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State Dept Photo/Oct 30, 2008/Washington, D.C.
Moderator: Welcome to the Foreign Press Center. Today we have with us John Fortier who is a Research Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who will brief on the Electoral College and the Battleground states.
John Fortier: Thank you, and thank you for joining us today. We are almost at election day after a campaign that’s lasted nearly two years. Maybe many of you are feeling as if you’re at the end of a marathon, as I am, but we still have some decisions to make and they will be made next Tuesday. Although, as you know, many people are voting today.
I’m here to say a few things about the Electoral College. First some simple things about how it works and what it is, but then to say more about Electoral College strategy. What we should think about in terms of the states that Obama and McCain will be contesting. What are the paths to get to a majority of the Electoral College. And where you might focus some of your attention on election night.
I bring with me a book which I have edited and contributed to called After The People Vote. We hope we don’t need all of the pages of this book because it is an explanation of the Electoral College when it works in normal times, but also some of the more obscure parts of the Electoral College such as if have a tie or if no one were to get a majority. If we had several candidates, or even horrific cases of what if the candidate were to die between election day and the inauguration. All of these are discussed in this book, as well as things like Bush v. Gore and disputes we might have. I actually suspect we will not have those problems this year so I won’t say anything about those more extreme circumstances, but just generally about how the Electoral College works in a normal circumstance, and then as I say, more about strategy.
The first thing to think about is that in America we really do not have a single election on election day. We have 51 different elections for President. Fifty states as well as the District of Columbia where we are sitting, each have an election. The results of those elections ultimately determine the winner. There is no single authority in Washington who oversees elections, we have some different practices in different states, but we have a number of different elections going forward at the same time.
You probably know, and even I think many Americans who do not understand all of the intricacies of the Electoral College understand the basics of how it works. You vote in your state and it matters who wins that state. It actually does not by the Constitution have to be the case that the winner of each state gets all of the electors in a particular state, but it is in almost every state the case that it’s a winner take all system. Win a state and you get all of the electorals.
To step back a few steps, you know that the Electoral College is such that each of the states has a different number of electors based roughly on population. More specifically, if you want to know the exact number of any state you have to look to our House of Representatives. In fact the founders of the Constitution created the Electoral College or the way of electing the President very late when they were thinking about the Constitution, after they had figured out what to do with Congress. It represents in some ways some of the compromises that were made in creating Congress.
Congress has two parts. A Senate, where all of the states are equally represented. Each state gets two senators. The House of Representatives is based on population. The biggest states have the most, the smallest states have only one representative, to take an example, the state of Vermont has only one representative. The state of California, our largest state, has 53 representatives.
If you want to get to the number of electors that you have in any given state, you add the two numbers together. The number of senators, plus the number of representatives. Every state gets two senators, so the smallest state is going to get those two electors, plus one more elector coming from its representative in the House of Representatives. California is going to have 53 members of the House of Representatives, two senators, adding up to 55.
Ultimately there are 538 electors out there. Winning a majority, winning 270 of them, is enough to get you the presidency. As I said, it is possible you would split it three ways. That’s not going to happen this time, but in a case where we have two candidates, unless we have the very unlikely situation of a tie, which is possible, 270 votes will win that election.
A couple of other just procedural notes of how the College proceeds. We on election night are discussing who wins each state. That’s a natural outcome of the way we elect presidents. You’ll see the TV cameras, the TV stations having red states and blue states as has become a tradition in America. We call Republican states red states; and blue states. As soon as one is called or one by one of the candidates it will be turned a certain color and you’ll see the electoral votes start to add up.
Assuming we have a clear winner, what will happen is, in any case, what will happen is these electors are actually people. They’re not just votes that are not associated with individuals. There are individuals in each state who are the presidential electors. In some states when you go and vote you will actually see on the ballot Barack Obama’s name and then you will see a list of 17 people who you’ve never heard of who are the electors who will actually case votes later in the year. Whichever candidate wins that state will get, that group of people will be the ones who actually show up that day to vote.
We have a date this year, December 15th, where all of those electors will meet. They do not meet in one place. They meet, each state’s group meets in the state capital. All the electors of the winning candidates who win in Illinois will meet in Springfield, Illinois on December 15th to cast their votes for President, and also a second vote for Vice President. Ultimately those votes are cast and then Congress will come into session, the new Congress in January, to count those votes. Hopefully by, usually it’s January 6th, this year it’s the 8th I think because of the weekend, you will have Congress saying this is the official result. We’ve counted the votes. We now have an official president-elect of the United States of America.
So while we assume we will know who the President is after election day, the formal process goes forward into December and then again into January.
I guess I’ll stop there on the mechanics of the Electoral College and turn to Electoral College strategy.
One of the implications of our system is that we are running many state by state elections. Of course some states are heavily Democratic, some states are heavily Republican, and there of course is a group in the middle that is more contested.
