<x-flowed>Michael Barone's reputation for being an election guru is highly overrated. I will soon lay out a critique of his introduction in the 2006 edition of "The Almanac of American Politics," but it has several interpretations of election numbers that are at best highly questionable, including:

* "The Bush campaign added more people to the electorate in 2004 than the Democrats did." That's certainly not true in key battleground states like Ohio, where the Bush victory was keyed on winning over some Gore voters from 2000 to offset in fact clearly losing among new voters.

* He suggests that the Republican turnout effort was more effective than the Democratic one, when in fact in most battleground states the Kerry campaign did relatively better than in the non-battleground states -- suggesting to me that Bush's victory was based on overall perceptions of his deserving re-election, not better GOTV efforts.

* He suggests the Electoral College boosted Bush, when in fact Bush almost certainly would have lost the election if winning the popular vote by less than half million votes. How is that a structural advantage?

* He says political pro's were surprised that Bush won 75 more congressional districts. But given that he won 47 more of today's congressional districts while losing the popular vote in 2000, that hardly seems surprising -- it just reflects a winner-take-all, district-based system's bias against parties with an urban base. He seems rather blind to 2000 and the impact of a party having a strong urban base -- writing "as political scientists have shown, in almost any districting plan a popular vote winner will tend to carry a percentage of districts larger than his percentage of the vote" as if the 2000- election were somehow ancient history.

* He fingers the Voting Rights Act and its 1982 amendments as a key reason for the GOP bias. But again, he misunderstands electoral history. The GOP actually had a significantly LARGER bias in the early 1970s, but it was obscured by far more ticket-splitters willing to vote GOP in presidential races and Democrat in congressional races. The fact is, our system's bias against urban America has been there for a long time -- and you sure can see it in the state of our cities.

Some folks starting coasting on their past record of hard work. Barone seems to be in that camp.

Rob Richie


At 09:53 PM 2/9/2006, ban@richardwinger.com wrote:

Michael Barone probably doesn't have any acquaintences
who don't have government-issued I.D., but there are
plenty of such people in the U.S.  There are millions
of Americans who have never flown on airplanes.  And
in low income neighborhoods, there are check-cashing
services that take a big chunk of any check that gets
cashed.  But poor people uses these services because
they don't have government photo ID's, and these
services don't require them.

The evidence in the Georgia lawsuit against the photo
ID law shows that lots of people do not have
government-issued photo ID.
---------------

> from what Barone posted on his blog:
  Large numbers of political
> players are charging that the basic requirement of
> showing voter identification at the polls is a form
> of undue intimidation. I think this is an astounding
> and indefensible argument. We have to show
> identification to cash a check or board an airliner.
> Identification is easily available to any American -
> and almost all of us carry official identifying
> cards on us at all times.


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com

Rob Richie
Executive Director

F a i r V o t e
The Center for Voting and Democracy
6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 610
Takoma Park, MD 20912
www.fairvote.org
rr@fairvote.org
(301) 270-4616


</x-flowed>