Monday, 03/22/04

I learned today that Bush isn't on the ballot yet in Illinois. Here's some background from last November, and here's a more recent update. What is it with Illinois and candidates named JFK?

I was also struck by Illinois's electoral clumping. Newly minted Democratic Senate candidate Barack Obama won what looks like 14 counties out of 102, but still beat the runner-up by almost 30 points -- and by 5.5 points, he beat all of his Democratic competitors combined. Due to higher than normal Democratic interest in the race, he also got more votes than all of the Republican primary contenders combined. He's gonna make a great senator.

Washington, of course, exhibits a similar urban clumpiness. Maria Cantwell won her Senate race here in 2000 by carrying only four counties out of 39, a sad average of 39.2% of the vote in each county, while Slade Gorton won an average of 58%. But since she beat him by a nearly identically reversed percentage in King Country (which contains Seattle, Bellevue, and Redmond, plus a couple more), worth a margin of 153,000 votes, she still squeaked by with 2228 votes to spare statewide. Eastern Washington sucks.

Enough fun, back to the book.

03:56PM «

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