One of the criticisms of the Electoral College is that it focuses the campaign on not all states, but only on some states. You see some states having a perennial status as a swing state. They are each year contested. Then given the character of the election, or in this case with Barack Obama leading in the polls there are some states that Barack Obama is contesting which are not thought of as traditional swing states, which are a little more Republican, which he is trying to win over. We can discuss some of those, where they are and what to watch on election night.
If you look back at the 2000 and 2004 elections, there is a remarkable stability to the political map. First of all, of course, in 2000 we had about as close an election as you could have, not only in terms of the popular vote but also in terms of the electoral college and of course in one key state as well, Florida. And you saw a map which follows traditional voting patterns. Republicans are very dominant in the south. There are a few states, Florida being one of them, which are competitive, but mostly they are generally, southern states are for Republicans. That might change a little bit this year. There are a couple of states we’re looking at that might be a little bit different. The northeast is generally a very strongly Democratic region. Almost without exception. You might say the state of New Hampshire, which used to be a very Republican state, is kind of a swing state these days in a close election. Pennsylvania, somewhat of a close state. The others are fairly solidly Democratic. The map, if you look at the map of red and blue states in 2000, again, you would find, going all the way out to the west coast the coastal states, especially California, Washington state and Oregon, sometimes a little closer, but generally Democratic states on the West Coast including Hawaii. The mountain states have been traditionally Republican. Those include places like Colorado and others which this year may be competitive, but have been traditionally Republican states. You often find the one key swing region is the Midwest which has some states which are more Democratic, like Illinois; others more Republican, like Indiana. Although again this year, closer. And then some very key swing states. Certainly the most obvious big swing states in the last two elections have been Ohio and Florida. The states with significant populations whose results are usually close between the two parties. It’s worth spending your time in those states given the number of electoral votes that come out of them and how closely competitive they are.
Just again to reiterate how similar the maps were in 2000 and 2004, there were only three states that changed hands from 2000 to 2004. If you look at the map, only a little bit different blue and a little bit different red.
The state of New Hampshire in 2000 went for George W. Bush; in 2004 it went for John Kerry.
Two states that went for Al Gore, Iowa and New Mexico in 2000; went for George W. Bush in 2004.
Those were the only three states that changed. Every other state remained exactly the same. The popular vote was close in both elections. A little closer in 2000 but still relatively close in 2004.
We come to the year 2008, and I’m not going to give you my big election analysis of why Barack Obama is where he is today, but just to say two things.
First of all, any time someone of one party is ahead by a significant amount, which Barack Obama is, those votes are coming from somewhere and usually it means that a lot of states have shifted a little bit in the Democratic direction. If Barack Obama is up six or seven points in the popular public opinion polls nationally, you would expect that many of the states also would be somewhat more favorable to him, six or seven points, a rough guide of that strength across the states. That means that some of the states that were very close might not be so close, and some of the states that were a little bit Republican are now looking pretty good for Barack Obama.
I would also say there are some states that we are watching over time that are changing their character. They’re becoming more Republican or more Democratic.
Finally I think we should look at some states that perhaps Barack Obama as an individual, not just as a Democrat, but Barack Obama has particular appeal in some states and might do well this time.
First I think if you look at the map in the public opinion polls that have been done in states around the country you do see John McCain having a hard time to win in any states that are so-called blue states. States that are Democratically held. states that either Al Gore or John Kerry won.
There are a couple that he’s trying. At this point in the campaign he’s got resources, he’s trying to narrow them to only a few places. I think earlier in the campaign he was interested in Michigan. He’s pulled out of that state. You see him spending some time in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. I think those are two states that do favor Barack Obama, but perhaps some of the states out there that John McCain might take from that blue column, he is most interested in them.
A couple of others that at one point were thought to be possible states that McCain could win over are Wisconsin and Minnesota, although I think he has given up on those a fair while ago.
On the other hand there are a number of states that Barack Obama is competitive in that Al Gore and John Kerry did not win. First of all, the state of Iowa is one that I mentioned. Iowa and New Mexico went from the Republican to the Democratic column from 2000 to 2004. The state of Iowa is one that Barack Obama has consistently done well in. I think that John McCain had, even though it was a very close election result in both of our last two elections, is one that John McCain did not have much hope for.
To return to 2004, if one state had changed hands, if Ohio had changed hands, the election would have gone in the other direction. So it is close enough that Ohio, one state, or even a combination of two or three smaller states would be all that Barack Obama would need to switch to win. So getting Iowa wouldn’t be enough by itself to switch the Electoral College majority to the Democrats but it would be getting awfully close. You’d need only a couple of small states.
Looking more out to the different regions of the country, in the category of states that I would put as states that are changing their character and becoming somewhat more Democratic over time, are some of the Western mountain states, particularly Colorado. New Mexico and Nevada are always somewhat close, but there is some evidence of movement in that direction toward the Democratic camp.
Aside from Barack Obama, any Democrat is likely to do better here than they did 10 years ago and 15 years ago, and in the future Democrats have some hopes that those will be more Democratic states.
