. Governor Lee Fisher by an average of 19 points in a state Mr. Obama carried by four points.

Ohio is no longer friendly Obama territory. An August survey by Public Policy Polling reported that Ohioans would prefer George W. Bush in the White House today rather than Mr. Obama by 50% to 42%. Mr. Portman campaigns relentlessly on jobs, presenting a principled, optimistic case that conservative policies mean economic growth. It's a winning strategy.

Terrell (Texas) Newspaper Refuses to Publish Story on Obama's Election

First there was the incident where the Rockdale (Ga.) Citizen downplayed the presidential election, but the Terrell (Texas) Tribune took it one step further by not even publishing a presidential election story anywhere.

Byron Harris of WFAA TV in Dallas reports:

Protestors spoke out Thursday against The Terrell Tribune's decision not to put Barack Obama's presidential victory on its front page.

The day after Obama was elected as president, the banner headline for the Tribune focused on the county commissioner's race. The headline read, "Jackson defeats Schoen."

About 25 residents, who said they had hoped to save the local paper with Obama's victory noted front page, picketed the newspaper's office Thursday.

"That's what I wanted, a keepsake," said Lera Duncan, who was among the protestors. "And this was very disappointing to me."

"They could have knocked me over with a feather," said Sarah Whitaker. "I was flabbergasted. I couldn't imagine such an historical event would not be on the front page somewhere on The Terrell Tribune."

Protestors pointed out that on Election Day, the Tribune had printed a John McCain-focused story as their lead story on the front page.

"It's not the people in the community," said another protestor. "It's the paper itself."

The Terrell Tribune's publisher, Bill Jordan, declined an on-camera interview.

"We run a newspaper, not a memory book service," he said. "We covered the local commissioner's race. We thought that was more important."

For those who may believe race played a part in the decision, the publisher pointed out that Democrat J.C. Jackson, who was at the center of the main story and who won the race for county commissioner, is an African American.

But while there were a few Obama-related stories within the paper, there was no story devoted to the presidential victory.

Study: Voter Turnout the Same as 2004

Despite lofty predictions by some academics, pundits, and practitioners that voter turnout would reach levels not seen since the turn of the last century, the percentage of eligible citizens casting ballots in the 2008 presidential election stayed at virtually the same relatively high level as it reached in the polarized election of 2004, a study announced yesterday.

The American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate reported that voter turnout in Tuesday’s election was the same in percentage as it was four years ago — or at most has risen by less than 1 percent.

The study says between 126.5 million and 128.5 million Americans cast ballots in the presidential election, representing 60.7 percent or, at most, 61.7 percent of those eligible to vote in the country.

“A downturn in the number and percentage of Republican voters going to the polls seemed to be the primary explanation for the lower than predicted turnout,” the report said. Compared to 2004, Republican turnout declined by 1.3 percentage points to 28.7 percent, while Democratic turnout increased by 2.6 points from 28.7 percent in 2004 to 31.3 percent in 2008.

“Many people were fooled (including this student of politics although less so than many others) by this year’s increase in registration (more than 10 million added to the rolls), citizens’ willingness to stand for hours even in inclement weather to vote early, the likely rise in youth and African American voting, and the extensive grassroots organizing network of the Obama campaign into believing that turnout would be substantially higher than in 2004,” Curtis Gans, the center’s director, said in the report. “But we failed to realize that the registration increase was driven by Democratic and independent registration and that the long lines at the polls were mostly populated by Democrats.”

Gans attributed the GOP downturn to three factors:

1) Sen. John McCain’s efforts to unite the differing factions in the Republican Party by the nomination of Gov. Sarah Palin as vice presidential nominee was a singular failure. By election time many culturally conservative Republicans still did not see him as one of their own and stayed home, while moderate Republicans saw the nomination of Palin reckless and worried about McCain’s steadiness.

2) As events moved towards Election Day, there was a growing perception of a Democratic landslide, discouraging GOP voters.

3) The 2008 election was a mirror image of the 2004 election. In the 2004 election, the enthusiasm level was on the Republican side. By Election Day, Democratic voters were not motivated by their candidate but rather by opposition to President Bush, while Republican voters had a much greater liking for their standard bearer. In 2008 and according to polls from several sources, by at least 20 percentage points, Obama enjoyed stronger allegiance than McCain. Even the best get-out-the-vote activities tend to be as successful as the affirmative emotional context in which they are working. In 2004, that context favored the GOP. In 2008, it favored the Democrats.

