Cocktail Politics, Rio Rancho Office Space and Truman Republicans
Lee on Nov 03 2008 at 2:00 pm | Filed under: Domestic Politics, Election 2008
It occurs to me that the sequence of cocktails is the best political indicator I know of on election night. In 2004 I was attending a Democratic election party and early on everyone was drinking wine and martinis in stemware, or beer and soda in tall glasses. The ambiance befit the beverages: general levity and young merriment. Sporty coquettish girls with wide white toothy smiles dominated all conversations.
But when it became clear that the exit polls predicting a Kerry victory were wildly mistaken, and field reports were coming in on cell phones of Karl Rove’s successful mobilization effort, it wasn’t long before the assembled Democrats had exchanged their drinks for short glasses filled with dark brown fluids. To match the new taste for scotch and bourbon whiskey, the sporty girls seemed to disappear and old men began to dominate conversations.
Perhaps that’s something to watch for when they cut to the election parties on television tomorrow evening.
***
I was in Rio Rancho today and the city appears to have been entirely painted over with Obama-Biden advertising. The vast sums the Obama campaign and its supporters squander placing signs on remote dirt roads is hopefully not a grim portent of future federal budgets (at least for we advocates of fiscal austerity). Few were the McCain signs to be seen by contrast.
Rio Rancho is the heart of suddenly and perhaps surprisingly critical Sandoval County. It’s a placid bedroom community on the high desert. Suburban, pro-business, Republican and Anglo. Bush carried Sandoval on the back of Rio with a 5,000 vote margin in 2004 (51.2%). But this time around Obama has made a serious play for its votes and may have succeeded.
Whenever I happen to be in town I stop by my favorite barber shop for a cut. I found that the strip mall she’s in had been entirely taken over for political offices, with the McCain and Obama headquarters separated only by my barber in the same building. The storefronts to the left and right of the presidential offices were held by the congressional candidate offices, with the special interest surrogates like the AFL-CIO on their flanks. It was a kind of chess alignment from king to rook.
The parking lot was filled with Obama bumperstickers, even though the McCain offices didn’t appear to lack for volunteers or people running to an fro. It struck me that there’s something awfully peculiar about that. You do not see McCain bumperstickers at anywhere near the frequency of Obama stickers. Scott Rasmussen says McCain has 44% of the vote in New Mexico. But anecdotally, I’d say the ratio of Obama to McCain stickers is 10:1 at least, if not greater.
I wonder what accounts for that. An acknowledgment of impending defeat? There’s nothing worse than driving around with ‘lost cause’ stuck to your car I suppose. Or perhaps it’s property intimidation. Democrats do have a bit of an unsavory reputation for vandalism around these parts I’m sorry to say. Yet it’s still a little odd in the parking lot for devoted partisan volunteers that they don’t put McCain stickers on their cars.
If McCain’s incessant references to Harry Truman’s improbable victory have any weight (and I don’t think they do, Harry Truman is the secular patron saint of the badly losing campaign), this might be the evidence. It’s often overlooked that after the unexpected outcome in 1948 most voters were as surprised as the press. There was some follow-up polling done on the matter and it was revealed that almost everyone who voted for Truman did so convinced he was going to lose, certain were casting their vote for a hopelessly lost cause.
Personally I don’t know anyone who thinks McCain is going to win. But I know a great many people who intend to vote for him all the same. They don’t have McCain bumperstickers on their cars either. Perhaps we might wonder just how many similar “Truman Republicans” are out there.
Sphere: Related Content2 Responses to “Cocktail Politics, Rio Rancho Office Space and Truman Republicans”
Trackback URI | Comments RSS
The View From the Bluff: Lance’s Economic and Finance Blog
I never got a sign up or a bumper sticker because I never noticed any place to pick one up.
There was an Obama office in the strip mall in Cedar Crest (Cedar Crest is pretty much one strip mall and a post office).
Must be nice to have lots of money.
While searching for Blogs about A Second Hand Conjecture » Cocktail Politics, Rio Rancho Office Space and Truman Republicans I found your site. Thank you for the effort you have put in.