I was in Florida during Hurricane Andrew and passed through the path of the storm a few days after. There, the threat came not from below but from above. Nothing higher than fifteen feet existed anymore -- homes flattened, every tree in sight snapped in half, concrete buildings defaced as if by a truck bomb. It looked like Hiroshima. "Only" 26 people died.

As harrowing as it might look on television, it's not the wind that kills so much as the water -- 150,000 lives taken in South Asia and perhaps hundreds more in Mississippi and Louisiana. Next time one of these comes, and they say leave... don't ask questions, just leave.

www.redcross.org

Candidate for Virginia governor and "sportsman" Tim Kaine roughing it at $400-a-night resorts and challenging his opponents to some competitive hiking and canoeing.

Tim Kaine, straight from the horse's mouth:

“Having a sportsmen’s organization is a way of saying, ‘Hey look, Kaine is one of us,’” he told reporters as he stood in front of a row of shotgun-toting supporters. Kaine, a longtime canoeing and fishing enthusiast, also mentioned that he occasionally takes his two sons shooting while visiting the Greenbrier and Homestead resorts.

These are the places Kaine is talking about:

A junior suite at the Homestead during a fall weekend will set you back $365. I wasn't able to find a menu of the Greenbrier's sumptuous offerings on its web site, but the Maitre D' might look askance at you should you forget your collared shirt at breakfast. Ah, the outdoor life.

And it doesn't end there. As can be expected, Commonwealth Conservative is all over it:

“I’d put myself up against anyone who serves in public office in terms of being an outdoorsman,” Kaine said. “You want to try to canoe me into the ground? You want to have a shooting contest? You want to go hiking? You want to go out and be a survivor?”

Is this Democrat for "You wanna take this outside, punk? You wanna go?" I'm sure you felt the temperature dropping a few degrees from the chill that's making its way down my spine.

If only Kaine knew what he were talking about when it comes to guns. But it doesn't help matters when you pledge to abolish a gun show loophole and your sham sportsmen's coalition is hawking a Knight muzzle-loading 12-gauge for $250 at a gun show with no background checks.

There's a campaign-ending moment in there somewhere. Decide which one in this handy-dandy Ruffini Poll^TM

Which of these Tim Kaine statements will prove most embarassing in the fall campaign?

My response -- and that of most of D.J.'s commenters -- is pretty much the same as it was the first time. It's an Internet poll of self-selected blog readers. Nowhere do I claim it's anything but unscientific. It's rather pointless to critique it as if it were.

D.J. calls the Rudy victory a "garbage call." Maybe so; three years out, with the field so fluid, even the scientific polls are speculative at best and garbage at worst. Having done four of these, I'm keenly aware of how altering the candidate list changes the results -- the four polls have produced three different winners. Frankly, I don't care who comes out ahead each time; I'm mostly interested in the crosstabs and the change over time -- who tends to benefit, even if it's at the fourth place level if so-and-so doesn't run, or who tends to do better in what region. It's polling as wargaming.

Michael Barone knows a thing or two about the polling industry, having worked in it for several years, and finds the straw poll valuable enough to mention in his U.S. News column, "An end to political polarization?"

The column itself is important, remarking on the improbable fact that candidates seemingly at odds with their party's base are utterly dominating the early polls. It plays into the discussion of whether Rudy could be nominated that's raging at Karol's place and which features prominently into Captain Ed's thinking about '08.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but my general sense of this right now is that the media's got it back asswards: Rudy could be nominated, but John McCain most definitely could not be.

Both are seemingly unlikely picks, but if asked to pick between the two, it boils down to this: partisanship matters. Giuliani differs from the Republican base in ways he's smart enough not to emphasize, but he is fiercely partisan. That may not win him points with the Randall Terry crowd, but it does impress the party regulars -- the blue-haired ladies who attend Lincoln Day Dinners who picked 43 over Forbes/Keyes, Dole over Buchanan/Forbes, and 41 over Kemp/DuPont. Rudy-skepticism has a certain hearsay quality to it -- I like the guy, but when the other 99.9% of Republicans who are anti-abortion zealots find out about him, all bets are off. McCain-skepticism among the base is much, much more direct: I viscerally dislike the guy because of: McCain-Feingold / the Gang of 14 / tax cuts / Kyoto / baiting the religious right / (insert support for any item on Democratic domestic agenda here.) McCain checks certain boxes ideologically -- though barely, but he is not very partisan. And anyone who thinks that doesn't matter should read Unconventional Wisdom's engrossing take on how the GOP nomination process actually works.