You see the Democrats holding their convention in Denver this year. That was not an accident. They are in some ways putting the flag in Colorado and saying this is a state that we have a future in. And some of it comes from significant Hispanic immigration to those states. States that now will have more reliably Democratic voters because of those Hispanic voters. But also they’re states that have some other migration patterns. High growth states that people are moving to from other parts of the West and changing the character of those states.
Again this year if you really look the polls, you find Barack Obama is ahead in Colorado and Nevada and New Mexico. Perhaps less in Nevada. Maybe that’s one of John McCain’s better states of those three, but still finding that he is ahead in those states that George Bush had won in 2004 as well as in 2000.
Certainly you can look to, one other sort of surprising part of the map that you can look to is a state right across the river in Virginia where Barack Obama has indicated that he would be strong there. He was strong in the Democratic primary, but it is a state that has had some demographic changes, moving in the Democratic direction, but also one that Barack Obama plays particularly well in.
First the changes. You see Virginia as a Southern state, almost all the Southern states have been pretty strongly Republican for the last 20 or 30 years with the exception of Florida, more of a swing state. Sometimes when Democrats have elected a southern governor, Governor Clinton to the White House, puts them on the ticket. They have some appeal in the South. But it was often hard for someone outside the South to win the southern states. It is a striking matter for Democrats to be able to win in Virginia, which just to give you some background. The last two elections have been Republican. George W. Bush won by over eight points in both of those elections. That’s not a really close state in the last couple of elections, one that Republicans felt comfortable with. Since that election you have had a couple of statewide elections, for Governor, you actually had an earlier Go Governors race with Mark Warner, with Tim Kaine being Governor now, a Democrat. Then ultimately Jim Webb elected to be Senator over George Allen. There’s some sense that there’s the ability of Democrats to win in that state more, and some of it is certainly based on the changes in Northern Virginia which is a very big growth area and brings a lot more essentially Northeastern people. Some people say that Virginia is the South, but the South doesn’t start until you drive 30 or 40 miles into Virginia. It doesn’t really begin at the river where much of Northern Virginia looks like Philadelphia or New York or Boston in terms of the education levels and politics of its residents.
So Virginia has a growth part in that area. And you see Barack Obama has particular appeal among young professionals, educated voters. So there’s not only a good Democratic movement in that direction, but he has a particular appeal there.
There’s also, like many Southern states, interestingly, they have particularly been strongly Democratic states but they’ve also had a high African-American population. Barack Obama is likely to turn out that significant African-American population at higher rates than another white Democratic candidate, so he has particular advantage in that realm too. And you do see a lot of resources that Obama has put into Virginia, and to good use because he is ahead in the polls and that will be likely one of the surprises on election night.
If you want to look for, it would be very interesting as the polls close up, we would be talking about Ohio and Florida, and I think in this election they’re not quite as close as they typically have been. Barack Obama is ahead in the polls in both. I think in Florida he is ahead, but not doing as well as in other states where his national margin is showing more. He’s still I think likely to win those states. If the race closes up we will be talking about those states, but if it doesn’t, we’re likely to see Ohio and Florida, the big prizes in a usual election, going in Obama’s camp.
One election night tip. If you are looking for early results, the Eastern states, first of all the time zone is earlier, and some of them close as early as 7:00 o’clock. Virginia, for example, closes at 7:00 o’clock. If you watch some of the results in the big Eastern states and you see that Barack Obama has won Ohio, Florida, Virginia, or even one of those states, certainly two of those states, it’s very hard to see how John McCain can win in the electoral map. It’s hard to see what other states he might make up later on.
One other traditional swing state, Missouri, which leans a little bit on the Republican side, that’s a competitive state this year. Barack Obama is doing well there, better than usual. Still, it’s fairly competitive.
Then a few states that we might watch if we are looking at Obama doing even better than we expect. The places where he is competitive which are really at the edge of his popularity, but he has a chance at. Two big ones are Indiana and North Carolina, I would say especially North Carolina. North Carolina is more Republican in a presidential election than Virginia, but has some of the characteristics I mentioned in Virginia, a high African-American population and a growing group of people who are moving into the state, some of them in high tech realms, some of them with more professional backgrounds. North Carolina is not a state anyone predicted would be competitive in a presidential election, but is one that Barack Obama is polling very well in and may well win that state.
Indiana is similarly a very Republican state, is the next door neighbor of Illinois. Barack Obama did very well there in the primary. It is very surprising that it is close in the polls, but one that is close.
Finally, if you want to watch for a few surprise states that are not usually competitive, or Republicans tend to win by pretty big margins, you might look to places like Montana and North Dakota which are typically pretty Republican but have shown some polling, they’re swell states that Barack Obama has put some resources into and might end up winning. Certainly if he wins by seven or eight points in the national popular vote as we sometimes see polls reflecting today, he may be competitive in that realm of states that we don’t usually see, and we won’t be up all night trying to figure out who wins, but we may be looking at individual states to see which ones are turning blue which are traditionally red.
