No Success in Blogrolling Efforts
Some posters have requested that I add a blogroll to link other political blogs from this website. Sara's instructions were very helpful in guiding me through the process, but as per my usual luck with such matters, my template remained unchanged even after applying the changes. I'll make another attempt later this week, but just wanted to give a heads-up why the update hasn't been made.
posted by Mark at 5:50 PM
5 Comments:
I don't know what's up. I used Blogger's tips on changing my blogroll.
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=41427&query=Edit-Me&topic=&type=f
And some bad news on the election front: Cold Hard Dollar Bill won. *pukes*
Pelosi and company had better make expelling Jefferson one of their top priorities when the new Congress convenes next month.
And from what I've heard, the Jefferson camp ran ads slamming Carter for supporting gay marriage, partial birth abortion, and human cloning. So my assertion of people no longer being duped by social wedge issues was proven wrong.
I think the old MN-06 in the 80s was different than the MN-06 of today, though I don't know much about the history of the area.
I made a second attempt to install the recommended blogrolls, also to no avail. Sorry. Maybe if someone with greater computer knowledge than myself visits my apartment and helps me out, perhaps I can get it installed at some point, but for now I'm doubtful it's gonna happen any time soon.
Agreed on the Louisiana runoff. New Orleans is going to end up losing whatever public sympathy it had now that it's elected two incompetents/crooks, presumably on the basis that their respective opponents were "whitey's preferred candidate." Jefferson is not one to play the race card, but his surrogates did the job subtly against Carter, even though she was also African-American. Jefferson also used social wedge issues like gay marriage to smear Carter as Sara pointed out, consistent with his lackluster voting record which ranked him as perhaps the worst Democrat in the Congressional Black Caucus. The only good news is that Carter may win the next special election in New Orleans....after Jefferson's inevitable indictment and conviction sends him to prison. Nonetheless, it'll be too late to save the new Democratic majority from a nasty and needless black eye.
The difference with Blanco is that she has to get elected in statewide. I have little doubt she'll win Orleans Parish, most likely by a margin much wider than either Nagin or Blanco did. It's the other 63 parishes where things will be more challenging. Still, I wouldn't count her out just yet.
Sean, the MN-06 of 1988 was significantly different than the MN-06 of 2006. At the time, it consisted only Anoka County, Washington County, and much of Dakota County. At the time, Minneapolis-St. Paul was a blue-collar metropolitan area, and there were very few seriously wealthy voters, at least proportionate to now. The Minnesota economy became more white-collar in the 1990's, the outlying suburbs filled up with upper-income Republicans and set the stage for a very rapid demographic shift and voting pattern. Democrat Bill Luther was narrowly elected in this district in 1994 and safely re-elected in 1996, before watching his margins shrink substantially in 1998 and 2000. At that point, MN-06 was reapportioned and the old district was split in half. Luther found himself losing the most Dem-friendly region of his district and adding some hard-core Republicans in the south metro. Meanwhile, the new MN-06 added some hard-core GOP turf in the northwestern metro between St. Cloud and Minneapolis. The result: two overwhelmingly Republican districts in MN-02 and MN-06.
Now to be clear, Kerry would not have won even within the old district lines of MN-06 due to the saturation of Republicans into the outer suburbs which was nothing but unsettled woodland and farmland back in 1988.
Nonetheless, Bush's win over Kerry would have been in the 52-48 margin in the old MN-06, rather than the 57-43 victory he enjoyed in the new MN-06.
sean, Dukakis' performance in rural areas was inflated because of the 1980's farm crisis. It wasn't necessarily one party's fault or the other, but the incumbent party took a beating in 1988 after brutal economic conditions for farmers in the Midwest and Plains. You'll notice Dukakis did much better than Kerry, Gore, and in some cases even Clinton, in several Midwestern and Great Plains' farm states. I'm too young to remember if this is the result of a direct outreach by Dukakis to farmers or just a general acknowledgement of the need for a change of course, but it's unlikely to be repeated anytime soon with the corporate consolidation of American agriculture that has happened since 1988.
Furthermore, the battle lines in the Rove-era culture war were not yet drawn in 1988. A gunslinging bubba from eastern Oklahoma could still vote Democratic in 1988 without being shamed by his buddies on Wednesday morning.
sean, they cannot be effectively tied to the national Democratic Party (Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy)....the same reason Republicans Don Carcieri and Jim Douglas of Rhode island and Vermont, respectively, won their gubernatorial races this year in uber-blue states. Bush and the national GOP didn't drag them down.
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