Let me also inject this. I remember standing on the floor Monday night at the Republican convention a year ago this week, when McCain and Giuliani spoke back to back. Except for the Michael Moore line, who got the better applause from the delegates? Rudy, hands down. Maybe the other bloggers who were up in New York could share their impressions on this one.

Politics abhors a vacuum and the prospect of a couple of "moderates" duking it out for the GOP nomination militates in favor of a lesser-known conservative challenger rising Dean-like in 2007 (and ditto for Hillary and the Democrats). As a leading indicator -- and in the absence of any good polling in the media -- online polls of political junkies might be able to better tell us who that will be. Right now, my bets are on Russ Feingold for the Dems and George Allen for the GOP.

Another nitpick: MT-Blacklist, where have you gone? The combination of plugins I'd used before had made comment spam pretty much invisible to me; it was zapped before it even had a chance to reach MT. Now comment spam is showing up in a moderation queue, and there's no way to turn off e-mail notification without also turning off e-mails for legit comments -- which is how I follow the discussion. This seems like a pretty big usability mistake. I have no interest in "moderating" comments and trackbacks. I want anything that looks even remotely bad banished to Siberia, and everything else to go through right away, which is how MT and its plugins worked in 3.12 for comments, if not for trackbacks.

Advice from any expert Movable Type user or Perl aficionado would be much appreciated in helping sort through these bugs, in the comments or in email. I'm totally stumped. (I may even write a post about Movable Type taking over the world when it's fixed!) For the time being, I'd hold off on this upgrade.

Scrolling through the referral logs, I came across the site HomeschoolBlogger.com, a branded community of homeschool blogs. Aside from being very nicely designed and laid out, it's the partial fulfillment of this scenario I laid out in December (not to spill my guts on the business plan or anything!):

What this investment will lead to is this: cool brands -- think Apple, Harley-Davidson, or Maxim -- offering consumers their own skinned blogs -- or offering anyone with a Blogspot or Typepad account the ability to syndicate their blogs with multiple skins -- all linked together in a Free Republic-style community so all the top posts from sportsmen or motorcycle enthusiasts would be readily accessible from any blog on the network. Don't worry -- this technology could be used by the "good guys" too. Isn't it time we got over the "coolness" of a major group like the NRA or the ACLU starting a blog, and get them to start offering branded user blogs that build a real online community?

Six Apart moves in this direction with MT 3.2's new StyleCatcher. I'm thinking it could be even more dynamic: full-text RSS feeds of posts, comments, and trackbacks allowing your content to be regenerated anywhere on the Internet with any template.

When Breitbart.com launched, it was ad-free, or so I recall. No longer. You gotta love this -- crony capitalism at its best. Not that there's anything wrong with it!

I guess the Drudge-Breitbart split was amicable after all. Master and Apprentice are again as one.

Click to Enlarge

Changes from Last Month: George Allen won last month’s five way match-up over Giuliani by 37.2% to 30.7%. The two polls are not an apples-to-apples comparison since the field was opened up to more candidates. However, the July poll was (and is) still active on the sidebar; 764 votes were received on the five-way poll during the August voting, with the results as follows: Allen 36.1%, Giuliani 30.4%, Romney 11.1%, McCain 9.8%, and Frist 8.6%. So, little change in underlying opinion since July. What's noteworthy here is that Giuliani effectively keeps all of his support when the field is opened up, but Allen loses about 16 points of his, suggesting that conservatives are still shopping around for a candidate. Mitt Romney keeps all but two points of his support – Giuliani and Romney may be gaining positive support from voters who like them and are not just voting against the field.

