Democrats are, to put it mildly, in disarray right now. There's a very open debate taking place as to which direction the party should head, and who should be leading it. This is all normal after losing an election. The 2016 election was a disaster at the top of the ticket, but wasn't so bad further down. Democrats actually picked up some House seats, and flipped two Senate seats back. Of course, this was disappointing because they had expected to pick up a lot more seats in both houses, but it could have been much worse -- Republicans might have expanded their majorities.

Democrats lost the presidency for a multitude of reasons, but one big one was the further erosion of support among white blue-collar workers. This frustrates many Democrats who quite accurately point out that Democratic policy ideas help these people much more than Republican ideas. But part of the problem is that few Democratic ideas seem all that concrete to the average voter. So maybe what Democrats need to do is to focus on just one big idea, and define the party as the champion of that idea -- while painting the GOP as the prime reason it hasn't happened.

To me, the simplest idea to rally behind would be to push to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and build in a cost-of-living adjustment as well. This would have the greatest impact on working people's lives, and the idea has strong support which cuts across party lines. So it could achieve two things simultaneously -- helping people out, and helping to rebuild the Democratic Party.

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In the past week, Democrats lost the presidential election while America suffered the ultimate loss of two unique public voices: Leonard Cohen and Gwen Ifill. Ifill was co-anchor of the nightly news show PBS NewsHour (which some still refer to by its original name, the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, showing how influential this show's anchors have been in the past). Ifill will be greatly missed, as she was not only a voice of reason with great intelligence behind it, but also a voice for people not normally heard from in broadcast news. Ifill once remarked that she made more money in a week than her father made in a year, and she never forgot her humble beginnings in her reporting, as she consistently pressured politicians on what their policy positions actually meant for people on the lower economic rungs of the ladder. She was, in a word, authentic -- something even rarer in national journalism than it is in the world of politics. I join millions of Americans now mourning the loss of one of the most relatable journalists on the national scene. Ifill will be greatly missed, that much is certain.

So will Leonard Cohen, for different reasons. Cohen's music spoke to millions, and provided the most moving tribute to both his work and the campaign of Hillary Clinton this weekend, when Saturday Night Live opened with Kate McKinnon (dressed as Hillary Clinton) playing the piano and singing Cohen's best-known work, "Hallelujah."

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool ya
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

To me, at least, this was one of the most poignant "cold open" scenes ever, in the long and storied history of SNL -- right up there with Rudy Giuliani and Lorne Michaels addressing the nation after 9/11. In one heartfelt moment, McKinnon summed up the loss millions were feeling not only because of Cohen's death, but also because of the outcome of the election.

Now, losing elections is a part of the political process. Nobody wins all the time -- and shouldn't. It's what keeps parties from getting out of touch, to be blunt. But I was reminded today of not just Hillary Clinton's loss for the Democrats, but of the inevitable loss for our country of the presidency of Barack Obama. I say this because I just finished watching Obama's press conference, and couldn't help but wonder what Donald Trump press conferences will be like in the near future.

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Last week, we pre-empted our usual Talking Points format for a pre-election column. This week, we're going to do the same for a post-election column. The shock has not worn off, and it just feels too soon to return to analyzing Democratic politics. Democrats are in disarray right now, which is probably a good thing in the long run, at least if it leads to some major course corrections. But the wounds are still too raw for us to rub any further salt in them, so instead today we'd like to take a detour into history instead. If history bores you in general, we'd suggest you skip the rest of this column. For everyone else, let's take a look back today.

Does any of this sound familiar? A presidential candidate presents himself as a "man of the people" who will fight the entrenched elitists who are running the country. He launches a campaign the likes of which America has never seen before -- a campaign which absolutely horrifies those elites. His opponents call him patently unfit for the job, as well as boorish, crude, violent, unsophisticated, illiterate, and downright dangerous for the future of the country. The candidate himself complains of a president who is corrupt and illegitimate, rails against a totally rigged electoral system (direct quote: "there was cheating and corruption and bribery too"), and vows he will "clean the Augean Stables of Washington." He also promises a government attuned to the needs of the people rather than the elitists. His campaign is denounced in the media as "the most rude and ruthless political contest that ever took place in the United States," complete with charges (from both sides) of bigamy, adultery, slave-dealing, pimping a virgin to be raped by the Czar of Russia, bloodthirsty murder, tyranny, a stolen and rigged election, military despotism, the impropriety of buying a billiard table for the White House, and both sides warning that they were going to "save the Temple of Liberty from pollution." After running a campaign closer to a cult of personality than anything previously seen in America, he wins the election.

