I am still musing on what a wonderful night it was on Tuesday into Wednesday. I stayed up all night until I finally threw in the towel at 6.45am. It was a bit tedious at first, but it got really exciting at around 3am.
Over the last few weeks, I have been a very regular visitor to FiveThirtyEight, the home of Nate Silver. So, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that the man’s forecasts have turned out to be right.
Thank you to everyone who joined in our live blog/tweet following the exciting results from across the Atlantic tonight. Many thanks to everyone who used the hashtag #LDVUSA to join in!
It was a great night – to see all the potential Romney paths to victory disintegrating one by one and a EV total of 332 looking on the cards for Obama!
Analysis and post-mortems can wait for another day. For now, it’s celebration time! WoooooHoooooo!
It’s going to be an exciting night as we live blog and tweet here on the US election results as they come in, via the magic of coveritlive.com
Join in with the comments and debate NOW. You can join in by either: (a) adding your comment in the form at the bottom of the box below, or (b) tweeting with hashtag #ldvusa. Use either of those methods and your comments will show in the live stream below.
It can often be a mathematical nightmare trying to work out who’s winning as US Presidential Election night progresses. Sometimes, some poor souls even end up having to rely on David Dimbleby to explain what’s going on! Poor things!
Here are three nifty tools to help you make sense of what is happening tonight:
We’ll be covering the US Election results night live here on Liberal Democrat Voice from 11pm on Tuesday.
You can join in by using the Twitter hashtag #LDVUSA, which will include your tweet on the scrolling page here on LDV. You’ll also be able to comment here on the screen using the Coveritlive.com tool.
There’ll be commentary from the LDV editorial team and Lib Dem bloggers throughout the night, plus updates from leading US news and commentary Twitter streams.
This is John Kasich, Republican Governor of the state of Ohio, USA.
It is possible to argue, credibly (albeit amid much debate), that if Barack Obama wins re-election on November 6th, the first person he ought to thank is John Kasich.
Polls suggest that, despite the hyperventilated efforts of the Romney campaign to generate some “big mo” after the Denver debate, Obama is still ahead in vital Ohio.
There are just 16 days to go until the US Presidential election. Liberal Democrat Voice will be live-blogging the election results as they come in on the night. Hopefully, the count won’t go on as long as it did in 2000, or we might be in for a very long live blog.
I should declare, up front, that I am inveterately
This week the New York Times ran a fascinating, detailed study of the drone war being fought by Barack Obama as he decides which alleged terrorists will be targeted by the American military:
A few weeks ago I was sure that Mitt Romney would win the US Republican Presidential nomination. He’d be nicely battered and bruised and the Democrats would have a fat file of YouTube and news clips to use against him (“I like firing people“/”I am not concerned about the very poor“/”Let Detroit go bankrupt” etc). But he would win.
However, it is now becoming possible that he might not win the nomination. Oh dear. Rick Santorum has been ahead in a string of national polls and is fourish points ahead in Michigan. Yes, Michigan, where …
With a new American Presidential cycle producing, as ever, near obsessional coverage (and ignoring other more important electoral news), now is a good time to update a post from the last cycle about learning lessons from the US:
This year is already seeing all sorts of prognostications about the lessons UK political parties and campaigners can and should be drawing.
However, many of the differences between American and British election campaigns are not the result of American campaigners having good ideas the British should copy, but rather are the result of four key legal differences between the two countries.
Here’s your starter for ten in our weekend slot where we throw up an idea or thought for debate…
Over the last three years Obama has had to concede much of his programme to Republicans in Congress. His healthcare reforms had to be significantly watered down even before Republicans won back the House of Representatives in 2010. And the reforms themselves have since acted as a lightning rod for criticism of the President.
Obama is struggling to get the economy going again amid continued turbulence in the global economy and unemployment is staying stubbornly high despite the massive £800 billion stimulus package. …
Everything you needed to know about the current ‘epiphenomenal imbroglio’ ((C) Will Self at 0:48 here) engulfing the US economy, courtesy series 6 of The West Wing:
Newt Gingrich, a right-winger whose bid to become US President looks to be crashing and burning after many of his senior staff walked out on his campaign, is not an obvious role model for British politicians, especially those not on the right.
But at heart quite a few all across the political spectrum would, I suspect, be rather pleased if he ends up doing well. That’s because the cause of the falling out is Gingrich’s insistence on doing two things that will strike a chord with many politicians and a fear into many election agents.
The political advertising put out by people who disdain negative ads is often too self-consciously worthy to be effective. John Hickenlooper’s advert as part of his successful run for Governor of Colorado however was rather different – and was rated as being very effective by those watching the race:
Labour’s filibustering in the House of Lords in many ways echoes the current tactics of Republicans in the Senate: using delaying tactics to avoid issues coming to a vote when they know they will almost certainly lose a vote when it comes.
Senate leaders announced on Thursday a package of rule changes that seek to reduce the stalemate and gridlock that has characterized the chamber in recent years.
But lawmakers failed to agree on a limitation to the use of the filibuster—the right of any senator to hold up any
Paul Elgood is a Lib Dem councillor in Brighton & Hove, but has been out in Boston, in the USA, watching closely observing the mid-term elections. Here’s his early morning dispatch…
Four years ago, Boston politics looked very different. Teddy Kennedy had just won what was to be his last campaign, Congressman Barney Frank romped re-election to make it 26 years in Congress, and new Governor Deval Patrick, backed by a then little-known Senator called Barack Obama won the State House, following on from Republican Mitt Romney.