Blogger Endorsements = Votes: Pointy-headed critics of online polling will worry about all the commentary and endorsements attached to the poll links (this and this are notable examples). I don’t, because we now have a verifiable way to gauge the impact of endorsements and candidate appearances in various online forums. InstaPundit readers went emphatically Rudy-Rice after Glenn made clear his preferences – much more so than INDC Journal, which was more pro-Rudy (he endorsed) and less pro-Rice (he didn’t). Newt outright won the Right Wing News vote after giving an interview there. Lorie Byrd of PoliPundit was critical of George Allen and Rudy went from 26% last month to 36% (Allen fell from 53% to 29%). There’s a curiously large Mitt Romney following among Hugh Hewitt fans. Because overall 2008 interest is low right now, it’s not likely that readers are picking blogs based on who they support. Loosely committed readers are actually following the lead of their favorite blogs. Sure, voting in an online poll is an ephemeral act, but rinse, lather, and repeat, and this support will deepen. The most important thing to come out of this poll is that we now have a proof of concept which shows that candidates engaging the blogosphere and its key voices early in the process translates into votes.

So, Captain Ed, who you backing?

The Blog-by-Blog: For two months running, Hugh Hewitt sends the most voters over, and amongst his readers, it’s neck and neck between Giuliani and Allen. Instapundit readers are once again very pro-Rudy. Those coming from Michelle Malkin’s, guest hosted this week, show support for the Newt Gingrich that’s statistically noteworthy. Polipundit readers are much more apt to back one of the two top candidates, and Rudy comes out ahead after Allen’s Sheehan slip. WizBang and Captain’s Quarters go for by +15% and +17% respectively.

The Fantasy Candidates: Some of the most interesting statistics come from the “takes from” tabulations. Rice would take heavily from Giuliani if she ran (likely a factor of Glenn’s recommendation) but to me almost the most interesting statistic is the George Allen-Jeb Bush switch. The Giuliani-Allen matchup is 18 points more pro-Allen among Jeb supporters, it’s 11 points more pro-Giuliani among Rice supporters.

Vice President Cheney tends to take from the conservative side of the field; Giuliani leads by just 1.3 in this group and Gingrich is also well represented. Manhattan DA Fred Thompson takes from Giuliani but by somewhat less than the 10 point spread on the overall ballot.

Red vs. Blue, and the Regions: Giuliani wins the blue states by 14 (32.7 to 18.6) and the red states by 6 (27.9 to 22.0).

Predictably, Giuliani’s strongest region is the Northeast with a 36.4 to 16.5% lead. His lead is most tenuous – but still there – in the South, with the split being 28.4 to 24.2%. The Midwest goes Rudy by 9, and the West by 11.

Allen runs strongest in the South (24.2%) – though a great deal of that is Virginia and the border states. By a hair, Gingrich’s strongest showing is in the Midwest (16%). Romney is stronger in the West (read: Utah) (12.8%) than he is in the Northeast (9.6%). And McCain runs much strongest in the Northeast (10.6%) than in his home base out West (6.4%).

State-by-State

Now comes the really fun part – the state by state. Overall, Rudy wins in 39 states and the District of Columbia, Allen takes 8, favorite sons Brownback and Huckabee take their home states, and Romney crushes the field in Utah. I’ll take these by candidate, highlighting their strongholds. You can crunch the real time data on this page.

But first, the early primary states (caveat: small sample sizes of around 100 apiece):

Iowa: Giuliani 26.3%, Gingrich 18.9%, Allen 12.6%, Romney 9.5%, Brownback and McCain 7.4%

New Hampshire: Giuliani 34.5%, Allen 16.1%, Romney 16.1%, McCain 8.10, Gingrich 6.9%.

South Carolina: Giuliani 27.4%, Allen 20.0%, Gingrich 15.6%, Tancredo 14.1%, McCain 7.4%.