I’m going to stop there and take some questions.
Question: Thank you so much for your time. Shin Shoji,NHK,Japan.
With regard to elections, party registration hasn’t been such an issue, like even red states like Kentucky have overwhelmingly a large number of Democrats, but given the polarized nature of the states in the election, would you say the party registration would be a major issue in the next few decades ahead?
John Fortier: The question is about party registration. A complicated thing in America, I mentioned we have 50 different elections, 51. We also have a lot of different rules in different states. So we don’t know exactly how many Republicans and Democrats are out there by registration. Some states register by party. Some states you just register, you don’t put a party down. Virginia is a case like that. There’s actually a state, North Dakota, where there is no registration. So we do things differently everywhere.
What we tend to do to figure out people’s allegiances is look to public opinion polls. One striking fact is if you wanted to look over time, certainly the Democratic party was at once a more dominant party, through FDR, in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Things started to change a bit, Republicans becoming more competitive in the presidential race, and then finally taking the House and Senate, the House especially, in 1994 for the first time in many years. And from 1994 to 2004 we saw the, not the party registration numbers were harder to get, but the stated party affiliations of people remaining pretty equal. There was a real equality. We said we had a 50/50 nation. Republicans and Democrats were extremely competitive at every level. congressional elections, presidential elections.
Things changed in 2005 in George Bush’s popularity, the party has had its problems, the party had a problem in the 2006 election. So you see a narrowing gap, sometimes a 10 or 11 or 12 point gap in what people say they are, whether they’re Republicans of Democrats. And Democrats have that advantage. That is one reason that John McCain, I think, one big reason, even though he has some independence from George Bush and can run a campaign to say I will be different, he does have a party that is quite unpopular, he’s running on a party line that is quite unpopular.
I’m not sure I got to the whole of your question. The other side of that is we see new registrations coming in at a high rate. That reflects Democratic enthusiasm. That reflects like the giving of money or the volunteering that you see sometimes on the Democratic side. You see a greater enthusiasm for the party out looking to get in, and some less enthusiasm for the party in power who’s lost some popularity. So there are some suspicions that those registrations, more Democratic registrations will lead to high Democratic turnout. I guess I see that, but it will take a while for us to know whether this is a phenomenon that is a four or five year phenomenon that’s related to George Bush and the unpopularity of some of his policies, or whether it is a longer term realignment. But certainly we do see a party preference much more significant on the Democratic side than we did four years ago.
Question: Thanks, Xiong Min,21st Century Business Daily, China.
So this year the early vote turnout is extremely high. In some states even doubled than last year’s. What do you think are the reasons behind it?
John Fortier: I have another book, not a best-selling book, called Absentee and Early Voting. It tries to document this trend. I should have brought that instead of this one. That was a 2006 book.
To put it in a nutshell, 30 years ago or so we have not so much voting by mail. We had a few people voting absentee. People who were out of town for business or some other reason, people who were too sick to make it to the polls, and knew about it in advance, could request an absentee ballot, or people who were overseas for some reason who again would request the absentee ballot. States said really, those are the reasons why you can get an absentee ballot. You can’t just get one for any old reason. You have to say you’re away from the place. You can’t make it to your polling place on election day.
Starting in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, a number of states, not every state, but a number of states, especially Western states, decided they would extend the right to vote early, by mail especially, to anyone, to make it a convenience to people, not for those who needed to be away from the polls. Starting with those states, you start to see a significant rise in the number of people who vote early.
In 1980 almost all the states looked about the same, about five percent of people voted early.
In 2004 we saw nearly a quarter of Americans voting early in some way. There are actually two types of voting early. I mentioned one, the bigger one, voting by mail. But there also has been in the last 10- or 12 years a number of states moving to voting in polling places before election day. They’ve opened their polling places up two or three weeks before the election, and you see again a great variation in places, to highlight a few extreme examples. Oregon, the state of Oregon, does not have any polling places any more. All of the ballots are mailed to the voters and the voters mail them back or drop them off. A state like Texas votes more than half by people showing up at polling places early and not on election day. So there really are some very big numbers. And we expect that to go up. We’ve seen trends that indicate both the states that do early voting are seeing more early voting, but also each election cycle you tend to see some new states adopting it. New states loosening their rules or encouraging voting early.
The book has some qualms about this. I think we’re moving maybe a little too far too quickly, especially in the realm of voting by mail, not as much voting in person.
I do think we are going to see significant turnout in this election, but I send a caution on early voting. Of course it is possible that people come to the polls and vote early and then there are not as many people left to vote on election day. That does happen. The great hope of people who instituted voting early and wanted to do it for convenience, thought they would also increase voter turnout. And the studies we have show that it doesn’t tend to increase turnout. It tends to move people around. The same people that would vote on election day are now voting at their kitchen tables a few weeks earlier and it’s not attracting a lot of new voters.
