Coakley Brown

I have mostly ignored this Senate race; I assumed that whatever power kept Ted Kennedy in office for forty-seven years would be sufficient to deliver this seat to whoever the Democrats decided to run. Silly me.

This morning I tuned in to CNN, which took a short break from its round-the-clock Haiti earthquake coverage to say

• People in Massachusetts are angry
• Martha Coakley apparently called someone named Curt Schilling a "Yankees fan."

Go figure.

538 is all over this; evidently Nate Silver really really wants to see the Democrats keep their 60-seat supermajority in the Senate, and hopes that by saying Coakley will lose that he'll rally enough Democrats to the polls to cause her to win. I usually like Silver/538, and really appreciated his coverage of polling results during the 2008 Presidential campaign. Unfortunately I wonder if he's out of his depth here, since there just doesn't seem to be a lot of good polling data regarding the Massachusetts Senate race. Just anger. And baseball.

the perils of being unprecedented

Image by drewsaunders via FlickrThe Washington Post talks about the Obama Administration applicant questionnaire:

Applicants are asked whether they or anyone in their family owns a gun.

The application also asks applicants to “please list all aliases or ‘handles’ you have used to communicate on the Internet.”

“Briefly describe the most controversial matters you have been involved with during the course of your career.”

I wouldn't dare parse this article; I can't tell from the tone if it's sympathetic (Mr Obama has lots of enemies) or cynical (Mr Obama has lots of supporters and can afford to be very picky) or accusatory (what now he's all corporate and such? etc.).

Good luck Mr President. I wouldn't trade places with you for the world.

Larry Sabato/University of Virginia podcast

Image via WikipediaWhile doing housework today I had the latest edition of the University of Virginia podcast playing in the background. Larry Sabato, the University's resident political commentator (I think it's telling that this episode was called "Larry Sabato: More Than The Score"), said some interesting things about the upcoming election and the subsequent Democratic senatorial supermajority, and while he insists that he always votes for someone named Thomas Jefferson he probably tipped his hand about his personal politics when he said that someday the entitlements party will be over and someone will have to pay the bill.

He estimates our current obligations to be on the order of fifty trillion dollars. That's roughly four times the size of the whole economy.

Anyone who talks about these numbers isn't a liberal and certainly isn't progressive. But to be fair, anyone who admits they won't be able to increase spending/lower taxes isn't a politician. And Sabato as much as says so.

All told it makes for brisk if occasionally depressing listening. I highly recommend it.

possibly the last thing we'll say about early voting

There's a post on 538 this morning referring to a poll saying 55-60 percent of New Mexicans have already voted. I'll be shocked if I get to my local polling place and find that I haven't already voted.

I'm not saying I'm going to have my vote cast for me by someone else this year; I'm just saying voter fraud is widespread in New Mexico.

fielding a call from the local Republicans

I got a call from the local Republican effort last night. I'm not exactly in the bullseye of their publicity effort (538 uses the jargon "ground game" here, and notes that the Democrats are way ahead of the Republicans nationwide), since I don't answer the only landline I own, don't own a television (and so don't see any television ads), don't listen to the radio, and rarely read the local paper.

They actually called my wife's house, and I fielded the call there.

The woman calling asked which of these three issues are the most important to me

• jobs/the economy
• national security
• some third thing, I forget what

I noticed that the questions did not refer to "character issues" or "the war" or "gas prices" or abortion. It was the sort of ad I'd expect at this stage of the campaign: centrist, middle-America stuff meant to find undecided voters, etc.

There were three or four more questions, all meant to let me know who was on the Republican ticket. Which was news to me, since until then I had no idea who was running against Ben Lujan (the younger) for the open 3rd New Mexico Congressional seat. Turns out it's someone name Dan East.

For the life of me I couldn't figure what the call was supposed to accomplish. Maybe the Republican Party is gathering data, but I doubt they'd put real people on calls like that when they could do the same thing with a robot call.

What a mess. I'll be shocked if the Republicans don't end up losing all four open seats (one Senate, three House) in New Mexico this year. Not only are they disorganized, but all the Democrats running for the national offices are members of New Mexico political families or multistate families like the Udalls.

Barack Obama in Espanola Thursday

I heard on the local news this morning that Barack Obama will be in Espanola on Thursday. It certainly makes sense for him to visit New Mexico: 538 has the state as a toss-up today; last week it was shaded in favor of Obama but it has gradually drifted to undecided as more polling data has come in.