And now the contenders:

Giuliani: Strongest state is New Mexico (49.3%), home state of New York is safe (46.1%). His strongest big states are CT (41.7%), NJ (37.1%), WA (34.7%). However, the headline-stealer is his support in Texas, Florida, and North Carolina, vote-rich New South states with large urban centers: TX (34.6%; are Cowboys fans keeping Allen down?), NC (33.7%) and FL (31.8%). Giuliani also gets strong support in more libertarian-leaning Western states (MT, NM, AK, WY) but the sample sizes are nothing to write home about. Other big state results: CA (30.1% -- despite being blue, CA tends to be a bellwether among Republican voters), OH (31.4%), PA (29.0%), and MI (30.5%).

Allen: Look at map above, and you’ll see Allen isn’t a Southern candidate so much as he is a border state candidate. Allen stomps in the Old Dominion (50.2%), and wins WV, KY, MD, and IN, with some spillover strength into states like OH, IL, PA, and MO. He has a seemingly anomalous win in RI and takes both the Dakotas and performs well in Minnesota -- did a couple of folks up north remember who was NRSC Chairman when Tom Daschle was retired? His strongest Deep South states are AL (his 7th best finish), NC (his 10th), SC (his 18th), and GA (his 19th). In the big states: CA (20.4%), TX (17.0%), NY (11.6%), FL (18.4%).

Gingrich: Newt-mania is entirely an outside the Beltway phenomenon right now: he’s the Reader’s Digest candidate. Gingrich scores the worst in D.C. at 3.2%, and gets just 7.2% in Virginia (NH is his second-worst state). Up and down the Eastern seabord, there’s little interest in Mr. Newt. Flyover Country’s a different story: he comes close in Idaho, finishes a strong second in Iowa, and is locked in a three-way tangle in Indiana, but owing to how evenly his support is spread out, he wins no states. The Deep South, including his home state of Georgia, is another area of strength: LA (20.4%), GA (20.4%), MS (19.5%). He also does well in a smattering of states that transcend regional boundaries (save except for the establishment redoubts): OR (20.2%), MO (19.3%), AZ (18.8%).

Romney: Governor Romney turns in the biggest winning percentage of any candidate in any state – not in Massachusetts, but in Utah with 52.1% of the vote. His second-best state: RI, a mini-MA, only more zealous about it – 19.4%. In Massachusetts, he’s at 18.6%, second to Giuliani. And he’s tied for second in N.H., currently his fourth best-state at 16.1%. Bigger states he does well in tend to be out West: AZ (12.6%), CO (12.6%), and CA (11.9%). Five of his bottom ten states are in the South. (Romney is probably the best example of these state-by-state breakdowns making perfect sense.)

McCain: Vermont, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York. These states would all be near the bottom of Republican support in a general election, but they adorn John McCain’s top 10. His support is concentrated conspicuously along the Northeast Metroliner Corridor – guaranteeing him frontrunner coverage in the MSM. His home state of Arizona is well down the list with an 8% McCain vote, less than half of what he gets in D.C. This seems low, except it’s nearly double what he gets in neighboring Western states: NV (4.2%) and CO (3.1%). McCain and Chuck Hagel are apparently the favorites of lefty trolls crossover voters as results from Balloon Juice and RedState seem to indicate. In a less mischievous vein, are non-Republicans in loose screen national media polls driving up McCain’s numbers from their lows among Republican activists in forums such as this one?

Dark Horses: Besides Romney’s triumph in Utah, Mike Huckabee and Sam Brownback win “primaries” in their home states of Arkansas and Kansas respectively.

Whew... I'm out of breath. Feel free to crunch your own numbers here and here and add to the analysis in the comments.

This narrative served us well for a time, playing into widely held suspicions of media bias, but now something different is called for.

A drumbeat of “steady progress” lacks a certain drama – a driving impulse – and falls short in telling the story of the world’s most dramatic place. It does not place the insurgency in its proper context, and arguably does not have very much to say about the violence at all. So long as the media, cooped up in the fifth floor of the Palestine Hotel, makes casualties their dominant frame, it is essential that they be addressed as part of a broader narrative about Iraq.

To the extent that the terrorist insurgency is addressed by our side, it is usually in the context of fearful, beleaguered Iraqis as the victims. Americans are urged not to lose heart -- because that’s what the terrorists would want. Unwittingly, we are training ourselves to be victims in need of therapy, to persevere through this unpleasantness just a little bit longer.

