LA City Elections: Promise, Pitfalls, Potential For Change

Today is Election Day in LA City, and given the turnouts we've seen in other off-year elections, as well as the fact that the mayoral race, the biggest ticket on the ballot, is basically a coronation, turnout is likely to be very small, save for the wide-open 5th District City Council race, which is really anybody's to win (very unusual in LA politics). The expectation is about 15%. Despite the fact that Los Angeles actually has a fairly rich culture of political activism, from the Latino student sit-ins to recent Prop. 8 actions and hundreds more, the recent history is that city elections do not draw much of a crowd. That's a shame in a city that's larger than the total populations of many states, and it reduces accountability on the elected officials.

I don't live in Los Angeles, but I work here, and I have a conflicted view about the way the city runs. I think if every resident were forced to watch The Garden, the Oscar-nominated documentary about South Los Angeles residents being forcibly evicted from a community garden, nobody would vote for anyone currently on the City Council, least of all Mayor Villaraigosa. The film, almost a real-life version of The Wire, revealed a city government of backroom deals and power-brokers able to make their voices heard well beyond the needs of the community. You can add to that the rare bit of journalism from the LA Weekly about the City Council, and you could be convinced that the lack of accountability from the electoral process has bred a toxic atmosphere at City Hall. The likely consolidation of power that would result from Villaraigosa allies in the city attorney and city controller offices would lead you even closer to that conclusion.

Yet among the morass, there are some very earnest public servants trying to manage a very unwieldy city, with a host of unique problems and challenges that would vex any lawmaking body on Earth. Set aside this year's $1 billion dollar budget; the problems of immigration, gang violence, income inequality, traffic, health care, air pollution, education, and much, much more all converge in this city. From 10,000 feet these problems look intractable, and yet there are gradual, slow steps toward mitigation, and even areas where Los Angeles is a national model. The sales tax receipts from Measure R may finally bring sustainable transit infrastructure to fruition for more than a handful of the city's residents. The Green Trucks Program is an innovative, first-in-the-nation effort to bring labor and environmental groups together to reduce pollution, create living wage jobs and help save the planet. And the city's Green Jobs Training program is seen as so potentially game-changing that it was used as a model in a White House staff report from their Middle Class Task Force:

The City of Los Angeles has undertaken or is in the midst of undertaking several initiatives that, together, begin to constitute a model for how cities can maximize the benefits of “going green” for working families. As is often the case, necessity was the mother of policy innovation. A few years ago, the city faced a number of stark challenges including: a state renewable energy mandate (a statewide “portfolio standard” requiring 20% renewable energy by 2017) and a state cap on greenhouse gas emissions; an impending shortage of skilled construction workers; entrenched poverty and joblessness in many low-income neighborhoods; and toxic levels of diesel pollution that were imposing huge health costs and blocking the growth of the nation’s largest port complex.

In the past year, Los Angeles has adopted a comprehensive approach to redevelopment which will ensure that city-subsidized development projects are built green and serve as vehicles for moving low-income residents into middle-class construction careers. The Port of Los Angeles has also begun to implement a comprehensive solution to freight-related air pollution that will increase efficiency, enhance security, and improve work conditions and living standards for port truck drivers. Most important is the fact that these initiatives are being undertaken on a large scale: the city’s construction policy is expected to impact 15,000 jobs over five years while the Clean Trucks Program (discussed below) could affect as many as 16,000 port truck drivers.

In 2008, the City of Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) adopted a landmark policy designed to protect the environment, safeguard the interests of taxpayers, and ensure that city-supported projects create good construction jobs and career pathways for city residents. The Construction Careers and Project Stabilization Policy establishes minimum labor standards and a process for avoiding labor disruptions by means of a master agreement between the CRA and local building trades unions. The policy requires participating contractors and unions to make construction job opportunities available to local residents, including individuals who face barriers to employment such as a criminal record or a limited education.

The policy is being implemented alongside a requirement that large subsidized projects meet the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards. In this way, city leaders have begun to lay the foundations for building a green-collar construction workforce in Los Angeles. The UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education
projects that the policy will make at least 5,000 apprentice-level construction jobs available to residents of neighborhoods with high levels of unemployment over the next five years. At least 1,500 jobs are expected to go to individuals who might otherwise remain homeless, unemployed, dependent on welfare programs, or caught up in the criminal justice system. But the most important result of the Construction Careers policy will be to leverage public investments in economic development to turn short-term jobs into long-term careers in the construction industry.