I'm perplexed as to why he's visiting Espanola, of all places. He'd see more people in Albuquerque or even Las Cruces, and Santa Fe would go nuts for him. He wasn't popular during the campaign for the nomination: for some reason the Espanola area and the surrounding county is still populated with largish, wooden, hand-painted signs supporting Hillary Clinton. Further north I actually saw signs that said to vote for Hillary because "she's the smarter candidate." Not the smarter choice, but the smarter candidate. These may have been holdovers from when our governor, Bill Richardson, was still in the race, but I rather doubt it: that's not how things are typically done in northern New Mexico.

I suspect Senator Obama will be symbolically if not directly confronting a racial issue; black people have not historically been welcome in northern New Mexico towns. Good for him, and good luck to him.

I would still bet on New Mexico going for Obama; the state was very close in the last two Presidential elections, and this year we're expecting a Democrat to win our open Senate seat and I think all three Congressional seats (all also open) are expected to go to Democrats as well, and given that today we have two Republican Congressional representatives and one Republican Senator, that's a clean sweep downticket.

John McCain came south to Albuquerque from Minneapolis to proclaim himself to be different from George W. Bush immediately after the convention; I'll be surprised if we see him again.

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New Mexico elections

I love democracy. I really do. I love the simple elegance of well-informed voters casting votes that are then accurately counted with the majority prevailing. It's not a perfect system, and it relies on so much, and says so much: about the voters, about the issues, and of course about the system.

And then there's the article from today's Alibi, saying that someone named Jim Noel didn't report for work this past Monday:

Jim Noel sent a letter to Secretary of State Mary Herrera saying he wouldn't be reporting for duty Monday, Sept. 8, after all. This leaves New Mexico without a director of the Bureau of Elections less than two months before Nov. 4. Noel is the director of the Judicial Standards Commission, but another title spurred outrage from the state's Republicans—Noel is also the son-in-law of Rep. Tom Udall, who's in a close race with Rep. Steve Pearce for U.S. Senate. Noel's wife is Amanda Cooper, campaign manager for Udall and daughter of Udall's wife.

That's right: the Secretary of State for the state of New Mexico appointed the son-in-law of one of the candidates for an open Senate seat to be director of the Bureau of Elections.

And this from the Alibi, an Albuquerque-based free paper not often known for being a mouthpiece for the New Mexico Republican party. The article links to another Alibi article on roughly the same topic that mentions, among other things:

Three ballot boxes were discovered to be empty after the primary in Cibola County, where state Sen. David Ulibarri won over Clemente Sanchez by fewer than 10 votes.

Empty ballot boxes are kind of unusual, even in New Mexico, but late vote counts are not:

Why on the morning after an election does New Mexico not usually have its votes tallied yet? The main problem in the past hasn't been with the whole state, he says, but with Bernalillo County. (Secretary of State Herrera was the clerk in Bernalillo County from 2001 through 2006).

As for missing paper ballots in Cibola County, Ivey-Soto says he doesn't believe they're missing at all. "They were not where they were supposed to be, and they ended up getting reported as missing," he says. The county clerk opted to wait until a judge could be present to look for the ballots, he says, to avoid suspicion. The status of those ballots should be revealed soon.

...

Training election workers is difficult, he says, and that could be part of the problem. Each precinct has a polling place on election day, and an enormous amount of money is spent to set them up. Bernalillo County has more than 400 precincts. Even when two precincts are using the same polling location, each requires a precinct judge, two elections judges and two clerks. That's the case even though 30 percent of the voters cast their ballots early and another 30 percent vote by absentee ballot. "So we're spending 80 percent of our resources for 40 percent of the voters."

This last paragraph says two things: only forty per cent of votes are cast on election day, and each precinct (not each polling location) requires a staff of five.

If I recall correctly, early and late ballots are not necessarily counted; they're only counted if the election-day count is close enough that these ballots could sensibly change the outcome of the election. I don't remember what the rules are in New Mexico, and I can't seem to find them online.

Let's all hope and pray the 2008 Presidential election doesn't end in an Electoral College margin of less than five votes with New Mexico still left to count. New Mexico has a history of late, poorly-counted, poorly-monitored elections, and the person who was responsible for the worst-run county two years ago is now Secretary of State, and recently appointed an in-law of a candidate to run the elections state-wide. And all this with less than two months until election day.

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short shameful apolitical confession

I haven't watched this week's convention. I didn't watch last week's convention.