It happens every election. The ballots are cast and counted. The winner is declared and within a few hours of the concession speeches the media begins reading tealeaves to try and figure out what swung the electorate toward one candidate or the other.
Generally there are few good tealeaves that do actually deserve to be read. Shifts in the polls leading up to the final days and exit polls taken on Election day being chief among them. But as valid as these two sets of data points are, they do fall short in some regard. That is why win or lose it becomes our responsibility as activists to underscore what we see as the overarching themes and true turning points of this campaign in it's aftermath.
We must frame the post election debate and there is no better time to start coordinating our talking points than right now.
As I said polls and exit polls are two great data points to reference when trying to figure out what the masses were making their decision on when they cast their ballots. But they have a tendency to be interpreted very narrowly and too often that interpretation is unfavorable to our side.
For instance should President Obama win a second term (and I believe he will) this latest shift in the polls over the last few days could and probably will be spun by the Romney campaign as a reflection of The President winning over undecideds due to his role in responding to Hurricane Sandy.
That will be the GOPs framing in the aftermath of the Election. That it took an act of God to re-elect President Obama. That is the message we will have to combat if we want this victory to mean something for Liberals and Progressives in the long run. If the GOP is especially bitter about losing they will also throw Chris Christie under the bus for the sin of standing near the President as he looked Presidential.
You don't have to be Charlie Christ to understand the GOP's penchant for throwing around the word traitor. The attempts to tarnish him before he can run in 2016 will be immediate and they will be fierce. An elephant never forgets and the GOP never forgives.
But mostly it will be an argument of circumstances beyond the their control. The GOP will argue that this was not a national rebuke of Governor Romney's ideas, nor the ideas of the Republican Party, it was simply poor timing on God's part. They will try to claim that no candidate could have beat President Obama in a time of national tragedy. The undecideds just ate it up.
That is the argument we have to counter. If we fails to do so, if we let this idea stand that President Obama just got lucky, than all of the work of discrediting the Romney/Ryan world view over the course of this campaign will be washed away. When the history books are written it will be said that President Barack Obama and his ideas about the role of Government were set to lose until pure luck stepped in and dealt him a winning hand. And with that the GOP will feel even more righteous in their obstruction, because he didn't earn it, he didn't "build that," he just got lucky.
We cannot let that frame take hold. So how do we combat it?
The first step would be exit polls. Hopefully in addition to demographic data the exit polls will also ask a series of questions to establish why voters chose to vote the way they did. Any pollster that does not ask an open ended question to this effect, or at least offers both Hurricane Sandy and The 47% tape as multiple choice options is wasting our time.
My gut instinct is that this campaign like most campaigns was won over the summer. Everything since then has been about shoring up the base, and trying to win 50.1% of the very few undecideds that were left. The demographics of this nation and that 47% tape released in September will have been the true deciding factors.
But we will have to wait and see what the Exit Polls say to know for sure.
The second step would be to point to the overall trajectory of the polls over the course of the year. It is a logical fallacy to assume that the last people to decide were the deciding factor. The fact that Obama never dipped below 60% chance of victory in Nate Silvers 538 projections was an early indicator that voters simply rejected Romney's ideology from the outset. The race was practically over in late September.
It's hard to say if there were ever enough undecideds left to save Romney.
One could also argue that Sandy made no difference at all. Obama both hurt and redeemed himself in the debates, but ever since the polls have been moving slowly and steadily in his favor. Odds are he would have the same polling numbers today without Hurricane Sandy. The extra days of campaigning in Ohio might have even been more beneficial to the Obama campaign than any News Footage of him and Governor Christie touring Hurricane damage together.
But perhaps it would be easier and more effective to embrace the Hurricane Sandy theme while tweaking it to our own advantage.
I don't mean simply stating "The President did an excellent job and the voters responded." That message while certainly self serving falls right into the GOP's frame of absolving their agenda and Ayn Rand philosophy from any blame. If that is the best we can do, Romney will go away but his ideas will live on.
Instead we would be better served to frame Hurricane Sandy as a real world scenario in which two competing ideological theories were put to test and President Obama's won. From the very beginning of this campaign. In fact since the beginning of Obama's Presidency we have seen a massive push back from the right wing. For the past 30 years we have been told that Government was not part of the solution it was part of the problem.
Barack Obama challenged that idea.
From the auto-loan, to the recovery act, to the overhaul of our health care system; President Obama has taken the position that Government has a positive role to play in the lives of every day citizens. And every step of the way that vision has been detoured, derailed and deformed by Republican obstructionism, nay saying and outright mockery.
The GOP like to claim the economy would improve if Government would just get out of the way, and then they stand in the way to prove it!
President Obama and Elizabeth Warren have been very eloquent in their delivery of the Democratic message, but when President Obama gave remarks stunningly similar to Warren's they were chopped up, taken out of context and made to sound like President Obama did not acknowledge the hard work and sacrifice small business owners have invested in themselves.
Suddenly the "you didn't build that" meme was born and the debate about the role of Government really began to ramp up. This election has been about Romney's "Corporate Libertarianism" versus President Obama's balancing act of Individual and National interests. And President Obama's vision will win.
To further underscore his severely conservative philosophy Mitt Romney picked for his running mate a man who idolized Ayn Rand and whose budget would shred the social safety net that keeps society from crashing to the ground. He proposed cutting social programs and services for the most vulnerable among us so he could purchase more ships for the Navy.
All along this has been a choice election between two very different Governing Philosophies. Hurricane Sandy took that conversation out of the hypothetical and made it a reality. It brought the point home in the final days of this election.
What kind of Government do you want in a time of crises?
Do you want a Government that washes it's hands of natural disaster relief the way Romney proposed? One that sent disaster relief back to the states, or even the private sector? Or do you want a Government that won't worry about whether it's cost effective to rebuild your house/community and just get it done?
Do you want a Federal Government that can respond before a storm makes landfall like President Obama has demonstrated? Or do you want a Federal Government so small you can drown it in a Hurricane?
After four years of competing arguments about the role of Government, voters were given a real world example of what this debate boils down too and they chose President Barack Obama. That is how we counter this Hurricane Sandy/October Surprise/Don't blame Ayn Rand it was an "Act of God" bullshit the Right is going to come up with! That is how we pin this defeat to their bad ideas and their bad polices- not just their bad luck.
If Hurricane Sandy had any effect on this election it served as the laboratory that validated and vindicated the last four years of President Obama's leadership and ideas. It proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that Government is a force for good when entrusted in the right hands.
Of course none of this matters if we lose on November 6th. So GOTV.
If you can still early vote do it now, lines will be long long long on election day. If you can't early vote show up early on November 6th, bring some water, a friend and prepare to wait in line. If you have to mail your absentee ballot make sure you use correct postage and that it's not too late to arrive by Election Day! If so, you will have to hand it in!
Remember: No tolerance for intimidation!