I am too young to remember the LBJ landslide of 1964 and my memories of 1968 and 1972 are minimal. The first vivid memory of a US Election that I have is 1976 when I stayed up all night awaiting the results though I was yet not in high school. 1968 was, of course, a transformational realignment election in the United States with the South’s tilt towards the GOP begun in 1964 when Goldwater took five states in the Deep South (he also won Arizona). Since the 1968, only Georgia’s Jimmy Carter and Arkansas’ Bill Clinton have won any states in the South for the Democrats. Even Al Gore of Tennessee failed to carry one state in the South. It will thus be of significance should Senator Obama manage to win a southern state. Of course, Obama has the benefit of running against the GOP and of changing demographics in states like Virginia, North Carolina and Florida.

Results so far tonight are but two. Kentucky and Vermont, each going as expected. The Bluegrass State has been won by Senator McCain and the Green Mountain State by Senator Obama. Vermont has undergone its own transformation over the years. Until 1964, Vermont had never voted for Democrat. LBJ was the first Democrat ever to win Vermont. Bill Clinton would be the second. George H. W. Bush was the last Republican to win Vermont. New Hampshire is now joining Vermont and New England as a solid Democratic region. And that’s largely because the moderate wing of the GOP — Jacob Javits, Edward Brooke, William Weld, Lowell Weicker, Lincoln Chafee — is either dead or headed for political extinction. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe are the last two Republicans left standing east of the Delaware River.

The election of 1969 remade the country but it also remade the GOP. What once a broad national party is now a regional and more conservative party. In New England and on the West Coast, the GOP is headed for its darkest days yet. And with changing demographics in South and the Mountain West, the virtual lock that the GOP has had on the Electoral College will come to an end tonight.

Reflecting on this change, here’s an incomplete list of who is to blame for the demise of the GOP.

• Ronald Reagan. A Conservative’s Conservative. Wholesale destruction of unions during his Administration. While memberships in unions had been declining since the 1940s, unions continued to show growth in their rolls until 1981. From 1981 to 1989, union membership fell from 25% of total employment to just 7%.

• Milton Freidman. I don’t hate many people. I hate Milton Freidman. His was the intellectual rational for a relentless war on living standards and a social safety net all in the name of “freedom.” His Chicago Boys wrecked havoc the world over and the economic results of their policies are evident in the rising tide of income inequality and the concurrent rise in indices of social misery.

• George W. Bush. An inept but unfortunately highly effective President. I am asked if I think Bush was the worst President ever. My answer is no. James Buchanan wins that dubious honour. Bush 43 was unqualified no doubt but he largely accomplished what he set out to do. That the results are a disaster is another matter.

• Karl Rove. The election wizard who has worked on every GOP campaign since Nixon’s in 1968. Rove’s strategy on playing to base in 2000 and 2004 won two bitter narrow elections. He sliced and diced the electorate to get Bush over the top. He also slice and diced the GOP into near extinction.

• Tom Delay. Few politicians epitomized every wrong with the GOP more than the former Congressman from Sugarland, Texas. It’s hard to forget his redistricting of Texas mid cycle in order to win a few more seats for the GOP in Congress.

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Welcome to the final edition of the BTF US Campaign Reader (at least until 2012). Here are six articles from both the US and international media about the US Presidential race. Highlights of each article provided with a link to the full article.

The Curtain Finally Falls
By Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin writing for Politico.

They should, by all rights, have entered Election Day with their moods matching the polls: Barack Obama elated by his seemingly substantial lead and large crowds, John McCain demoralized by the specter of defeat and meager turnout.

But in the final hours of a campaign that has seldom gone according to script, the candidates’ moods and their campaigns’ demeanor – quite fittingly – didn’t follow the expectations. Obama seemed almost unsteady amid the emotional barrage of the end of the campaign and his grandmother’s death, while his aides held fast to solid, positive early voting numbers with a mood one Chicago staffer described as “cautiously nauseous.”

A hoarse McCain and his top aides and advisers, clinging to the far weaker evidence of favored polls, evidenced an upbeat, even jaunty attitude through a grueling final day of airport hangar rallies that took them through seven states in just over 24 hours.

Obama, never a demonstrative man, gave little sign until Monday night that he had undergone a week of extraordinarily intense emotion. He campaigned at a less breakneck pace than his rival, holding just three events on the final day of campaigning.

Four Election Day Scenarios
By Carl M. Cannon in Reader’s Digest.

Obama wins the popular vote handily, but loses narrowly in the Electoral College. This dichotomy has happened before, as recently as 2000, but this result would make that year’s Florida recount look like a picnic. For one thing, Al Gore won the popular vote by 500,000 out of 101.5 million votes. This time, the numbers could be much more undemocratic, a result that would be disenfranching to a clear majority of Americans and would generate ill-will that would have an explosive potential. Some African Americans leaders, many conspiracy-minded academics, party activists, and the angry left-wing blogosphere would immediately proclaim the election stolen. The unrestrained—and more partisan—media of 2008 would trumpet these claims. The sheer size of Obama’s victory in the popular vote would undermine McCain’s very claim to power. Here’s how this might happen:

Suppose Obama were to carry California, with its 55 electoral votes, and New York (31 electoral votes) by 1.8 million votes each, and his own state of Illinois (21 electoral votes) by 1 million. Based on 2004 election results, such numbers are easily imaginable. Meanwhile, McCain would eke out narrow victories in Florida, Ohio, Missouri, and Pennsylvania by margins ranging from 50,000-100,000 votes, while winning Texas by a comfortable—but not overwhelming—cushion of half-a-million. Those seven states would give McCain a slight lead over Obama in electoral votes 113 to 107, while the Republican ticket trailed the Democratic ticket by something close to 4 million votes in the popular vote. It would be hard to make up that kind of ground in the rest of the states. This is the Democrats’ doomsday scenario, and it has fallout that affects all Americans. It would engender, in addition to political chaos; a) four years of very, very hard feelings in this country: b) a steep loss of prestige for the United States in world public opinion; c) the demise of the Electoral College.

After Epic Campaign, Voters Go to Polls
By Michael Cooper in the New York Times.

In voting booths in every corner of the land, the people were collectively writing the ending to a political saga that has been unfolding for nearly two years, during a tumultuous, uncertain period of American history in which record numbers of people expressed concerns that the country was heading down the wrong track.

Voters began lining up before dawn at polling locations up and down the East Coast, in what election officials said was an unusually large turnout. Some voters waited for as long as an hour in Virginia and others stood in lines that stretched out the door at polling stations in Cleveland. Yogi Preschel, 54, used his 45-minute wait to vote on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to drink a cup of coffee and shave with a battery-powered razor.

Some voting experts and campaign aides predicted that there would be a record turnout of some 130 million voters, which would be the highest percentage turnout in a century, and would shatter the previous record of 123.5 million people who cast ballots four years ago.

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