Obama Wins With Strong Showing in Indiana

Sen. Barack Obama, an unknown state senator from Illinois four years ago who has cast a vision for change across the country, has won the election tonight to the highest office in the land. He will become the 44th president of the United States next Jan. 20th.

Obama is close in Indiana's rural areas. When the urban area of Gary's votes are reported, he will take that state and its 11 electoral votes. The Associated Press has reported that its exit polls show that 33 percent of people who voted for the GOP governor in Indiana voted for Obama, which is a strong indication he will win the state.

In addition to Indiana, Obama has projected safe margins in California (55 electoral votes), New York (31), Illinois (21), Pennsylvania (21), Michigan (17), New Jersey (15), Massachusetts (12), Washington (11), Maryland (10), Minnesota (10), Wisconsin (10), Connecticut (7), Iowa (7), Oregon (7), New Mexico (5), Maine (4), Hawaii (4), Rhode Island (4), Delaware (3), District of Columbia (3), and Vermont (3). The total now will be at least 271 electoral votes, clinching the White House. He needed 270 electoral votes to win.

Obama was born of modest means in Hawaii on Aug. 4, 1961. His father, Barack Obama Sr., was born and raised in a small village in Kenya, where he grew up herding goats with his own father, who was a domestic servant to the British.

Barack's mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in small-town Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs during the Depression, and then signed up for World War II after Pearl Harbor, where he marched across Europe in Patton's army. Her mother went to work on a bomber assembly line, and after the war, they studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal Housing Program, and moved west to Hawaii.

It was there, at the University of Hawaii, where Barack's parents met. His mother was a student there, and his father had won a scholarship that allowed him to leave Kenya and pursue his dreams in America.

Barack's father eventually returned to Kenya, and Barack grew up with his mother in Hawaii, and for a few years in Indonesia. Later, he moved to New York, where he graduated from Columbia University in 1983.

At Harvard Law School he became the first black person to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review. Obama worked as a community organizer and practiced as a civil-rights attorney before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate in January 2003. After a primary victory in March 2004, Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He was elected to the Senate in November 2004 with 70 percent of the vote.

He defeated Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton during the primaries this year in a heated campaign that almost went to the convention floor.

Two Dressed in Black Panthers Attire Intimidate Voters in Philadelphia

There are already a number of reports of voting problems in key battleground states such as Virginia, Pennsylvania and Florida.

At one precinct in Philadelphia, guards wearing Black Panthers attire and armed with nightsticks are in front of the doors of a polling site intimidating voters. Here is raw footage filmed by a student.



Here is a news report from FOX:



And here is raw footage of the pair being dealt with by police:



David Bario, writing for The American Lawyer at amlawdaikly.com, reports:

The polls have only been open a few hours, but reports of malfunctioning voting machines and overwhelmed polling stations already are flooding in. Jonah Goldman, director of the National Campaign for Fair Elections, says he and other Election Protection partners are most concerned so far about Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Florida, where massive voter turnout is overwhelming already vulnerable voting systems.

In Virginia, election protection monitors are describing massive machine breakdowns, which are being compounded by the absence of state provisions to provide back-up paper ballots when the machines fail. Voters in Richmond, Chesapeake, Fairfax, and Arlington are stuck in long lines, and some are being given provisional ballots to speed up the process. Those provisional ballots should be treated like regular ballots, Goldman says, but there are concerns that they will not be. There also are reports of voters being turned away from the polls and voter intimidation. Over two dozen polling places opened late, leading Election Protection officials to call for voting hours to be extended by two hours. Check back for more on the situation in Virginia later this afternoon.

Pennsylvania has similar reports of long lines and malfunctioning machines. In Pittsburgh, poll workers were so overwhelmed that local election authorities deputized Election Protection monitors in the spot to deal with the crowds.

In Florida, in addition to long lines, at least two dozen polling places centered in the Tampa and St. Petersburg areas have reported malfunctioning optical scan machines.

In Virginia, water dripping from an early-morning rain onto optical-scan paper ballots have made some of the ballot impossible to scan, Ryan Enright, a spokesman for the State Board of Elections, told CNN.

Election officials are encouraging voters to dry off before filling out ballots. Damp ballots will be allowed to dry before being tabulated, Enright said. This step will mean a longer processing time for election officials, but it should not affect voters' wait times, he said.