FiveThirtyEight.com: "Obama outperforms Kerry among virtually all demographics..."

FiveThirtyEight.com's poll-aggregation expert and interpreter Nate Silver describes Obama's superior performance:

Obama received a larger share of the vote than John Kerry among voters of all genders, races, education levels, and income classes, and virtually all religions. ...

...Obama markedly overperformed Kerry among parents. In a sense, it was those people who have most reason to be concerned about the future who voted for Obama: people who are young themeslves, or people who have young children at home. ...

Read more and observe FiveThirtyEight's chart, which breaks down the percentage of the electorate that voted Dem in 2004 and in 2008, with respect to an array of categories of personhood.

Nursing My Champagne Hangover...

What a time to find oneself living in Chicago.

J and I were varying degrees of sick with colds yesterday and therefore didn't venture down to Grant Park for the festivities. But nestled within the cozy confines of our humble Hyde Park digs, the city's excitement -- and reverence and awe -- was palpable. Of course, despite our colds, we just had to celebrate with a bottle of bubbly. Celebrations, cheers, cars horns honking and/or being honked lulled us to our slumber, our disbelief at what had happened still intact.

Today, the commute to work. Chicago's spirit of neighborliness and goodwill continues to pervade in the fuzzy Indian summer sun. On the bus and on the streets, back in Hyde Park and in the Loop, in the areas surrounding Grant Park. Faces speak volumes: a brand new text or a dusty text long forgotten. Where there was awe, there is now relief, a kind of basking in the moment's sunshiny serenity. Yes, it's really true; the albatross is off our back.

For one night, the City of Chicago was the focal point of the world's attention. Part of President-Elect* Obama's genius is that the focal point really was an entire city -- and, by extension, an entire nation and an entire world -- and not Obama himself. I mean, okay, obviously he was the figure of interest on the occasion of his acceptance speech. However: each and every one of Obama's communicative faculties, his body language, the content and music and resonances of his language and of his ideas, every power he summoned in the course of that speech was engaged in absorbing the enthusiasm of the entire, breathless City of Chicago, feeding this enthusiasm through his brilliant, tired mind, and returning the same enthusiasm, refashioned with elegance, finesse and sincerity.

This, by the way, is one of the most important of the myriad differences between Barack Obama and John McCain: for all of his confidence and even cockiness, Obama speaks with greatest authority about the American people and the future of this country.

By contrast, throughout his rambling, mean-spirited and at times pathetic campaign, McCain was able to speak with authority about one thing and one thing alone: John McCain.


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* You have to keep saying it to remind yourself that it's really true.

This is where the real fun begins:Pay attention to the Republican Party's excuses & explanations

I think that you can tell a lot about the health of the Republican Party by observing all of the excuses that its remaining apologists devise in order to explain away what appears to be a landslide victory for Barack Obama, as well as for several Democratic congressional candidates across the country. My diagnosis of the Republican Party is that it is in big big trouble.

Here's some of the spin and blame-gaming in which the Republican Party has been engaging and in which it will continue to engage:

• the voters are 'scared' about the economy, and they don't understand the economy all that well, so they're voting Dem as an act of panic;
• the media are 'liberal' and 'biased' and were 'in the tank' for Obama,
• and they never gave Sarah Palin a 'fair chance',
• and they never inquired about Barack Obama's real connections to William Ayers, etc.;
• Democrats encouraged and engaged in voter fraud;
• Democrats failed to insist upon the showing of ID cards at the polls.

This final allegation is especially infuriating and widespread, because it is essentially an index of the extent to which the Republican Party is fast hemorrhaging the cosmopolitan and suburban portions of its base.

What's left of the Republican Party at this point is, quite frankly, the Dixiecrat portions, which it absorbed into its ranks with the advent of Goldwater and then Nixon.

And, just in case anybody here doesn't know what the Dixiecrats were all about: they were the segregationists who never forgave the Democratic Party for having passed the Civil Rights Bill. In other words: racists.