Obama’s historic election followed just two years later, but so too did the …
The Tea Party movement is even now preparing for its first big electoral test. Banners are being printed, bumper stickers peeled, computerised push-pollers tested.
They are a frightening prospect for European liberals. Perhaps any foreign radical movement looks bizarre to outsiders, but the combination of Sarah Palin, red-neck fundamentalists and the shadowy Koch brothers with their billions is a fearsome prospect.
Yet the Tea Party has lessons for us, even if it doesn’t make its way over here – which in some form or another it seems likely to do.
I’ve heard a few Liberal Democrats express concern about the mid-term election results. The fear, as it has been expressed to me, is that Cleggmania had a lot of superficial similarities to Obamamania – it was a campaign based on hope, by a progressive liberal who offered something new, and it led to the formation of a government. Seeing Obamamania apparently swept away in a surge of vehemently conservative tea-partyers, several Lib Dems fear that the same fate could befall them at the next election.
I think this is simplistic.
America’s gay rights activists were celebrating last night as a judge re-legalised gay marriage, making the latest step in the long-running battle in the US and the state of California.
Previously, legal gay marriage had been granted to Californians following successful legal challenge on discrimination grounds of the rules that meant marriage was only available to heterosexual couples.
Only after thousands of gay Californians had tied the knot did anti-gay activists manage to get a proposition on the ballot paper last to ask voters whether gay marriage should be disallowed. By a narrow margin, Californians voted to end homogamy in their state …
Tax is emerging as the next big battleground in the US Congress. George Bush’s “tax cuts for the rich” expire at the end of the year. Obama proposes extending them for everyone except those earning over $250,000 (couples) / $200,000 (singles). That means only the top 2% revert to their previous tax rates (about 4 percentage points up on the situation now). The Republicans want all the Bush tax cuts to be maintained and, indeed, extended to everyone.
Well, I suppose we can be relieved that, after simply naysaying all Obama’s proposals for a year, the Republicans have at last come …
For some people and organisations Twitter has become, at least in part, simply another way of sending out timely news. Issue a news release? Check. Put it on website? Check. Send out tweet with headline and link back to site? Check.
All sounds fairly typical and unexceptional and if you’d asked me a few days ago I wouldn’t have added an exception or caveat to that sort of process, even if it didn’t involve a formal press release or link. If you treat Twitter as an outlet for official, timely news then that’s how you use it. I say “a few …
Campaign ’08: A Turning Point For Digital Media is a slim volume by Kate Kaye, senior news editor at ClickZ, taking an in-depth look at the online advertising used in the 2008 Presidential contest for the primaries and then the general election.
Though the book touches on other aspects of internet campaigning, what makes it stand out from the crowd of competing volumes is its focus on advertising.
It starts with a reminder that there is only one John McCain: the McCain mocked in 2008 for not getting online campaigning is the same McCain who was feted in 2000 for getting online campaigning. Indeed, in many ways it was his 2000 campaign that put online political fundraising on the agenda in the US, just as Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign put online organising on the agenda.
Last night Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate for Massachusetts Senate, lost by 5 points a race that just weeks ago everyone was declaring hers by right. And even before the polls closed it seemed like everyone was playing the blame game.
Coakley’s team and the White House pointed the fingers at each other. Some are blaming the economy, the excellence of Republican candidate Scott Brown (our first centrefold Senator, history should note), or Coakleys repeated Red Sox related gaffs. There’s even a “Drunk Electorate” theory. All of these factors surely played some part.
Nominally an extremely safe seat for the Democrats, the Democratic candidate Martha Coakley should be a shoe-in.
And yet Republican former centrefold star Scott Brown, once voted by Cosmo as America’s Sexiest Man (the link is fairly safe for work, but does contain a tastefully cropped naked man) has been closing the gap in the polls, and in some cases even taken a lead.
Of key importance in this battle is the senatorial supermajority, which we have covered on The Voice in the past. In the US senate, a party with 60 of the 100 senators – or the votes of 60 senators – can move a vote of cloture which can end a filibuster. This removes from the minority party a powerful tool to veto legislation by talking it out. This has become all the more fraught recently since Obamacare, the extremely controversial healthcare legislation currently under consideration. If the Republicans win the Massachusetts, the Democrats lose their right of veto and they could lose Obamacare.
Here’s a video for each candidate to give you a flavour of the battle.
First, President Obama is staking his political reputation to support Martha Coakley and underlining the future of Obamacare:
In 2006 two filmmakers decided to document the first term of a little known US senator called Barack Obama. Within nine months their rookie was running for president.
The resulting two hour HBO documentary was shown on BBC Two last Saturday (9th Jan). If you didn’t see it, do all you can to track it down somewhere, somehow. It is clear that the film-makers formed a trusted relationship with Barack, Michelle and his team so the access to the deeds, the techniques, the emotions and the inspiration of the whole cast from candidate to ten year …
Tom Bailey Daniel Walker, I'm fully aware of how the EU elective system works, and the point is that European voters are not allowed any direct access to that process. [ p...
Daniel Walker @Tom Bailey "instead of the white/black smoke system used to choose Pope von der Leyen"
The President of the European Commission is nominated by the European...
Tom Bailey I like the sound of STV elections. Why not start the process by convincing the EU to use that system instead of the white/black smoke system used to choose Pope...
Matt (Bristol) Mark, I notice other comments have not made it and in truth there is no reason for me to derail this thread. But I genuinely believe there are a significant num...
Hywel Paul - what was this. It isn't on the wikipedia page of polls. Not surprised by the lack of commentary - the slow but noticeable down-tick in reform poll rati...
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Tom Bailey 
Daniel Walker 
Matt (Bristol) 
Hywel 