Hell, no. We refuse to be the victims. We refuse to even discuss the possibility that any terrorist thug could throw us off course. If asked for the umpteenth time to rearticulate a plan for Iraq, it needs to be Ronald Reagan’s “We win, they lose.” How we felt about the planes slamming into the Towers is how we should feel about the bombing of a police station in Samarra. Rage. Defiance. Steely determination. The last thing we need is to be dour, subdued, and tired.

Publicly and on the ground, it’s time to be brash and in-your-face. The more they attack us, the more united, angry, and lethal we become. (Right now, it seems like the opposite.) In the words of Leo McGarry, Act as if ye have faith and faith shall be given to you.

Self-confidence like this doesn’t emerge in a vacuum; it springs from a narrative that is nourished over time.

This narrative is nothing new: we had it for a while in the spring, and now it’s time to get it back. It’s simple: everything – EVERYTHING – pivots around the Iraqi woman with purple ink-stained finger, or the Revolution babes in Lebanon, or the jailed democracy protesters in Egypt. That’s why we are being viciously attacked. That’s the narrative. That’s the first three quarters of the policy speech. It’s not that we shouldn’t be talking about progress on the ground. It’s that there's a better way to talk about progress than as a whiny alternative universe the media won't cover. Use the progress to explain the violence, and by talking about the progress you implicitly talk about the violence too. It's not pollyannish either: extreme violence provoking extreme evil -- both can be given their due in one construct. The level of violence is not the success criteria; our will to defeat the inevitable opposition we will face is.

In making the case, the stories and narratives from the frontlines must be the centerpiece. The letters home from the troops, the voices of the liberated, the raw statistics of Iraqi renewal all provide a rich backdrop to give a more thorough and complete accounting of this war than the police blotter-style coverage from Baghdad. In every country, election coverage compels attention because it is so massive a civic endeavor – millions of people, thousands of stories, one day – and it’s also the only time the unmediated voice of the people trumps anecdotal coverage in the media. If there can’t be an election every month, then perhaps it’s time to regularly stage massive events that are manifestly larger than a handful of violent attacks. An Iraqi Live 8, for instance? Or an Iraq-USA friendly on the soccer pitch.

Those of you have read me for a while know that I like talking elections. It’s not just for the sweat, thrill, and gamesmanship of it. It’s because the sense of mission and urgency of a campaign – get your message across or die politically – is a model for instilling excellence in any enterprise. To all those who support this war and want to defend it, guess what? This is a campaign. The tactical nimbleness, the relentless pounding away hour after hour, day after day, the need to stay relevant to the discussion and dominate the news cycle -- all of those need to be there. And the stakes are every bit as high as they were last year.

UPDATE: This is what it's all about:

We will stay on the offense. We'll complete our work in Afghanistan and Iraq. An immediate withdrawal of our troops in Iraq, or the broader Middle East, as some have called for, would only embolden the terrorists and create a staging ground to launch more attacks against America and free nations. So long as I'm the President, we will stay, we will fight, and we will win the war on terror. (Applause.) ...

One of the most important battlefronts in this war on terror is Iraq. Terrorists have converged on Iraq. See, they're coming into Iraq because they fear the march of freedom. Their most prominent leader is a Jordanian named Zarqawi, who has declared his allegiance with Osama bin Laden. The ranks of these folks are filled with foreign fighters who come from places like Saudi Arabia and Syria and Iran and Egypt and Sudan and Yemen and Libya. They lack popular support so they're targeting innocent Iraqis with car bombs and suicide attacks. They know the only way they can prevail is to break our will and the will of the Iraqi people before democracy takes hold. They are going to fail. (Applause.)

The stakes in Iraq could not be higher. The brutal violence in Iraq today is a clear sign of the terrorists' determination to stop democracy from taking root in the Middle East. They know that the success of a free Iraq, who can be a key ally in the war on terror and a symbol of success for others, will be a crushing blow to their strategy to dominate the region, and threaten America and the free world. They know that when their hateful ideology is defeated in Iraq, the Middle East will have a clear example of freedom and prosperity and hope. And the terrorists will begin to lose their sponsors and lose their recruits and lose the sanctuaries they need to plan new attacks.

