David, you are of course correct about the size of the Democratic congressional margins in 1976, but those were, as Donny notes, unchanged from the previous Congress (and they were as large as they were because 1974 was the "Watergate election").

yes, it would have been remarkable if Carter could have made substantial gains in in the House in 1976 after '74.

I'd say Clinton '92 is the best analogy. And Clinton thought he had a mandate to nationalize health care, and we know how that worked out.

If we're going to play games and use House and Senate figures, it's probably worthwhile to count in the 2006 numbers in some way.

2006 was a really awful year for Republicans, and the Democrats picked up a LOT of low-lying fruit -- and some surprisingly high stuff, although I imagine they expected to lose TX-22 and it's ilk back.

So to follow that up 2 years later, with another 5 Senate seats and a dozen or two more House seats? They got all the easy House seats in 2006, and they just posted rather nice back-to-back Senate pickups.

Looks like a Tsunami to ME -- leastwise, I wouldn't have wanted to be a GOP office-holder in either election.

But Clinton in '92 only won 43% of the vote, the Democrats gaines 0 Senate seats, and actually lost 9 seats in the House. Simply not comparable to what happened yesterday. Yesterday was closer to 1980 (compare Obama's 53% of the total vote to Reagan's 51%) although the GOP did gain 12 Senate and 35 House seats. I am not claiming it was as big a shift as 1980, but the result is closer. We can find various weird stats to downplay yesterday's Obama/Democratic victory, but it was quite significant.

I don't know that I'd call it "fairly close," but it certain isn't a blowout, landslide, tsunami, etc., by historical standards, but just a mundane victory.

This is inaccurate. Moments in history must be considered in context. D-Day was not a minor operation simply because so many more soldiers died in the Battle of the Somme.

I think you are all missing the point, which is that, after victory, Reagan, and even Bush 41, did not face the polarized electorate that is Clinton's real legacy. In the years since Bush 43 won his majority, he has found the nation basically ungovernable, in part because his opposition has stoked the worst partisanship I have seen in my lifetime. They have literally called for his assassination, called him a drunk, a torturer, "Hitler"... in the middle of a war they have called his commanding generals liars, likened our troops to Nazis, accused them of terrorism and murder, and on and on. You know as well as I do that this has been going on.

And now we are coming off a campaign where the winning candidate has made fun of his opponent's disabilities, called the VP candidate a "pig", viciously pursued -- with government resources -- private citizen who had the temerity to ask him an unscripted question, and recruited state prosecutors to persecute his critics. His minions literally demanded DNA tests of her newborn son, and made up a fictional abuse-of-power scandal that only unraveled the day before the election. And on top of this he has long-standing ties to anti-Semites and terrorists -- associations that he lied about to hide? And he has deemed any opposition to him 'racist' -- even discussing his ties to Communists has caused his supporters to cry "racism!"

Why on earth would you think that this bitter divide will not persist into the new administration? Do you think that bringing back the "Fairness Doctrine" [sic], regulating blogs, and assembling a "civilian security force" will calm things down?

Step back and take a look at where we are -- and that 53% will look mighty thin. When it sinks in that we have elected a Communist fellow-traveler to lead the Free World, there will be hell to pay.

BBB

bbbeard,

Excellent post, and absolutely correct. Just shows you what can happen in any country where the dominant media becomes a propaganda organ for one side.

If the media had done its job and demanded that Obama give some answers to questions relevant to his qualifications for president and his shady associations, and had hounded him half as much as they hounded every Republican from Reagan forward, the result would have been different.

Instead, they were his cheerleaders, big time.

Does it ever stop being somebody else's fault? I'm just curious.

I think we could ask the same question of you, X.

BBB

Professor:

Come on. Get real. I think this is a pretty solid win by any estimation. There is nothing mundane about it.

Consider that a certain percentage of voters were never going to vote for someone black, and still aren't. And then look at the fact that Obama got 52% of the vote, there is a 6+ percent margin in the popular vote, and a 100+ margin in the electoral vote.

In other words, notwithstanding the headwinds faced by any black candidate (Democrat or Republican), he got a higher percentage of the popular vote than anyone in 20 years, and a higher percentage of the electoral vote than anyone in 24 years. If you look at just non-incumbent wins, his was the largest popular vote percentage or electoral vote margin in 28 years.

And all of this comes after two elections that were very close, and two more before that where the winner could not get a majority of the vote - even in 1996 when he was running as the incumbent.

For God sakes, we lost Florida, Ohio, Colorado and Virginia. And Indiana! Has Indiana ever voted for a Democratic president before? We did not pick up a single state that we did not get in the last election.

I don't know how you spin this into anything other than a drubbing. I think your efforts would be better spent asking why this happened than in denying that it did.

@jgshapiro:

It is clearly a win (unlike 2000 and probably also 2004), but it is far, far, far from being a drubbing.

Your claim that Obama has won the highest percentage of the electoral vote in 20+ years is wrong no matter how you qualify it.

Right now Missouri and North Carolina have yet to be officially called, but it seems fairly certain that Missouri will be called for McCain and North Carolina for Obama.

If this happens, the final Electoral College vote will be 364 to 174. Bill Clinton in 1992 won 370 votes (challenging an incumbent president) and in 1996 won 379 votes. So Obama's Electoral College victory is only the largest since 1996, which, given that that was only three elections ago and the two in between were two of the most-closely fought elections in our history, is hardly impressive. (Even if Obama wins Missouri, his win would only tie Clinton's in 1996.)

If you really don't believe me that this victory is no more impressive than Clinton's 1992 win, just go to the New York Times election results website and look at the county by county comparison of this election to 1992 (under the Voting Shifts tab). All that red (much of the country) is counties that voted more Republican in 2008 than in 1992 (i.e., they offered less support to Obama in an open election than they did to Clinton running against an incumbent).