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Mark Schmitt grades some theories of the election:
"Race Chasm": C-.In another version of the white-racism theory, David Sirota popularized the idea that Obama would struggle in states where there were not enough African Americans to decide the outcome, but just enough to provoke white racism. He would do fine in lily-white states like Vermont and heavily black states like Mississippi but fall into the "race chasm" in between, in states like Connecticut, Oklahoma, New Jersey, and Florida. "Race chasm" had limited predictive value in the primaries (Obama did fine in mixed states like Wisconsin and Indiana), and none at all in the general election.Tara McKelvey reports on how a faulty VA system helped push one man to suicide:
Derek Henderson was jumpy and full of rage when he came home from Iraq in 2003. Over the next four years, he fought with his mother and brothers and got into trouble with the police. Finally, on June 22, 2007, he jumped off a bridge into the Ohio River. He didn't die, though, at least not right away. He tried to swim to a pole that supports the bridge and then slid under the water. He was 27 years old.And Harold Meyerson maps out the new Democratic landscape:
Though a number of academics flashing their regression analyses dispute that last week's election signaled a political realignment, I believe they're wrong. Suburbanites and professionals continued their long march from the Republican to the Democratic Party, as John Judis and Ruy Teixeira have both documented and predicted in the pages of this magazine. The current generation of young people is a more liberal cohort than its predecessor.
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—The Editors
