Charlie Cook, the well-known political seer for National
Journal, was in town this week, and we were lucky enough not only to touch
him for the use of one of his illuminating analyses (see Viewpoint, p. 15) but
to hear his fresh take on the 2008 presidential election, as presented to the
Memphis Rotary Club on Tuesday.
Cook confirmed something which we had begun to suspect, that — political trends or no
political trends — the contest between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John
McCain is going to be a real barn-burner, too close for anybody to hazard a
definitive prediction on at this stage. What makes it so is the peculiar
mathematics of the electoral college, which — now as in the foundation days of
the republic — ensures that the candidate who ekes out a narrow victory in a
large state will get the whole kit and caboodle of electors from that state,
while the blowout winner of a marginally less populous state will get a lesser
number, even though his overall popular-vote total might have him well ahead
otherwise.
In our time, one of the consequences of this anomaly was Bush over Gore in 2000,
in what may have been the most crucial election outcome of the last hundred
years. But we need not rush too fast from that fact into the declaration that
the electoral-college system must be changed at all costs (something that would
require nothing less than constitutional revision — perhaps an easier business
in the Internet Age but still one involving a long and drawn-out process of
congressional action, followed by state-by-state approval). It is largely
forgotten now, but there was a general assumption just prior to the election of
November 2000 that it was Gore, not Bush, who might lose the popular vote but
win the presidency on the basis of an electoral-vote edge.
In any case, what we have is what we have. And, for various reasons too lengthy
and involved to go into here, the prevailing national mood favoring Democrats
won’t necessarily be reflected in the presidential-race outcome. Consider this
finding by Cook: If Obama should win all the states won by both Al Gore
in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004 (and these were narrow losers, remember) plus all
the states won by either Gore or Kerry but not both (New Hampshire, Iowa,
and New Mexico) plus Nevada, which was won by neither, the resultant electoral vote
standing would be Obama 269, McCain 269.
Other states are in play this year — Virginia, for example, which has morphed
from a Southern state into a mid-Atlantic one, in Cook’s thinking. But the
likelihood, in any case, is that partisan loyalties will be in flux nationally
and that the kind of regional shifts in thinking favored by electoral-college
math will be decisive in determining a winner. This is the roulette-wheel
reality that some analysts (though not Cook) choose to call “post-partisan.”
If indeed we have entered some such unpredictable era of politics, then
post-partisan may feel a bit too much like post-partum. We’ll be happy to see
the new birth, we suppose, but the experience may end up having been more
uncomfortable and painful than we’d prefer.
