All,

I am very concerned about a section of the Voting Rights Act going in front of the Supreme Court. Can someone talk me down off the ledge?

C’mon, it’s not like they’re white men.

Yeah, but....I mean, the right-wing isn't trying to control men's bodies!! (I know you were joking, but I just can't sometimes.)

Anyway, I have a cranberry coffee cake in the oven and am coming down from my rage attack.

It's weird. I'm not a political debater, per se, but over the past year or so I've found myself more and more fascinated by the psychology of voting, and what people think of as threats to themselves, or promises--truth or lies--what's the job of the people you elected, and what's your job as a citizen.

I don't believe most people have terribly complicated reasons for how they cast votes. It's probably a selection of sound bites, or reactions to how the candidates have behaved in the past year or so, what it takes to preserve their fiefdom--and the scope of fiefdom ranges from anywhere between the individual and the world.

Suddenly (or, you know, gradually over the past year) I am getting more and more fascinated.

That Rachel Maddow piece is very much about the point of voting, something that *should* be a common goal, no matter which side you fall on.

(And for all this--so much of the world can't tell the two US parties apart anyway...)

Religion is also part of the story. Most white women, like most white men, are churchgoing Christians, a group that is strongly Republican—especially evangelicals, who voted for Romney by almost four to one.

Does this apply to non-white Christians? What about other religions?

This is pretty impressive too:

In 2004, more than a third of Hispanic women voted for Bush, and in 2008, thirty per cent of them voted for John McCain. This year, just twenty-three per cent of Hispanic women voted for Romney.

As is this:

Ninety-six per cent of black women voted for Obama; seventy-six per cent of Hispanic women voted for him; and so did sixty-six per cent of women of other races, including Asians. Since about one in six voters is now a non-white woman, those votes were enough to cancel out the reverse gender gap among white women

FOUR PERCENT OF BLACK WOMEN DIDN'T VOTE FOR OBAMA. That's gotta scare the shit out of some people. And I have to wonder--how many of them voted Democrat, as opposed to Obama? What can 2016 possibly offer to get stats like that out of any demo?

I'm not thinking black women are the key to the office, but clearly minority women can swing shit, and shit was swung.

I don't believe most people have terribly complicated reasons for how they cast votes.

Don't you think most voters know who they'll vote for long before election day, though? I was surprised by the campaigning that seemed to think it was going to sway you at the last minute.

FOUR PERCENT OF BLACK WOMEN DIDN'T VOTE FOR OBAMA.

I assume some combination of margin of error and...I don't know, Herman Cain and Alan Keyes' wives?

I agree that the cultural wars are going to get worse -- this just confirmed what they feared. The minorities are going to band together and take down white people.

WRT the utter shock... it is commensurate to the hubris. If you believe so strongly that you will win, and you are in the bubble of feedback media (meaning the same guy fundraising for you is on the network as a political analyst) then it makes sense you can think you would win. That and this is a master example of doublethink. Romney spent the entire election lying and dissembling to the point where he lied to himself and his staffers to themselves about his chances of winning.

Don't you think most voters know who they'll vote for long before election day, though?

YES. I wish that politics was more like a cagematch. The election season should be X number of days only. Then decide already.

I think that 4% of black women were all in california and voted Green or Peace and Freedom or some other 3rd party.

Don't you think most voters know who they'll vote for long before election day, though?

Ask me that question at different times, and I'll give different answers, probably. I do see people saying boring was totes whatevs since they're not making a difference--I wonder what the numbers are like? How many of those no-point-to-mine votes can swing a race?

I also wonder how many people are one-issue voters (he can't have my guns/womb/borders) and how many can you convince at the last minute that their one issue wasn't the one they should have been paying attention to?

I don't know. But there's nothing like an election to indicate how many people don't think in ways I can follow.

Yikes! I need to get off my ass and find a pink or burgundy knee length crinoline. Any suggestions for sources that don't charge an arm and a leg for non-white underskirts? And are smooth and comfy to the legs?

Any suggestions for sources that don't charge an arm and a leg for non-white underskirts? And are smooth and comfy to the legs?

I think you can have one or the other but not both.

Pix, can you explain the NBPTS renewal process. For Entry 1, I just write about 4 professional growth areas. But then what is the extra pages of documentary evidence?

I am past the schadenfreude of Romney's campaign being SO confident they were going to win, and into the part where I feel bad for the regular people who got such a terrible shock.

I am still gleeful about any pain it might have caused Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, etc.

And I do hope this is at least the end of the FOX news machine being quite so centered on misinformation. NPR had a story about how some conservatives are pointing out that the insistence on Romney's "momentum" and their conviction that the polls were wrong was pretty damaging.