WASHINGTON: Americans went to the polls yesterday in what is arguably the most important presidential election since World War II.
Voters throughout the US spent hours waiting for the chance to cast their vote for the man they hoped would bring the country out of a mind-boggling series of crises threatening not just the short-term future but the very viability of this nation.
The first indication of the direction the election was taking came last night when Barack Obama was the big winner in the presidential race in Dixville Notch and Hart’s Location in New Hampshire.
Since 1948, the two small villages have observed a tradition of casting the first Election Day ballots; the towns also have historically chosen the next president. In Dixville Notch, Obama defeated John McCain by a count of 15 to 6. Hart’s Location reported 17 votes for Obama, 10 for McCain and two for write-in candidate Ron Paul.
Another sign of the election’s direction came from the “Misery Index,” which chose Obama. The Misery Index is a simple economic concept that adds the unemployment rate and the inflation rate over the preceding 12 months.
The index was popularized in 1976 by Jimmy Carter, who exploited rising inflation and unemployment during the 1973-75 recession to defeat President Ford. Four years later, amid a soaring Misery Index, Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory over President Carter. Based on an unemployment rate of 6.1 percent in September and a 12-month inflation rate of 4.9 percent, the latest Misery Index currently totals 11 percent. It has been this high since 1984, when it stood at 11.6 percent. “When the Misery Index is high, people tend to vote against the incumbent party,” said Ray Fair, an economics professor at Yale University, who built the econometric model to predict the outcome of presidential elections.
According to the econometric model, Obama will win 53.75 percent of the two-party vote, giving him a 7.5 point victory over McCain.
This is interesting, as no president has managed to garner more than 51 percent of the popular vote in the past 20 years. In fact, of 15 presidential elections since World War II, only six winners actually cracked 51 percent — Dwight D. Eisenhower in both 1952 and 1956, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, Richard M. Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1984 and George Bush in 1988. All Republicans.
Here is another twist to the election direction: The weather. Weather apparently can be a factor in voter turnout, especially for Democrats, as Democrats tend to be less affluent than Republicans and tend to live in larger cities. So, the theory goes, they depend more on public transportation to get them to the polls.
A 2004 study of a century’s worth of data about weather on Election Day concluded that when it rained, “the negative effect on Democratic performance of turnout is significantly increased” and that “weather accounts for about a five-point swing in turnout.”
This Election Day, much of the nation, including most of the battleground states, saw fair weather that encouraged voters to go to the polls.
Where were the exceptions to sunny skies?
At the time of going to press, two strongly contested battleground states, North Carolina and Virginia, were expected to get rain. Colorado, another hotly contested state, was also due for storms. But in Missouri, where the race was perhaps the tightest in the country, the weather was predicted to be a “beautiful voting day,” according to Brian Cordy, a national weather forecaster.
