...is some version of "half the country will be angry and disappointed tomorrow morning." Like this. Or this, from the FT:
This has been an exhilarating and exciting contest. But the visceral dislike between red and blue America has also made it disturbing. There is talk that if Mr Obama loses on Tuesday there will be riots. And there has been plenty of raw anger on display at McCain rallies – with accusations that Mr Obama is un-American or linked to terrorists.
There are a few reasons that "half the country will be angry," and potentially won't accept the legitimacy of the result, is a stupid thing to say. For one thing, the losing candidate will have less than half the votes -- quite possibly much less. If voter turnout is, say, 160 million (50 percent higher than in 2004), and Obama wins 53-45, McCain's 45 percent will represent about 72 million people, or about 23 percent of the country.
Second, while there is plenty of anger at McCain-Palin rallies, they are also hilariously small rallies, like the 1,000 people at Bucaneer Stadium yesterday. They represent a tiny fraction of "Red America." It is the campaign's decision to stoke that anger, and the fact that doing so has had so little actual effect on the election other than to make the angry core smaller and nastier, that is the interesting story. On the other side, the "talk that if Mr. Obama loses there will be riots" is, as far as I've ever seen, talk on the right, originating with Jonah Goldberg. Sure, if Obama loses now, there will be some real questions about how that happened, but if Obama had stumbled, and McCain had kept the lead he held in early September and gone smoothly to victory, "Blue Americans" would accept that result just as they accepted the 2000 and 2004 results.
The idea of a hopelessly divided America, in which neither side can accept the legitimacy of the other, seems to be one in which a lot of the press is deeply invested. Obama's rhetoric and broad coalition doesn't entirely bridge those gaps, and there are still profound differences of culture and ideology, but we've lived with those differences before and we'll live with them again. What this election showed is that a politics that seeks mainly to aggravate and exploit those differences doesn't automatically succeed, and that's among the many happiest bits of news this election.
-- Mark Schmitt