I wish there was more structural accountability in Los Angeles, from the Mayor on down. I wish the city wasn't so dominated by big-city machine politics and red-letter projects that often fail to follow through on their promise. And where criticism is warranted, I'm sure to be first in line. But Los Angeles is a very complex and hard-to-pigeonhole place, and that is true of its politics as well.

Final Numbers On General Election In California Released

The Secretary of State has formally released the final numbers on the 2008 General Election. You can see the Presidential vote by county here. The Congressional vote is here. The State Senate races are here. The State Assembly races are here. The ballot measures are here. A couple thoughts.

• We had 79.42% turnout among registered voters, which is pretty fabulous. Among all eligible voters including those who haven't registered, turnout was 59.22%, so there's a lot of room for improvement and to change the elctorate there. The best turnout was in Sonoma County, with 93.43% of all registered voters. The worst was Merced County with 66.57%, one of only two under 70% (Imperial County had 68.48%).

• 13,743,177 voted this year. 13,561,900 people cast a vote in the Presidential election. That's over 200,000 undervotes at the top of the ticket. As a point of reference, Prop. 3 received 12,638,905 votes, an undervote of 1.1 million (one out of every 13 or so voters, in other words, stopped at the top). Most of the propositions are the same, except for Prop. 8 which received 13,402,566 votes and lost by over 560,000.

• Hannah-Beth Jackson lost by 857 votes. Thanks, Don Perata.

• In CA-03, Dan Lungren would up with just 49.5% of the vote and the center-left coalition (Bill Durston and the Peace and Freedom Party candidate) got 48.2%. This is clearly the top priority among House races in 2010. The final spread in CA-04 was 1,800 votes. In CA-44, Bill Hedrick wound up 6,047 votes shy of Ken Calvert, and if he runs again, that will be a race to watch. The center-left coalition in CA-46 (Debbie Cook and the Green candidate) received 45.9% of the vote, a good achievement in that district. Nick Leibham would up with 45.2% in CA-50, which seems to be the ceiling, as Francine Busby topped out around there as well.

• Lots of interesting numbers in the Assembly. Alyson Huber's final margin of victory was 474 votes. John Eisenhut was only 4,680 votes shy in AD-26, Fran Florez lost by 1,310 votes in AD-30 (with pathetic participation), Linda Jones came up 4,761 shy in AD-36, and Ferial Masry lost by 8,230 votes in AD-37. There's a path to 2/3 here, considering that we're three seats away. AD-65 and AD-68 are marginally promising as well.

If You Don't Know, Alaska Where Your Ballot Is

I concur with Nate Silver that something is definitely fishy about the Alaska numbers. Nowhere else in the country did the pre-election polls so wildly differ from the post-election reality. Don Young and Ted Stevens, one unspeakably corrupt and the other a convicted felon, both won their elections, apparently, despite being down by double digits in the pre-election polls. I thought there might be a backlash against the "Washington elite libruls" who punished Stevens with a conviction, but that doesn't explain Young. And it certainly doesn't explain this:

Indeed, it seems possible that the number of "questionable" ballots could be quite high. So far, about 220 thousand votes have been processed in Alaska. This compares with 313 thousand votes cast in 2004. After adding back in the roughly 50,000 absentee and early ballots that Roll Call accounts for, that would get us to 270 thousand ballots, or about a 14 percent drop from 2004. It seems unlikely that turnout would drop by 14 percent in Alaska given the presence of both a high-profile senate race and Sarah Palin at the top of the ticket.

More than unlikely. Now, I know the outcome of the Presidential race was apparent by about 4pm local time there, but you would think having a native son (well, daughter) on the ballot would seek to counteract any depressed turnout.

Shannyn Moore has a great write-up on this. And Digby says what we're all thinking:

If this were coming from anywhere but the state that had legislators who proudly belong to something they called the "Corrupt Bastards Club" (with hats!) I would adopt a wait and see attitude. As it is, I have no problem saying that this stinks to high heaven and is probably exactly what it looks like.

Something's very, very wrong.

Stamping Out Suppression In Mississippi

I really thought that Haley Barbour and his gang was going to get away with it, but the state Supreme Court grew a spine:

The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the special election to replace Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) – who resigned last December – will appear near the top of the November ballot.

