ShareThisWASHINGTON -- The election of the first post-baby-boomer president raises the question: Who captured the vote of that enormous, often-influential cohort?The answer: Neither presidential candidate did. In fact, according to exit polls, the boomer vote split almost exactly down the middle.Among those ages 45 to 64 -- which includes most boomers -- 50 percent voted for Barack Obama and 49 percent for John McCain.X...X...XSo, how did pollsters do in foreshadowing the results of the race? Political scientist Costas Panagopoulos at Fordham University compared the findings of the final national pre-election polls conducted by 23 survey research outfits with the actual final tally.The top polls: Rasmussen; Pew; YouGov/Polimetrix; Harris Interactive; and GWU/Battleground.The least accurate: Newsweek; CBS/Times; Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby; Gallup; CBS.X...X...XBottom line for this election season: The candidate who spent the most money won.The Center for Responsive Politics analyzed campaign-spending reports and found that in 93 percent of House races and 94 percent of Senate races the winner was the biggest spender.The average price tag for a House seat now is nearly $1.1 million. For a Senate seat, it was $6.5 million.The biggest losers: Candidates who spent piles of their own money. The campaign-funding watchdog group calculated that, of the 49 congressional candidates who spent more than $500,000 of their own money, just six House candidates and one for the Senate won.The booby prize goes to Sandy Treadwell, a Republican who ran against incumbent Democratic Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand in New York. Despite spending at least $5.9 million of his own money, he lost.X...X...XSo, how did allegedly ethically and/or legally challenged pols do at the polls?New Orleans voters gave the nod in a runoff to Rep. William Jefferson, the Democrat who the FBI says stashed bribe money in his freezer. He'll be on the ballot in the general election next month.Florida voters ejected Democratic Rep. Tim Mahoney by a 20-percent margin after reports of extramarital affairs and other alleged improprieties surfaced weeks before the election. Running on a "faith, family and personal responsibility" platform, Mahoney had won the seat in 2006 after GOP Rep. Mark Foley resigned amid allegations of improper behavior with congressional pages.In Michigan, former federal prison inmate and assisted-suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian lost his bid as an independent for a suburban Detroit House seat. The Rev. Edward Pinkney, a community activist, ran for the same seat from behind bars; he is serving time for making threats to a judge who had earlier convicted him of election fraud. Believed to be the first to run for Congress while in prison since former Rep. James Trafficant, D-Ohio, tried from the federal slammer in 2002, Pinkney lost.X...X...XAnother long-reliable gauge of election reflection bit the dust Tuesday.The small Kentucky mountain community of Lawrence County had picked the winner in every presidential election since 1964. The last time the county went with the loser was in 1960, when Richard Nixon bested John F. Kennedy by 520 votes.But in the Nov. 4 contest, the good voters of Lawrence County got it terribly wrong: McCain clobbered Obama by 1,467 votes, a margin of 26 percent.(Contributing to this column were Scripps Howard News Service correspondents Lee Bowman and Michael Collins. E-mail Lisa Hoffman at hoffmanl(at)shns.com.)
The baby-boomer vote ... How pollsters fared ... More
Submitted by SHNS on Mon, 11/10/2008 - 11:36
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