I think we will see some people coming out to the polls and enthusiasm for the campaign, but it might not be because of the early voting. It is partly because the campaigns are driving their people to the polls. You see Barack Obama very explicitly saying vote early. We don’t want to risk that you will not make it to election day. You’ll have bad weather or an injury or forget or have a busy day, so why not vote now. But again, it’s a little hard to tell from those numbers whether we will see extraordinary turnout or high turnout.
One other caution just generally on turnout is, we don’t have a very high turnout in America, but for us the 2004 election was an enormous turnout. We went up by a very significant amount.
Starting from the statistics we have in 1968 is when we allowed 18 year olds to vote, so that sort of changed things. But starting after that, 18 year olds could vote, we saw consistently the percentage of people eligible to vote going down until – occasionally a blip up, but the general trend was down. In 2000 we saw in the low 50 percent, 52 percent or so of people voting who were eligible in an election. That jumped up to over 60 percent in 2004, by far the biggest jump. By far the sort of higher number that we’d seen in this period. Over 60 percent.
There are different ways of calculating it. One way is 60.7 percent, but there are a couple of different methods of figuring out exactly how many people can vote. But roughly over 60 percent.
It is certainly possible we will see higher turnout this time. I think people expect that, but we don’t really know. And you may see more enthusiasm on the Democratic side but some fall-off in turnout on the Republican side. So the final mix of turnout is a bit unknown and we expect a fairly high turnout, but I would not bet my house that we will absolutely have higher turnout than we did in 2004 which was a very high turnout election.
Question: Zoltan Mikes, World Business Press Online, Slovak Republic.
My question is how much reliable are the polls showing Barack Obama so far ahead? Isn’t there a factor that maybe some people who will vote Republican are ashamed to tell to the pollsters that they will vote Republican because of unpopularity of Mr. Bush, some other persons will then change their decision by [inaudible]?
John Fortier: The question is about the reliability of the polls and some of the factors that might change them.
In this election, if the polls showed we were two or three percentage points separating the candidates, I think there would be a lot of very strong questions about the way we poll, the methodology of the polls. You use in the fall especially polling companies are not just calling people but they’re also trying to figure out who the likely voters are. Each company has their own method and it’s kind of like Kentucky Fried Chicken in America, nobody wants to tell you the secret recipe. They won’t tell you exactly how they determine it, but they are using methods of asking, have you voted before, sometimes demographic factors, trying to figure out who the likely voter are. They could be wrong. There are some assumptions in the polls that are wrong, but they are unlikely to be off by six or seven points. They are more things that we worry about when there’s a two to three point race when there really is some argument over what the makeup of the electorate is.
So if the polls close up some more, we may really ask those questions, but there’s not a lot of time left. We also do poll a lot in America. It’s not that every poll and methodology is perfect, but we have a lot of very respectable pollsters out there and you can, and you probably do, make yourself silly by looking at the internet every day and finding we have ten tracking polls and others that are coming in not every day, but fairly regularly. So there are a great body of polls out there, and that’s more reliable than a single poll.
Just to throw a historical example out, people point to the election that Harry Truman woke up to and found the newspapers said Dewey beats Truman, and actually Truman had won.
Well, the state of polling at that time was there had been a poll ten days before the election, a single poll, and there were some other polls earlier, an indication that Dewey was ahead, but not the body of polling we have today.
The other question you asked is really about are people telling the truth to pollsters, not just who the likely voters are. And sometimes that question gets asked, what about race, what about, there’s a term we sometimes use in America called the Bradley Effect. That is there was a mayor of Los Angeles running for governor of California, Tom Bradley, African-American, who was ahead in some pre-election polls close to the election, and ended up losing. There was a suspicion that voters had said in the polls, yes, I’ll vote for Tom Bradley, but then went to the election day polling and couldn’t pull the lever for him, voted Republican. That cost him the election. That’s the Bradley Effect. People can tell pollsters one thing but they do another when they vote.
There’s a lot of evidence that this doesn’t happen in a lot of races. There are a lot of statewide races with African-Americans we have not seen that effect. People have even gone back and looked at the original Bradley race and said look, there were some other factors. There was some not taking absentee balloting into consideration, some methodology questions about the polls.
I do believe that race has had an effect and does have an effect on public opinion, in how people vote. That people, thankfully a lot smaller percentage of people are voting on racial lines today than they were 40 years ago. Forty years ago public opinion polls showed that 40, 50 percent of people said they wouldn’t vote for an African-American. That number today is very low, three or four percent. There are probably more people than that who might be affected by race, but I think it’s very likely that most of that is already reflected in the polls.
Your example, people may lie to a pollster when they say I wouldn’t vote for somebody because they’re African-American. They might not want to express that sentiment. But I don’t think it’s such a horrible sentiment to express to a pollster in a private phone call that maybe I’ll vote for John McCain. I don’t think you have to be so ashamed or embarrassed about that that they would say one thing and then go into the polling place and vote another way.