The court ruled 8 to 1 that the ballot layout approved by Republican Governor Haley Barbour violated state election law by listing the race at the very bottom of the ballot. Barbour was chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1993 to 1997 [...]

Many saw Barbour’s choice as a hardball political tactic to discourage voter participation in a close Senate race. Democrat Ronnie Musgrove is within striking distance of unseating former Republican congressman Roger Wicker, whom Barbour appointed last winter to replace Lott.

They're trying to hide this race because Musgrove is a former Governor and proven winner with a compelling story.



But the voter suppression tactics are going to sprout up like daisies as we get closer to Election Day. And that's aside from the potential voter registration database glitches (which could just randomly eliminate people's voter registration) and high turnout on Election Day which could end up with long lines and voters left out in the cold.

Some friends of ours have set up a Voter Suppression Wiki to call attention to a lot of these efforts. I'm certainly going to be checking in throughout the next month or so. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Two Ground Games

I've written a fair bit about, and I still believe in, the Obama campaign's leap forward in the ground game, and how this will eventually help them in the final analysis. The Seminal posted a long, link-heavy piece about this today, and Time did a feature as well.

For the next month, the Obama campaign's ground focus is on finishing up the stunning gains in voter registration that it and the Democratic Party have made. Since January alone more than 3.5 million new voters have been registered in 17 of the 23 states tracked closely by the Obama campaign where information is available. Three states — Florida, Michigan and North Carolina — have seen increases of more than 400,000 new voters, and 10 more states have recorded new registrations of more than 100,000. Though these numbers include registrants to all parties, in 14 of the states at least half of the new voters are under 35, a key demographic for Obama.

"We're on pace to hit goal," says Jason Green, a 27-year-old Gaithersburg, Md., native who is Obama's national voter registration director. "I would love to exceed goal." Green, not surprisingly, isn't in the mood to get specific about what that goal is, though he does say that it is "in the millions," and that the bulk of the voters will be in the 18 battleground states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Colorado and New Mexico (though drives have been mounted in all 50 states). Green is also happy to share the news that they registered more than 100,000 people over Labor Day weekend, capitalizing on the wave of excitement coming out of the convention in Denver.

Harold Ickes, whose company essentially put together the voter list that Obama is currently using, is quoted in the article saying that "(The McCain campaign) should not pooh-pooh the ground game that Obama is mounting; it's a formidable one. I don't think in my experience in Democratic politics there's ever been anything like it." Of course it takes a lot of money and even more staff and volunteers to make sure this very new vote actually gets to the polls, but Obama has both.

All of that is great. But of course there are two ground games. I'm not talking about the Republican GOTV efforts; I frankly think they've misjudged how many new voters the Obama campaign has the potential to activate. I'm talking about the Republican ground game to suppress the vote, which is starting to take shape.

First there's the campaign to delegitimize absentee balloting, headed by our old friend Hans Von Spakovsky. This is from an article he wrote for something called "Spero News," asserting a stolen election in Alabama in the 1990s:

...The most important lesson of Greene County is that absentee ballots are extremely vulnerable to voter fraud. The case shows how absentee ballot fraud really works, and it is a reality very different from the claims of partisans and advocacy groups. More broadly, the case shows how voter fraud threatens the right to free and fair elections and how those most often harmed are poor and minorities. This directly rebuts the usual partisan conspiracy theories about voter fraud.

According to the self-appointed liberal guardians of the poor, practically every effort to legislate against or prosecute voter fraud is intended to keep minorities and the poor from voting at all. Concern over voter fraud, say some partisans, is simply Republicans' cover to intimidate voters and raise obstacles to minority voting. Indeed, groups like the NAACP argue that racism and intimidation are the motivation for voter fraud prosecutions, and some prominent Democrats dismiss voter fraud as virtually nonexistent. As a result, prosecutors are intimidated from fighting vote fraud for fear of the political consequences, and elections continue to be stolen.

He's tipping his hand here, that absentee ballots will be challenged by Republican officials wherever the vote is close.