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Program Note: At the bottom of this excerpt is the original program note I ran earlier today, just for continuity. The following excerpt had to be typed out manually, which took me a while to complete (I thought I had done so a long time ago, when taking historical notes, but it turns out I was mistaken). I am posting it in full here for regular readers as a preview of tomorrow's column. I would be willing to bet that now that Donald Trump has won the presidency, a whole lot of people are going to start noticing parallels between him and Andrew Jackson, the first truly populist president ever elected. I'm too tired tonight to provide any context or any of my own personal commentary, which I will add to the following to create tomorrow's column. But, as I said, I thought regular readers would appreciate the core story in advance.

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For the past eight years, America has had an African-American president. Faced with the prospect of a white woman succeeding him, America instead just elected an angry white man as president. Call it the triumph of angry white men everywhere. Millions of Americans are about to find out what it's like to be led by the equivalent of the drunk uncle at the Thanksgiving table who refuses to follow the rules of politeness and political correctness. Was it a backlash against our first black president? Or rampant misogyny towards Hillary Clinton? Or just free-floating rage against a changing culture that is becoming more tolerant and multicultural by the year? It's impossible to accurately say, really. The only thing that can be said for certain is that angry white men are now dominant.

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Program Note: What follows is a repeat column from eight years ago, and the only time I've ever sat down and typed out a transcript because I was shocked that it didn't already exist on the web somewhere. This was the first time I ever laid eyes on Craig Ferguson's late-night comedy talk show, and I have to admit I was hooked from this point on. Oddly, he almost never mentioned politics again (except for the occasional sex scandal jokes) -- this was a completely out-of-character rant for him.

One technical note, I have removed the link to the video, because the guy's blog doesn't exist anymore. So if you want to see it you'll have to look it up on "the Googley web" yourself.

I'm running this repeat column today because there just isn't anything left to say about this election. We can all join in the comments as the results roll in tonight, but I just don't have anything to add today, other than "Go vote!" I mean, I could have ginned up a column on being annoyed at some political pundits (who really should know better) who have recently started misusing the political term "The Big Blue Wall," by somehow changing the accepted definition to only mean Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania -- something that's been annoying me for a few days. But it just isn't worth it, and my guess is that after the dust settles the term will revert back to its actual meaning (the 242 Electoral College votes that Democrats begin the race with in their pocket). In fact, sooner or later that Big Blue Wall is likely going to be expanded (I wrote about this earlier this year, with my guess being that Colorado, New Mexico, and Virginia will soon join the crowd). But until that point, it has a very specific meaning, at least to the wonky pedants such as yours truly.

But it just wasn't enough for a full column -- it barely even made a decent paragraph, there. So instead, I decided to just post Craig's excellent "Go vote!" rant, and then head on down to the polling place myself. Until the polls close, here's a nostalgic look back at the halcyon days of the 2008 race. Craig even gets almost prophetic when he warns about complaining: "when we wind up with President Sanjaya!" That's not all that far off the mark from President Trump, now is it?

[Originally published September 11, 2008]

As a public service, today I am running a full transcript of Craig Ferguson's monologue (from The Late Late Show on CBS) from last night, 8/10/08.