Here are the results so far. I've also added a sortable 50-state table of the results so you can start cracking on the insta-analysis.

Thanks to the effectiveness of the cooperative, decentralized conservative blogosphere, we beat Kos in total votes for two months running. Here are some stats for comparison:

PatrickRuffini.com GOP Straw Poll: 10,623 votes (and counting!)
Daily Kos Dem Straw Poll: 9,388 votes
MyDD Dem Straw Poll: 1,892 votes

I'll do an update when the total surpasses Kos and MyDD combined. Don't forget to vote.

This one should be fun. It's pretty much all the likely candidates as they stand today in a main ballot, and a bonus ballot with the opportunity to vote for four of your favorite fantasy contenders. Once you get to the results page, you'll see exactly which likely candidates the fantasy candidates take the most from.

Here's another reason why this one's the Big One. On your ballot, you'll have the opportunity to mark your state. If this poll is as big as the last one (@13,000 responses), we'll have a statistically valid sample of online activists not just nationally, but in most of the fifty states. On the results page, you can filter the results by state, by region, or by Red vs. Blue states.

As always, we're tracking results by blog. All center-right bloggers who participated in the previous polls are encouraged to do so again to see how their readers are trending over time. And if you haven't yet done so, feel free to join in for this and future straw polls. Here are the results from last time for comparison's sake.

Some tips to ensure quality results:

1. Try and vote every question. The state and fantasy candidate questions should prove very interesting.
2. The fantasy ballot pits the four new candidates against the rest of the field. If you don't wish to change your vote from the main ballot, just vote "Keep My Vote the Same."

Let the games begin!

Main Ballot: George Allen Sam Brownback Bill Frist Newt Gingrich Rudy Giuliani Chuck Hagel Mike Huckabee John McCain George Pataki Mitt Romney Tom Tancredo

Fantasy Candidates: If any of these candidates unexpectedly entered the race, tell us whether you'd switch from the main ballot: Keep My Vote the Same Jeb Bush Dick Cheney Condoleezza Rice Fred Thompson Select Your State: AL AK AZ AR CA CO CT DE DC FL GA HI ID IL IN IA KS KY LA ME MD MA MI MN MS MO MT NE NV NH NJ NM NY NC ND OH OK OR PA RI SC SD TN TX UT VT VA WA WV WI WY ">

]]> 2005-08-30T06:51:22Z 2005-08-22T06:21:06Z tag:sandbox.patrickruffini.com,2005://1.414 2005-08-22T06:21:06Z

This blog is nothing if not current and up-to-the-minute; what follows in this post is my analysis of New Jersey voting trends in the 2004 election.

Eh?

So, this one might be a bit dated. But this one has the perfect tie-ins: the release of the 2006 Almanac of American Politics, which has 1,800 pages of this stuff, and the upcoming New Jersey gubernatorial election. 'Tis the season for Garden State psephology. (Also, data down to the precinct and township level doesn't always become available immediately after the election, and I've needed to practice my mapmaking skills.)

Note: If you're from New Jersey or are familiar with the state, feel free to correct my analysis or add anything I may have missed. I'm eager to make this thread sort of the official Wiki on this subject.

Thanks to 2004 vote data from Dave Leip's indispensable U.S. Election Atlas and 2000 data mined from this American University election site, I was able to produce the map you see at left of the Bush vote gain in New Jersey by municipality, which is much more granular the county data you commonly see. Most of the map is red, although the state is blue. This map isn't about who won in what areas, but the degree of Bush gains or losses since 2000. The reddish tint is courtesy of New Jersey coming in with the third strongest pro-Bush swing in the country. The right GOP candidate could put New Jersey's 15 electoral votes in play in '08.