Then there are the ongoing disputes over ballots and voter registration forms, which are occurring throughout the country right now. We learn in the article that Republicans are trying to keep Bob Barr off the ballot in Pennsylvania, trying to stop organizations like the League of Women Voters from registering voters in Florida, as well as trouble with de-certified and re-certified voting machines in Colorado. And then there's this:

Virginia: Virginia is neck and neck this year, to the surprise of Democrats and Republicans alike. At this point, Democrats appear to have an advantage, thanks to an aggressive voter registration effort by the Obama campaign, which has been especially successful in registering young voters. Republicans have responded to the surge in voter registration by raising the tried-and-true boogeyman of voter fraud. In addition, some local registrars in Virginia have been incorrectly—though perhaps innocently—telling college students who legally register to vote in their college towns that by doing so they "could no longer be claimed as dependents on their parents' tax return … and could lose scholarships or coverage under their parents' car and health insurance." Which candidate wins Virginia could well depend on which campaign is able to turn out its voters.

Finally, there's this major issue that I flagged a couple months ago, but now we're seeing Republicans seek to use it as a strategy - taking the foreclosure crisis and connecting it to suppression operations:

The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week. He said the local party wanted to make sure that proper electoral procedures were followed [...]

The Michigan Republicans’ planned use of foreclosure lists is apparently an attempt to challenge ineligible voters as not being “true residents.”

One expert questioned the legality of the tactic.

“You can’t challenge people without a factual basis for doing so,” said J. Gerald Hebert, a former voting rights litigator for the U.S. Justice Department who now runs the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington D.C.-based public-interest law firm. “I don’t think a foreclosure notice is sufficient basis for a challenge, because people often remain in their homes after foreclosure begins and sometimes are able to negotiate and refinance.”

As for the practice of challenging the right to vote of foreclosed property owners, Hebert called it, “mean-spirited.”

Well that'll stop them. After all, they don't want to be seen as "mean-spirited." By the way, Michigan isn't the only state talking about this; GOP officials in Ohio have the same idea. And remember, swing states like Nevada and Florida have among the highest concentration of foreclosures in the country.

I know that lots of people focus on e-voting machines and hacking, but the ground war is where votes are really stolen, through intimidation, suppression, bogus challenges and ruthlessness. And with Obama's strategy relying heavily on new voters (and now, with little room for error), the battle over the vote becomes even more pronounced. Sunshine is obviously important; in fact, it has brought about small victories, like the VA relenting and allowing voter registration at stateside veteran's facilities. But we need more than sunshine. We need an army of lawyers who are aggressive and unrelenting.

You can educate yourself about your voting rights at The Brennan Center or The Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, as well as your local registrar. Know your rights, and know the rights of your friends and relatives, to boot.

Obama's Gambit

This is a very good article by Digby, noting the correct prediction that the conservative movement would go all-out to use the well-worn, 50-year narrative of Democratic leaders as elitist egghead America-haters and define Barack Obama in this fashion. Today Obama appeared on Fox News and was pretty openly confronted with this label, and he gave almost as good as he got, but the very act of appearing on the network led many to suggest that he was validating the charges and pivoting away from the "far left" in response. He pointedly mentioned how he was attacked on Daily Kos for writing a diary about the Roberts Supreme Court appointment back in 2005, a pretty light Sista Souljah moment but certainly notable.

Digby writes:

Maybe this election will change all that. I hope so. But so far, I'm seeing the narrative playing out exactly as I thought it would and it leads me right back to where I started. I believe that Democrats are nearly guaranteed to win due to the fundamental forces driving this election. But I'm not so sure the Democrats will win with any kind of progressive mandate if they let the media frame the election in these terms and I'm definitely not so sure that our new president will be able to enact a progressive agenda if he (or she) moves right thinking to disable this narrative. (That's the whole point.) The silver lining is that it's being deployed early in the game due to the long primary and that offers a chance to change the storyline before the general. They need to get to it.

Some would say that the Fox News appearance was a signal of this right-wing pivot to disable the narrative, which of course won't work, and would debilitate the effort to enact anything progressive in 2009 and beyond. We'd be looking at Triangulation Part II.

I think the Obama campaign's official response was actually this.

Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign is planning to unveil a "massive" voter registration drive, one that will reach all 50 states and seeks to boost confidence in him as a potential general election candidate [...]

"That's why I'm so proud that today our campaign announced a massive volunteer-led voter registration drive in all 50 states to help ensure every single eligible voter takes part in this election so we can take back Washington for the American people," Obama said at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place.

The Obama campaign has plenty more on this effort. The candidate's work as a community organizer included a huge voter registration drive that helped elect Carol Moseley-Braun as the first female black US Senator in history.