I doubt there is a huge effect. Maybe there is no effect. Again, we’re talking about a margin in the polls of six or seven points, where even if there is a little bit of that effect we’re not likely to see it on election day, or make up that difference on election day.
Question: My name is Marie-Paul Rouleau, CBC, Canada.
I’m not sure, my question is, it’s a bit on the side of your topic. I was wondering what do you think about the theory of the Democrats that they could get 60 senators and that could be a coat-tail effects of Obama?
John Fortier: The question is about the Senate and 60 votes. I think that’s another story people will be watching on election night. Do the Democrats get to 60? I think it’s important, the 60 number, but not quite as important as people say.
First of all, Democrats will gain seats, clearly, in both the House and the Senate. And it’s a significant fact that they gained a lot of seats in 2006 and took the majorities, and now we’re going to gain more.
Some of those gains we knew would happen three or four months ago. Partly because the bad news for Republicans has already taken hold and had some effects. When many Republican congressmen were looking at running again in 2008, they said well, we’re in the minority now and it’s not going to be a good Republican year. The polls really show our party is not doing well, so I’ll retire. You see many many more open seats, retirees on the Republican side than on the Democratic side. If you’re a Democrat, I’ve been out of power for a long time, now I can be back in power, why retire? So a lot more opportunities for Democrats to win.
Secondly, in candidate recruitment. If you are asking a person to run for office on the Republican ticket they may look and say 2008, maybe not such a good year. Come back in two years and ask me again. I’ll run then. Just the opposite on the Democratic side. A good year. A good year to be a candidate.
So strong candidates, more opportunities, more open seats.
We knew almost no matter who won the presidency the Democrats would gain a fair number of seats.
In recent days both the polls on the national level but also some of the playing out of this advantage the Democrats have, you’ve seen even more and more Republicans in trouble. I think the Democrats will certainly gain a significant number of seats in the House, likely over 20 seats. Some say closer to 30. But the 20 seats plus on top of the 31 they won in 2006. And in the Senate they won six seats to get to 51 in 2006; they need nine to get to 60. A month ago I would have said that is almost impossible. Today I do think it’s possible that they get to 60. They’re very likely to get to 58 or 59, and 60 is not out of the question.
The reason I caution you on the magic, making 60 the magic number is this. Sixty is important for one reason. On an individual vote, the Senate is not always a majoritarian body. There are 100 senators. Sometimes you need 60 people in the Senate to say we are calling the vote. Otherwise a minority, some less than 60, can say we are going to keep debating. We’re never going to get to the vote. It’s a delaying tactic. You can never, even if you have a majority of senators who want something, they sometimes can’t get the vote and can’t get something passed.
So 60 is important on an individual vote. But 60 senators in the Senate doesn’t mean that every Democratic senator will be with you on that vote. One senator who will be around who’s been joining with the Democrats is Senator Lieberman who is likely to actually become [punished] by the Democratic party for supporting John McCain. May actually end up caucusing or working the Republicans rather than Democrats. And there are some conservative Democrats who may on an individual vote or on regional votes stray from that 60. There are also some Republicans who might join the Democrats on some votes. So having 58 or 59 is a great number, it’s a big number. Sixty is slightly better, but it’s not a magic number that everything always passes because you have 60 senators. It’s the individual vote that the 60 is. So they may get to 60, but I know they’re going to get to 58 or 59 and we can talk briefly about where these seats are, but they’re, Republicans are unlikely to gain any seats from Democrats. There are many Republican seats that are in trouble, both open seats as well as incumbents.
Question: Marie-Paul Rouleau, CBC, Canada.
John Fortier: Some of these races, it was just a problem of open seats and good candidates, so I think any Democrat would have done well in those seats no matter who, whether Obama or Hillary Clinton. But there are a few places that you watch with interest. Some of the Southern states. I mentioned Virginia could be won by Obama and maybe North Carolina. But many of the other states are very solidly republican states – Georgia, Mississippi – but they also have significant African-American populations. Barack Obama may not win those states but he may draw out many more African-Americans who then make the margin closer for him, and might be enough to help some of these Senate seats. Two of them to watch are in Georgia and Mississippi, also North Carolina. [Inaudible] I think is in deep trouble in North Carolina, is behind in the polls, and may also be hurt in addition to her usual problems by an extra African-American turnout. In Georgia [inaudible] Chambliss, just a couple of points ahead. Roger Wicker in Mississippi, a few more points ahead. But Mississippi is the most African-American state in the country, about 36 percent of the state is African-American. Again, I don’t think Barack Obama will win that state, but the candidate Ronny Musgrove might be pulled along by some extra African-American turnout in those states.
Oddly enough, in a way the white, more moderate conservative Southern Democrats, who are not necessarily running as close to
Obama but they may end up benefiting by the turnout he brings to the presidential race.
Question: Nickolay Zimin, Itogi, Russia.
Sir, [inaudible], what exactly purpose is [inaudible]? Maybe it’s time to just eliminate it. To make the process less complicated. Thank you.
