Last time, they stole Florida. This time, they stole Florida and Ohio. In 2008, how many will they steal?
We are the optimists, the true believers, putting our coins in the slots and our chips on the table, with faith that the game is basically fair -- or if it's rigged, that it's rigged as often for us as it is against us. But Karl Rove runs the casino, and as long as he does we will not get a break. In order to win, we are going to have to change the rules.
We lost Florida the minute Jeb Bush appointed their Secretary of State. We lost Ohio the same way. The mechanism was complicated - a Diebold script here, a few lost ballots there - but it was all over long before it began. If we had taken the state by a million votes, it wouldn't have mattered. That's not going to happen. And when it's a close game, if they own the SecState, they win. In short:
When they cheat us, they beat us.
To take 2008, we need the SecStates.
Data and analysis below.
The Diebold machines are only going to spread, making it harder to win with less than a landslide in any Republican-controlled state over the next 20 years. Ideally, all electoral matters would be handled by a nonpartisan office -- but until then we need to go after the Secretaries of State.
I just did a quick and dirty analysis to gauge which states are most important to control. Using the terrific spreadsheets posted at electoral-vote.com, I calculated a "Swing Index" for each state that reflects (1) how big a prize it is, and (2) how closely divided it is. The Swing Index goes up proportionally to the state's electoral vote, and goes down proportionally to the winner's margin of victory. It is:
Swing Index = (Electoral Votes) / (Winner percent - Loser percent)
A low score means the state is (1) safely red or blue, (2) has few electoral votes, or both. A high score means that, for the number of electoral votes it offers, the state is too close for comfort.
Here's the list. (Plesae scroll down)
State | EV | Kerry | Bush | Swing Index | Governor |
Pennsylvania | 21 | 51 | 49 | 1050 | D |
Wisconsin | 10 | 50 | 49 | 1000 | D |
Ohio | 20 | 49 | 51 | 1000 | R |
Iowa | 7 | 49 | 50 | 700 | D |
California | 55 | 54 | 45 | 611 | R |
Michigan | 17 | 51 | 48 | 567 | D |
Florida | 27 | 47 | 52 | 540 | R |
New Mexico | 5 | 49 | 50 | 500 | D |
New Hampshire | 4 | 50 | 49 | 400 | R |
New Jersey | 15 | 53 | 46 | 214 | D |
Minnesota | 10 | 52 | 47 | 200 | R |
Illinois | 21 | 55 | 44 | 191 | D |
New York | 31 | 58 | 40 | 172 | R |
Nevada | 5 | 48 | 51 | 167 | R |
Virginia | 13 | 46 | 54 | 163 | D |
Washington | 11 | 53 | 46 | 157 | D |
Texas | 34 | 38 | 61 | 148 | R |
Missouri | 11 | 46 | 54 | 138 | D |
Colorado | 9 | 46 | 53 | 129 | R |
Oregon | 7 | 53 | 47 | 117 | D |
North Carolina | 15 | 43 | 57 | 107 | D |
Arizona | 10 | 44 | 55 | 91 | D |
Georgia | 15 | 41 | 59 | 83 | R |
Tennessee | 11 | 43 | 57 | 79 | D |
Maryland | 10 | 56 | 43 | 77 | R |
Connecticut | 7 | 54 | 44 | 70 | R |
Arkansas | 6 | 45 | 54 | 67 | R |
Louisiana | 9 | 42 | 57 | 60 | D |
Indiana | 11 | 39 | 60 | 52 | D |
Maine | 4 | 53 | 45 | 50 | D |
Massachusetts | 12 | 62 | 37 | 48 | R |
South Carolina | 8 | 41 | 58 | 47 | R |
Delaware | 3 | 53 | 46 | 43 | D |
Kentucky | 8 | 40 | 60 | 40 | R |
West Virginia | 5 | 43 | 56 | 38 | D |
Hawaii | 4 | 55 | 44 | 36 | R |
Alabama | 9 | 37 | 63 | 35 | R |
Mississippi | 6 | 40 | 60 | 30 | R |
Kansas | 6 | 36 | 63 | 22 | D |
Oklahoma | 7 | 34 | 66 | 22 | D |
Rhode Island | 4 | 60 | 39 | 19 | R |
Vermont | 3 | 59 | 39 | 15 | R |
Montana | 3 | 39 | 59 | 15 | R |
Nebraska | 5 | 32 | 67 | 14 | R |
South Dakota | 3 | 38 | 61 | 13 | R |
North Dakota | 3 | 36 | 63 | 11 | R |
Utah | 5 | 26 | 72 | 11 | R |
Alaska | 3 | 34 | 62 | 11 | R |
Idaho | 4 | 29 | 69 | 10 | R |
Wyoming | 3 | 29 | 69 | 8 | D |
D.C. | 3 | 90 | 9 | 4 | |
This method is a starting point, please offer your improvements. Remember, states at the bottom of the list are safe or worthless D or R, and states at the top are plums ripe for picking - juicy combinations of divided electorates and significant EVs.