I think Obama's gambit is to register so many voters and find so many new people to enter the process that he isn't bound to any particular political structure, from the right or the left or the middle. He really is trying to make his new mass of supporters his power base. It's an audacious strategy, one that doesn't have a lot of historical basis that you can really look to on the national level. But without question there's a tremendous upside to reaching new voters; you're essentially talking about over half the country, between those who don't vote and those who don't even register. And the technology is now in place to more easily find them, target them and talk to them.

There's certainly a danger here of relying on projected numbers instead of traditional power bases, though I don't think he'll be abandoning groups like unions and black churches, nor will any progressive movement structures abandon him. But I really think that the Obama campaign is reacting to this demonization campaign from the right by saying "OK, I'll find voters in so many nooks and crannies and make you work in so many states that you won't have a chance to make this narrative work." His response is not necessarily building a progressive electorate; that would be accomplished by plugging into the nascent progressive structures that already exist. Obama appears to want to build an electorate aligned with Obama's principles and values, and fostering greater participation in politics as a means to move the country forward and break the current polarization. Some Democrats would play on the same playing field and try to win it; Obama's building an entirely new field, one where these narratives and negative ads and the need to tailor the entire general election to 10 independent voters in the middle of Ohio won't matter anymore.

I can't say if it will totally work, but that looks to be the strategy. We've been tantalized with these kinds of efforts before; it's actually a very traditional belief that increased turnout is good for Democrats. There's no question, however, that this is a truly different kind of political campaign, and the benefits could be absolutely earth-shattering.

Heavy Turnout

This blog has some good on-the-ground information in the Philadelphia area, and the reports around the state share one thing in common - the turnout is off the charts.

Pennsylvania is on its way to the record turnout that election officials have been predicting for weeks, according to poll workers from across the state.

Election officials were reporting extremely heavy voter activity in many of the state’s 67 counties throughout the morning, starting with long lines reported even before the polls opened at 7 a.m.

“Let’s just say it’s very busy,” said Joseph Passarella, the director of voter services for Montgomery County, sounding a little harried. “Our phones have been ringing since 6:15 this morning and have been ringing nonstop. We’ve never had a primary election this busy.”

Among the phone calls were people who wanted to vote in the primary but had not switched their registration to Democratic in time, Mr. Passarella said. Those people were told that they were not allowed to vote in the Democratic primary.

A slice of that may be the Rush-bots and their Operation Chaos, but really we're seeing a sea change in Pennsylvania. Montgomery and Bucks Counties are now majority Democratic, and elsewhere in the state the energy is very high. A voter group is trying to extend polling hours in Philadelphia. After all the nonsensical events of the past six weeks, I think we've pushed Pennsylvania far into the blue column in November. This is true for Iowa and New Hampshire as well. In the states where there was a real focus on retail campaigning, this extended primary had a huge and undeniable impact. In fact, the lack of one in Michigan and Florida was a good argument to hold new primaries.

An Evening With Debra Bowen In Downtown LA

Last night I was fortunate enough to be present at a small-group discussion with Secretary of State Debra Bowen hosted by the California League of Conservation Voters. Despite this being a hectic time for the Secretary of State (E-12, in her parlance), she took a couple hours to fill us in on efforts leading up to this year of three separate elections.

In the final two weeks for voters to be eligible for the February 5 primary, there was a surge of registration. At a "midnight registration drive" in Sacramento, over 1,500 citizens registered to vote in one day (sadly, registrars in places like Los Angeles County resisted efforts to do the same because it would be "inconvenient" for them to update their voter rolls). While she had no prediction on turnout in the primary, Bowen was confident that there will be a lot of excitement and potentially a good turnout. One drawback is the fact that decline-to-state voters have to opt-in to receive a ballot for the Democratic primary (they are shut out from the Republican primary). When I asked Bowen about this, she replied that counties are required to actually notify DTS voters of their rights, and that some precinct locations will have signage notifying them to that end, but that this is insufficient and her hands are tied by state law to some extent. The parties who want to welcome DTS voters into their primary have a big role to play in this. The Democratic Party, if they want to expand their base, should make a legitimate effort to let DTS voters know they can vote in the primary. It will have the effect of getting them in the habit of voting Democratic and give them a stake in the party. There are also legislative reforms, regarding mandatory signage inside the polling place, changes to the vote-by-mail process (nonpartisan voters must request a partisan ballot), that can be taken.