John Fortier: The question is the Electoral College and whether it’s time to reform it, get rid of it, do something else instead of it.
A few things. I actually do support the Electoral College, but I am in the minority in America. Public opinion polls show 60, 65 percent of the American people want to get rid of it and probably want some form of a national popular vote.
What purpose does it serve? A couple. One, I think that it doesn’t tend to have as many bad effects as people attribute to it. It’s one of these questions that you might not want to get rid of the devil you know to go to the devil you don’t know. People worry that like in 2000 it is possible for the popular vote to go one way and the Electoral College vote to go the other way. That is true. It is possible, although it’s very unlikely. It happened in 2000. It happened before that in the late 19th Century, in the 1880s.
On a piece of paper if you were an academic you could draw a way of having the Electoral College look a lot different than the popular vote, but in reality it’s likely got to be one percent of the vote or more, closer in the popular vote to actually have the Electoral College go one way and the popular vote go the other way.
The other two benefits people point to are, one is somewhat more of our tradition. We really don’t have any elections that are not somehow you vote in your own state. We don’t have a national institution that runs elections. We don’t have anybody watching over it. We don’t have similar rules in all the states. And our members of Congress, the districts are never drawn across a state line. You are always voting somehow through your state. So it does make candidates go to states and care about what makes the majority in Ohio, what makes the majority in Florida? Sometimes you might say that’s very parochial, they care about ethanol in Iowa and they care about gambling in Nevada, but it does show that we are a system that’s not just a national system. WE have state interests as well.
The other thing is, many of you may come from countries where you have a multi-party system. We have a two-party system in America. [Inaudible] advantages of that. The simplest way is to say that we have two broad but clear choices before you. The voter gets to vote for something or even against a party and know their vote will directly translate into a result. Sometimes in a multi-party system your vote for a party is then somehow in coalition with others and it’s hard to know exactly what your vote gets you.
But the Electoral College requires you to be able to first win in states with majorities or high pluralities. Be the winner in a state. IT also requires you to win a number of states across the country.
You saw a person like Ross Perot, who was popular. Won 20 percent of the vote, but not win a single electoral vote because he wasn’t able to convince any one state to make him the winner in any state.
You also have seen in the past some Southern conservative Democrats in the ‘40s, ’50s, ‘60s who would run and win a few electoral votes by winning a state or two. But not be able to piece together a majority of the country. Not be able to win outside of the South. So it forces a candidate to win in different regions of the country. But you are in good company as to your question about whether we should change it or not.
There’s always an effort to change it through the amendment process, amendment of the Constitution, which is very hard to do, you need super majorities. There’s another effort out there where people are trying to persuade their states to give all of the electors to the winner of the national popular vote, not of who won their state. Complicated, but look at it this way. Let’s say the American people voted for Barack Obama through the national popular vote. You added up all the votes, you saw Barack Obama had won. And in Indiana, John McCain won, but Indiana passes a law that says we’re going to give all of our electors all of those votes to vote in December to whoever won the national popular vote, not to John McCain who won in Indiana. If enough states do that, then ultimately you could have through that door a national popular vote, but I think that’s probably getting too technical for today. we could talk about it after the session.
Question: Mihaela Biliovschi, Jurnalul, Romania.
As I remember, John Kerry was predicted to win [inaudible] in 2004, according to the polls and he didn’t, and what happened?
Also, what is wrong with the undecided this year in America? Why so many people are still undecided to this day, so close to the elections?
John Fortier: The first question about John Kerry and predicted to win. I hear what you’re saying, but there were pre-election polls, some showing Bush ahead actually, and some closing at the end by John Kerry. I think you’re also talking about the exit polls. We do all sorts of polls, polls before election day, and then the networks get polls which are, they’re pulled from a variety of sources, but many of them are the traditional ways, of course, people leaving the polls. You ask them who they voted for, and you have a large sample, and you figure out where the votes are going and you’re able to predict who won. You also, because of absentee balloting you have to call some people today, so it’s a little different.
But those votes were somewhat skewed for John Kerry.
The networks, as some of you know, maybe you’ll get to be in that room, are more and more closely guarding their exit poll results. It used to be you could have a friend who would sneak you the results of the morning exit polls and the afternoon exit polls. Today the people who see those exit polls have their cell phones taken away from them, they’re locked in a room until finally they’re let out as the results are sent to the networks. So you don’t get any early information. And the networks are somewhat more careful, that that information is only a piece of the puzzle. You can’t assume that if the exit polls show that someone is going to win in a state by two percentage points, that that’s enough. You often have to wait and see how many results come in.
I guess the election was much closer in the polls before election day in 2004 than it is today. If there was a poll where John Kerry was ahead, it was by a very small amount, and I think it was more the issue was with the election results.
The second part of your question, undecided voters.