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Welcome to the final Electoral Math column of the 2016 election season. After a very quick rundown of the past week's polling activity, I'm going to dispense with my usual hedging and just go ahead and call every state for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

As with all my political prognostication columns, I always admit my own record up front, so you can see my past performance. While my record for picking primary winners is only fair-to-middling, my record at picking states in presidential elections is a lot better. In 2008, I only called two states wrong, as I was so overly optimistic that Barack Obama was heading for a historic landslide that I rashly predicted he'd win Georgia and Missouri. Missouri did wind up being incredibly close, but John McCain won Georgia by a full five points. I also failed to predict that Nebraska would split its Electoral College vote, with one out of their five votes going to Obama. Counting Washington D.C. as a state, my 2008 record was 48.8 for 51 contests. In 2012, however, I correctly predicted every state, for a perfect score of 51 for 51. Now, I seriously doubt I'm going to do that well this year, because it's been such a wild and wacky race all around. Meaning there are sure to be surprises at the very end, as well.

But we'll get to all of that in a minute. First, let's take a final look at the graphs where we've been charting both candidates' performance over time. I'm going to keep the commentary on the graphs to a minimum for this final column, as I'm really just providing them for completeness' sake. After a quick run-through of the final charts, I'll get to naming my picks for each candidate and my final map of the 2016 election.

Here is the overall total count of Electoral Votes (EV) for both candidates.

[Click on any of theses images to see larger-scale versions.]

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Welcome back to Friday Talking Points. We went on our annual hiatus last Friday, to bring everyone two chilling Hallowe'en nightmares, but we found that it was actually quite hard this year to come up with anything more terrifying than "the other candidate wins" -- for either side of the aisle. Such has been the 2016 election season.

However, regular readers of this column are going to have to wait yet another week for a standard Friday Talking Points offering. This week we are throwing out our format entirely, and instead providing an explanation of who we're voting for, followed by a call for reform in an effort to inject a possible silver lining to what promises to be a very contentious Election Day (no matter who wins). Yes, there will be optimism at the end of this column, specifically provided for people who are tired of the apocalyptic tone of the final pre-election week. So there's that to look forward to.

As we sat down today to write our usual talking points, we realized that it would be an almost pointless exercise. By this point, Democrats already know what to say about Donald Trump -- and they've been loudly saying so to anyone who will listen. Our attempts to add to this cacophony would be virtually meaningless now. So too would rehashing the past two weeks, since America has been breathlessly following this storyline on an almost hourly basis.

Instead, we're going to first explain who we're personally voting for, and then we're going to attempt to interject a little optimism for the near future at the end. We promise that next week we'll return to our usual format (either in triumph or in sorrow), after the election is over. And we didn't want to disappoint regular readers, so we have managed to fill roughly the same amount of pages as we normally do on Fridays (translation: get ready for an insanely long column, as always).

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A Second-Term High

President Obama is having the best year of his entire presidency, in terms of job approval improvement. In the ten months of 2016 so far, Obama's monthly job approval average has risen eight times, and only decreased twice. His job approval number has improved so much that he's now at the second-highest point of his entire second term. The only month he was at a better point was January of 2013, when he was sworn in a second time. On top of this, his daily job approval average hit the highest point of his entire second term last month. All in all, it's looking like Obama will finish his time in office in a pretty comfortable place. After falling back a bit in September, Obama roared back in October. Let's take a look at his new chart for this month.

[Click on graph to see larger-scale version.]

October, 2016

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America is in the midst of a dramatic shift in public opinion, one which began at least a decade ago and shows no signs of reversing any time soon. The concept of fully legalizing marijuana for adult recreational use must now actually be considered the mainstream opinion in America. The latest nationwide poll (that I have seen) put national support for legalization at a whopping 60 percent -- higher than it has ever previously been. Next Tuesday, five more states will vote on the issue on their ballots. Two of those states are on the East Coast. One of the five is the most populous state in the country, with over 39 million people living in it -- fully one-eighth of the total US population. Polling is sketchy on the issue (it always is), but it certainly looks possible that recreational marijuana legalization has a good shot of winning, in all five states.

The concept of legalization has now been fully normalized. What I mean by that is that it is no longer considered some laughable proposition that deserves nothing more than ridicule and stoner jokes from the media. You don't hear a lot of Cheech and Chong jokes being made this election cycle, to put it another way (or Harold and Kumar jokes, for a younger generation). In fact, the media stories now mainly focus on the vast amounts of money to be made by legalization -- and not just for the people involved in the trade. Millions and millions of tax dollars are also at stake, which is something national journalists seem to take a lot more seriously.

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