Bowen's great achievements since taking over the Secretary of State's office include an insistence on voter security, and outreach to young voters. On the security front, despite the howls of protest from county registrars, Bowen will be limiting precincts to one touch-screen voting machine (for disabled voters) and will be undergoing increased security and auditing procedures. A lot of these measures will be behind the scenes, like delivering voting equipment in tamper-proof bags so that evidence of changes to the equipment will be obvious. And the auditing procedures, with an open testing process, may delay voting results, but are crucial to maintain confidence in the vote. A court recently ruled in favor of Bowen and against San Diego County in implementing these changes, but she expects an appeal. As Bowen said, "Since cavemen put black stones on one side and white stones on the other, people have tried to affect election results." But she is doing whatever possible to make sure those efforts will be supremely difficult in California. None of her provisions so far are slam-dunks; it's hard to create something foolproof, considering that memory cards for many machines can fit in your pocket, and so many machines are hackable. But Bowen is making an excellent start.

Bowen was cool to this idea of voter fraud, which has been pushed by conservatives for years. She described that there has only been one documented case of voter fraud in recent history, and that it's a high-work, low-reward strategy for cheating. Efforts to stop this non-existent problem include voter ID laws, expected to get a boost with the Supreme Court likely to allow the one in Indiana to go forward, despite Constitutional concerns. While Bowen deflected many attempts to get voter ID laws enacted in California while on the Elections Committee in the Senate, she believed that such attempts would never pass this Legislature.

As far as reaching out to young voters, we all know about Bowen's use of MySpace and Facebook to keep young voters informed (and yes, she also reads Calitics). But one measure she talked about last night struck me. On February 5, over 140,000 California high school students will engage in a mock election, featuring a Presidential primary and three mock ballot initiatives: 1) should the vehicle license fee be ties to auto emissions, 2) should voting be mandatory, and 3) should government do more to stop bullying on social networking sites. This is an ingenious way to get people interested and excited in politics at an early age, and sounds like a model program.

We have a long way to go on national election reform; Bowen noted that only three Secretaries of State (her, and the two in Ohio and Minnesota) agree that there needs to be a federal standard for national elections. What we need to do is elect more competent professionals like Debra Bowen and keep pushing the debate in the direction of reform and voter confidence.

Whoever Loses, We're All Winners

The smart money continues to be on Obama today, with the final poll giving him a wider lead and showing Clinton sinking into third, which would be quite interesting if it's a significant enough spread. Obviously these caucuses, the leaders of whom never even allow the final numbers to be shown because the "winner" might conflict with the candidate who got the most votes, are ridiculous, and I hope they get a decent Viking funeral today. But the real impact, the story everybody should be running tomorrow but won't, is that the Democrats will pummel the Republicans tonight on turnout.

Thousands more Iowa independent voters are expected to turn out for Democrat presidential candidates than Republicans at today’s Iowa caucuses.

Iowa independents are expected to follow the lead set by their national peers in 2006. Nationwide, independents backed Democrats heavily in the watershed 2006 elections, in part out of a rejection of President Bush and a loud cry for change that has continued into the 2008 campaign, strategists in both parties agree.

Recent polls have shown the percentage of Iowa independents planning to participate in the Democrat caucuses is far higher than those who say they’ll caucus for Republicans. Turnout for the Democrats is projected to be higher than Republicans, perhaps double.

Considering that more Democrats will caucus than Republicans, that's as high as a 70-30 spread among independents. And they have to register for the party on site. This makes Iowa very likely to go blue in November, despite the fact that it was a very close state in 2004. I think we could absolutely see as much as 175,000 caucus goers for the Democrats tonight, while projections for the Republicans are around 80,000.

That's the real story coming out of Iowa.

The War On Caucuses

The lack of absentee voting and the inability for a town hall meeting format to adapt to the changing schedules of Americans, making it restrictive and somewhat undemocratic, is yet another reason why I don't support the Iowa caucuses outsized importance. But Iowa's 10-15% turnout is a dream compared to Nevada, where turnout has been BELOW ONE PERCENT in recent years.

I do think other states should get a shot to mix it up every now and again, but really caucuses are not representative of democracy in 21st-century America (unless you do them in shifts so that everyone gets an opportunity, including an online caucus for absentees).