I’m not sure we have a particularly high number of undecided voters. In 2004 we did have more people deciding earlier than ever. It was a very polarized election. There are some undecideds out there, but different polls show a different number. But most polls push you a little bit, even if you say I don’t know who to vote for, they’ll kind of ask you who are you leaning towards? I think the numbers are still fairly low in that regard. I don’t think there’s a huge undecided vote out there that John McCain could bank on. In fact it’s likely the spread to go even more in the Obama direction, given that he is the party on the outside.
Question: This is Ole Westerberg, TT, Sweden.
[Inaudible]. Anyway, I was wondering if you could tell me more about election night tips. When I look at the election it seems like, when I try to do the math it seems like if Obama wins just Virginia, for example, it’s practically over. Can you talk a little bit more about that. What do you think? The various early scenarios.
John Fortier: I do remember being in Stockholm in October of 2007. So nearly a year ago. We’re still talking about the same election.
I think I agree with you. There are three big states to watch on the East Coast. Virginia, Ohio and Florida. It is difficult to imagine how John McCain will win if he loses any one of them. And he does trail in all three today. Somewhat closer in Florida, more of a chance than the others, but he does train in all three.
He is trying to compete in Pennsylvania. That is another big stat which in theory could replace one of those other states. If he lost one, Virginia or Florida, he could win in Pennsylvania and still do okay. But I think that’s even less likely. The polls are more against him in that state than in the three that I mentioned.
That is something to watch. To be safe, maybe you want to make sure that two of them are in the Obama camp before you are certain that the election is hard to win for McCain, but I do think even Virginia, the smallest of the three, it’s hard to imagine how John McCain would win if one of those three states go to Obama.
Now if McCain does eke out very very narrow victories, or if it’s maybe close enough that networks are not willing to call that, then I guess I would look out West. One way, you remember the brief period of time when McCain and Sarah Palin were ahead in the polls. A little bit after the Republican Convention, a couple of weeks, and then if you looked at the state polls they looked a lot like they did in 2000 and 2004. And so if John McCain were to have pulled out those three states that I mentioned, where we really would be looking at a battlefield is the Mountain West states. I think Iowa is likely to go to Barack Obama almost no matter what happens. But if it really does close up, I would watch Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico. Those are states that are competitive, are increasingly competitive, and those three or two of them with Iowa will make up for losing Ohio if Barack Obama does lose that.
But the road to 270 is very difficult for John McCain and it really does probably mean somehow eking out small victories in those three big states of Virginia, Ohio and Florida. Otherwise it’s difficult to see how he gets to 270.
Question: I’m Dodangodage Prasad, Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corp., Sri Lanka.
My question is that we have much discussions about the high turnout, but there is also some media discussion about the [inaudible] systems that some working system in [inaudible] problems in the working systems. Yesterday USA Today newspaper carried a big article about this. Some of the television stations also make some comments about the complications that could be happening in the working systems. They were pointing out that [inaudible] elections.
So what is your comment about the situation of working systems? I know there was some big [inaudible]. What is your comment on it?
John Fortier: Another big topic. If you think about 2000, we mentioned the Electoral College. The popular vote went one way, the Electoral College went the other way. Americans, the policy system, didn’t really focus on that issue as much as they did how we vote. The question of CHADs, of the recounts, of absentee ballots from overseas. We had a very close election and we put it under a microscope and we realized that we had some serious issues in our election administration system. I mentioned also that because we are such a decentralized system, that it’s hard to reform because it’s different everywhere. Different machines even from one county to another, different procedures from one state to another, but we did do some things.
I think in general there have been some good things that we’ve done since 2000. Some have not worked out. Even the good things are in the process of change. There’s a lot of change in the way we’re voting. You will see a number of voters who voted on one type of system, voting on another system four years later. That causes some problems. A lot of new voters coming to the polls. They also may not be familiar with the technology.
To simplify. We had a lot of different voting systems. We had the famous punch cards with the CHADs, we don’t have those any more really. But we have two types of machines that we vote on. One is called a direct recording device or an electronic voting machine. It’s like a bank machine where you actually touch the screen or sometimes push a button and register your vote. The other one is more like taking a standardized test where you have a piece of paper and you fill in a bubble or maybe you make an arrow and then that piece of paper is ready by a machine. Those are the opti-can machines.
Most of America has moved to that. We’ve actually spent a lot of money, have some new systems.
The greater controversies have been about the [advanced] machines, the electronic voting machines, with some people questioning should we also have some paper backup of those machines? Some people worry if you push the button, does it really turn into a vote? What if there’s a problem in the machine, or what if, even worse, somebody manipulated the machine. So we have a lot of debate as to whether to have those machines.
Some states have moved to these machines since 2002 when we stated changing things, and now they’ve moved back. The state of Florida is one like that. We also have some, locally in Virginia and Maryland that moved back towards more paper ballots and opti-scan machines.
The last simple message is that if you have a very close election you have a lot of issues we can argue about. We will see a lot of litigation. If it’s not so close we won’t see so much. I think we’re moving often in the right direction, but there is certainly a lot of change and possibility in a close election for disputing some of these matters.
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