A brief word on the overall partisan makeup. Kerry won New Jersey by 53-46 in 2004, down from a 16 point margin for Gore. The urban-rural divide – with the balance decidedly in favor of the urban – is particularly stark on the election maps. In the blue-Republican color scheme I used in 2000, the Democratic vote appears as a red gash from the New York to Philadelphia suburbs with a splatter down to Atlantic City and along the shore. The 2004 map is even starker, with barely any “red” outside the diagonal L from New York to Philadelphia to Atlantic City.

Downtown Hoboken

The most obvious gains come in the New York City suburbs, in Bergen and Hudson counties along the river, and particularly in Monmouth County just down the way from Staten Island. There is clearly no ignoring the 9/11 effect here. Artsy and gentrified, you might normally expect Hoboken to be a hub of MoveOn activity. A PATH stop away from Lower Manhattan, Hoboken lost 43 of its citizens in the World Trade Center, more than any other New Jersey city. With terror and security at the center of last year's race, the Bush vote in Hoboken from 26 to 33 percent, a 28% increase in vote share. In blue-collar Bayonne, across from the Statue of Liberty, the President's vote surged from 31.7 to 42.6 percent. (Newark and Jersey City, with large minority voting blocs, saw more muted increases, but with Bush's small voting base growing by 26 to 30 percent.)

Teaneck

These were not the only blue enclaves that did an about face. Teaneck, with a large Orthodox Jewish population, and with nearly 30% African Americans, was barely on the map for Republicans four years ago – just 17.3% pulled the lever for Bush. This year, that percentage was up to 29.9%, a 72% increase in vote share, more than anywhere else in the state save tiny Victory Gardens. There's a different dynamic at play here than in most urban-inner suburban districts; two of the Democrats from this area – Steve Rothman and Bill Pascrell – voted for the Iraq war.

At the opening of New York Harbor to the south, Monmouth County shares the experience of living in the shadow of the city, with all the highs and lows that brings – Middletown lost twenty at the Trade Center – but without the liberal underpinnings. Here, it is not uncommon to see towns the President pull even or winning in towns he lost by 25 points or more in 2000 (see Marlboro, Manalapan, Union Beach); the Reagan Democrats were coming home. In American politics, staggering gains like this are rare – you only tend to see them in tightly knit rural outliers (where in fact only a couple of hundred votes have moved) or highly aggrieved communities of interest (Miami Cubans after Elian, 26% swing – guess in which direction). To see drastic shifts of this nature in an ordinary American suburb suggests a potentially lasting shift borne of September 11th.

The view from Lower Manhattan

But even an overpowering event such as a terrorist attack does not always alter long-term perceptions a few miles beyond ground zero; I have a hunch that the darkest red on the map can be traced to those areas with a vista of Lower Manhattan. A large swath of central New Jersey – encompassing Princeton, Mercer County, and exclusive enclaves like Saddle River and Harding Township – was the counterpoint to the pro-Bush swing in North and South Jersey. Two characteristics of this area stand out: going there, one does not get a strong New York or Philadelphia feeling (rare for New Jersey), and second, its affluence. New Jersey is the reverse of what we saw in most states: the furthest-out suburbs trended against the President while the close-in ones surged to him.

Harding Township with its palatial estates swings to Kerry

Looking at the map, one factor above all others dictates a blue coloring: privilege. After preparing the map, I laid it on top of satellite imagery of New Jersey in Google Earth. This impressive pad with private tennis court (still trying to pin-point the horse stables) is firmly in blue-trending area. Thirteen of the most Kerry-trending towns in New Jersey were in the top 50 out of nearly 700 in per-capita income. This holds true for the smallest units (Teterboro, population 18, voting population 24, #9 in per-capita income, the only area in Bergen County to swing to Kerry) and for exceptions to an otherwise Republican trend (Mantoloking, per-capita income $114,017, one of only two towns on the Jersey Shore to swing to Kerry), Princeton, home to privilege of a different sort, saw a 3-point decline in Bush's vote. These are places where a sense of that you are better and smarter and more competent than other people is valued; where a question like “Do you know who I am?” is probably apropos. Never doubt that people vote for personality and lifestyle above all else; the sort with Ivy League diplomas and five vacation homes certainly do.