What I'm seeing is, first, that the Democrats absolutely have to defend Pennsylvania. Imagine how much worse things would have been if we'd had the same shenanigans, from absentee ballot paper weight to precinct-by-precinct challengers, brought to us by a Republican SecState in Pennsylvania. We also need to defend Wisconsin.
And, as we knew already, the Democrats need to own Ohio. Secretary of State is most important, but we should target every race there until we have a solid home field advantage.
Surprisingly, in this analysis, a state I take for granted, California, jumps out. What if Arnold were to convert the state to electronic paperless voting? Fortunately, the SecState there is elected not appointed (he's a Democrat from San Francisco). But, be wary of the Repubs running a strong play for California Secretary of State -- if they control balloting there, they control the nation.
The others break down about as you'd expect. But there are three important points I'd like to make.
1. Governors matter So do Secretaries of State, Attorneys General, and on and on. At DailyKos, we all but ignored Governors' races. If they control the voting machinery, they control the election. Once we lose honest voting, we have lost democracy -- the state becomes party-owned. How can we defeat a Republican governor, if he's willing to do vote-suppression and ballot-tampering -- how do you beat a team on their home field when they own the umps? We should start now, before the corruption sinks too deep. We should also work with friendly state legislators immediately to begin trying to move control of elections away from the SecState and into the hands of a nonpartisan or bipartisan board.
2. Take nothing for granted We lost Texas by 23 points, but we only won California by 9. That is unacceptable. The Republicans just made gains in the House, Senate, and won the White House by a bigger margin than last time. They are not going to be sitting on their hands.
It goes against everything I know to imagine California as anything but "safe blue." That is why it is critical to use an unbiased metric to apportion our resources. I propose the Swing Index, but other methods that take demographic trends into account may be better. The Swing Index tells us something that challenges my intuition but that is worth thinking about: It is more important to play defense in Pennsylvania and California than to play offense in Florida. Only an unbiased metric will let us see beyond our assumptions.
3. Remember Lexington and Concord In the war to overthrow the first King George, the British marched from their fort in Boston to the revolutionary center of Concord. Paul Revere rode to warn the town, and the minutemen - a group of self-organized citizen militia, the original Kos Rapid Response team - assembled at Lexington to stand them down. Paul Revere was captured, but his job was done - he had warned the town, giving them time to prepare. (He was the original Howard Dean.) When the British arrived at Lexington, 75 minutemen were there to meet them -- but the British vastly outnumbered them, and killed or injured one-fourth of the Minutemen. They fell back, and regrouped in Concord. By now minutemen and fighters from neighboring towns had begun to arrive, and arms and munitions were being brought in. They fought the British all along the route to Concord, the fighting lasted for days, and by the time the British retreated they had lost 73 soldiers with another 174 wounded. This was the first battle of the revolution.
We have had our Lexington. But now the call has gone out, the progressives are assembling, we are regrouping and we will not be stopped.
It's time for Concord.
Let's take our country back.
(p.s. if you would care to recommend this diary, so that it may stay on the front page half as long as it took me to write it, I would be grateful.)