Final election thoughts:

California, I'm disappointed. I expected the other two gay marriage bans in other states to go through, but I thought you would vote for sanity and compassion and human rights and quash yours. You didn't. It was close, but too many of you were bigoted, for that's what it is: bigotry.

I understand that there is currently a push to dispute this amendment with the Supreme Court, as it denies a minority group the rights granted to a majority group and is thus unconstitutional, just as denying African-Americans the right to marry in this country would be unconstitutional. I hope that happens -- I find that to be an excellent argument.

We shall see. This battle might have been lost but the war is far from over.

******

Came across this on John Scalzi's blog, so many of you may have already seen it. Fox News (!) did a bit on the untold, off-the-record-until-after-the-election things their reporter was told about Sarah Palin by staffers in the McCain campaign. It's... interesting and would indicate that there was little-to-no vetting of her as a candidate beforehand. Click here if you're interested in hearing it.

From: [identity profile] alces2.livejournal.com


The vote for Prop 8 in California is indeed a bigoted position, IMHO. However, if you look at the voting percentages, I wonder if it is also apathy to a certain extent. 50% or less voting in San Francisco doesn't make sense. I believe similar numbers exist across the state. Maybe they saw that Obama had won and didn't come out. That's an excuse not a good reason. Of course there is no guarantee that all the people who didn't vote would have voted against Prop 8 but still . . .

I'm curious what Palin will do over the next months and what will other material about her will come out over the next days and weeks. My hope is that she disappears into obscurity.

From: (Anonymous)


I'm curious ... does the rest of the country know that the "Yes on 8" campaign was very, VERY heavily financed by the Mormons? Do people see the irony in the Mormons financing Marriage = 1 Man + 1 Woman? (Think "Big Love" here.)

Re: California low-ish turn-out
Pennsylvania was announced mid-afternoon PST. Anyone following the election knew what a turning point that was. Ohio was called early in the evening, local time. Even those only casually following the election (who? I don't know.) would have known what that meant.

Neither presidential campaign had much GOTV presence in California; both shipped folks from here to battleground states. The Yes on 8 campaign had a very large GOTV effort, especially in California's bible-belt (the central valley).

Los Angeles County, and it alone has about the same number of voters as the whole SF Bay Area, voted Yes. The bit that surprised me were the two counties along the Nevada border voting No. I'm used to state maps that show them aligning with conservative/Republican voting patterns.

See http://vote.sos.ca.gov/Returns/props/map190000000008.htm for a map of the state's voting pattern.

So, my suspicion is that the black vote in California came out to participate in the historical moment, but the youth vote did not. The African-American community's sense of history overrode the sense that ones vote might count but it would not matter. We can't know for sure until the statisticians crunch the numbers, but that's what my gut tells me.
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