This stat from the other end of the scale is equally revealing: eleven of the twenty towns posting the largest Bush gains were ranked 500 or below in income. The average income rank for these towns was 437; for the Kerry towns it was 132. While Barone is right that the top and the bottom of the income ladder often make common cause against the middle, it seems that in New Jersey last year, the bottom was more closely aligned with the middle than it typically is. (So much for those Taxcutsfortherich^TM.)

Rounding out the analysis are northwestern Jersey and South Jersey, which came in with strong but not atypical Bush swings. I'll leave it to some enterprising reader to fill in the details on Warren and Hunterdon Counties. In South Jersey, a reader known to many of you as Ironman served on the review committee for this post and notes many Coastal Jersey residents are the older Reagan Democrats of yore. I took a gander at the Almanac of American Politics, and they seem particularly prevalent in Frank LoBiondo's second district, which coincides with the red swath you see at the bottom of the map. Knowing that over-65 voters evinced a general pro-Republican trend this time, these results shouldn't surprise us.

What does it mean for the Governor's race? That's an open question, but if Forrester can win by simply turning out the people who voted for Bush (47 percent of a presidential vote is well over 50 percent of a gubernatorial vote). His best targets in terms of holding newer members of the Republican coalition should be the blue-collar communities in Monmouth County and seniors in South Jersey who don't feel any particular attachment their jet-setting U.S. Senator.

I'm sure this doesn't even begin to do this all justice. New Jersey readers are invited to click and magnify their little pixel on the map and add some local color.

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In regard to these mysterious machinations, I can neither confirm nor deny that another straw poll is on the way.

Kos wastes no time in sliming Scarborough, a probable act of sabotage with roots in Tallahassee. Twenty four hours in, and they're already running scared.

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune is throwing cold water on the speculation. There's no doubt that a Scarborough run would be a heroic act given his lucrative MSNBC contract; here's hoping we have a hero on our hands. The very fact that we're talking about this proves just how deep the GOP bench is. Every year, we inch closer to that natural 62-seat majority with the Red States, and the fact that we can still throw off their game in Blue States like MD and NJ while Daschling Byrd is just icing.

You feel for the man, until your eye is drawn to this passage:

“I also wish,” he continues, “I desperately wish, that I had been president when the FBI and CIA finally confirmed, officially, that bin Laden was responsible for the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. Then we could have launched an attack on Afghanistan early. I don’t know if it would have prevented 9/11, but it certainly would have complicated it.”

Conclusions of this nature can only be drawn with the benefit of hindsight. And yet, even after 9/11, the best he can muster is a weak, Kerryesque "finally confirmed, officially" on the standard of proof he would have used to go after bin Laden? What about Mogadishu? What about the Khobar Towers, in which just as many Americans were killed as on the U.S.S. Cole. Or the African embassy bombings? Or bin Laden's fatwa of February 23, 1998?

"Finally confirmed, officially" are weasel words from the pre-9/11 days when we mistakenly believed anti-terrorism was just gumshoe work. It's a sign that the Clinton perspective on national security hasn't changed much since that pleasant sojourn from history.

UPDATE: State Dept. Says It Warned About bin Laden in 1996.

No, we won. It was a 70-30 district, we beat the spread by a healthy margin. Democrats need to stop judging success on Election Day, we need to judge success every day.

Last then adds:

I'd make more fun of this, but I'm a Philadelphia sports fan and I understand this psychosis all too well. In my heart I know that the Sixers shellacked the Lakers in the 2001 Finals, even if they didn't--technically--"win" the "championship."

Because Sports > Politics, Jonathan's going to win this battle of analogies, but I too can sympathize. I was up in Philly for a while. In 1999, I worked on an underdog Republican mayoral campaign. We faced a 4-to-1 voter registration deficit in one of the most notorious machine towns in America and should have lost 70-30. Instead, we lost the general by 2, the best showing by a Republican in half a century.

So, I guess my resume should now be amended to reference the "the victorious Republican mayoral campaign that prevailed against all odds, beating the spread by 38 points." How ingenious! In six years, I'd never have thought to describe it that way.

Thank you for sharing this particularly inventive bit of framing Bob Brigham!