I’ve resisted posting anything on my blog about the US election, realizing that a) I’m sad and angry and not thinking especially clearly, b) I try hard to keep this blog focused on my media research and on Africa, and c) my non-US readers are likely sick to death of hearing about our damned electoral process. But hey, I just found a really fun data set (mmmm… data sets) and a couple of pretty maps, and I thought I’d share.

(Addendum: Resident critic and provocateur JT points out that the previous paragraph is totally disingenuous. I’ve posted several times about the election, just trying to frame it in “perspective from Africa terms”. Guilty as charged.)

First, I need to tell you a little bit about where I’m posting from. I live in Lanesboro, MA, a small town (population 2,990) in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. We’re just north of Pittsfield (population 45,793), the county seat, 5 miles from the state of New York, 15 miles from Vermont… and about 140 miles from Boston, the state capital.

We are quite literally in the heart of “blue country”. Looking at a county-by-county election map produced by USA Today, thoughtfully hosted by Dave at Scripting News, it appears that Massachusetts is one of only three states in the nation where every single county voted for Kerry. (The others are Hawaii and Rhode Island – thanks for the correction, Ron.) Even ultra-liberal Vermont had a Bush county – Essex, in the far Northeast, sometimes referred to as “The Northeast Kingdom” in a nod to locals libertarian leanings and periodic threats to secede from the state.

Many Blogger-Americans are taking some consolation today from a lovely map designed by Jeff Culver, posted on BoingBoing under the title “Purple Haze”. It shows almost every state in America as a shade of purple, reminding us that most states are split 55-45 and that the “two nations” rhetoric disguises just how mixed political leanings are throughout our diverse nation.

That may be, but where I’m sitting, I’m just not feeling it. The night before election day, my wife and I caught a Richard Thompson concert in nearby (okay, 50 miles, but that qualifies as nearby in our part of the country) Northhampton, MA. Richard, who’d done an excellent job of being apolitical all night, took a straw poll near the end of his set. He asked “Who here will be voting for Bush tomorrow?” There was ten seconds of dead silence, followed by a minute of self-congratulatory laughter. As I took the “T” into Cambridge the next morning, I grabbed the local free paper and read the “Person in the Street” section. Of the 12 people surveyed, 11 were planning on voting for Kerry, and one was not planning to vote.

You can understand how I might have believed Kerry might win this election. It’s not that I wasn’t watching the polling – it’s just that there are very few people in my daily life who were planning to support Bush. (Just to make it very clear – I think that’s a bad thing, not a good thing, which I’ll try to make clear in a moment.)

There’s an excellent discussion taking place on Joi Ito’s weblog. Joi made an inflamatory, but hugely useful, post titled “The People of America Have Failed Us Today”. In my response to his post, I referred to myself as living in “the navy blue corner of a dark blue state”. I was guessing at the nature of local politics based on my experiences living here, but the AP has released a town-by-town voting list for Massachusetts, allowing me to test my theory.

In the average (mean) town in Massachusetts, 62% of voters supported Kerry, 37% supported Bush and 1% supported Cobb or Badnarik. (Bourne is weird – 16% supported Cobb or Badnarik…); in the median (sorted by percentage voting for Kerry), the breakdown is 59%/40%/1%. But the towns I regularly encounter are even bluer. Lanesboro voted 70% for Kerry; Williamstown, where I pick up my mail, was 79.5% Kerry. Nearby cities Pittsfield and North Adams both were 75.4% Kerry. Of the 32 towns in my county, 24 were in the top quartile of Massachusetts towns in terms of percentage of Kerry voters. All but one were in the top half; the lone rebel – Otis, MA – had 720 voters, 320 of whom supported Bush, giving the town a 56% showing for Kerry.

(Incidently, none of the Berkshire towns are in the top 10 of pro-Kerry towns. But Cambridge, where I work, and Northhampton, where I hang out, are.)

So here’s the thing: I’m a big believer that Americans don’t know enough about Africa, and therefore aren’t very interested in Africans. Increasingly, I’m becoming convinced that this is because most Americans don’t know many Africans and don’t have personal connections that cause them to pay attention to Africa. I’m admitting, here and now, that I don’t know enough conservatives, especially Berkshire County conservatives. And I’d like to know more of you.

So, my offer: if you voted for George W. Bush in 2004, and you’re willing to come to deep blue Lanesboro, MA, let me buy you a beer. (And if you don’t drink or are underage, let me buy you some other beverage.) November 11th, 7pm, the Old Forge (Rt. 7, just north of the center of town) – email me ethanz AT gmail.com to let me know you’re coming. I promise not to whine, cry or pout – just to talk and drink. See you there.

I’ve resisted posting anything on my blog about the US election, realizing that a) I’m sad and angry and not thinking especially clearly, b) I try hard to keep this blog focused on my media research and on Africa, and c) my non-US readers are likely sick to death of hearing about our damned electoral process. But hey, I just found a really fun data set (mmmm… data sets) and a couple of pretty maps, and I thought I’d share.

(Addendum: Resident critic and provocateur JT points out that the previous paragraph is totally disingenuous. I’ve posted several times about the election, just trying to frame it in “perspective from Africa terms”. Guilty as charged.)

First, I need to tell you a little bit about where I’m posting from. I live in Lanesboro, MA, a small town (population 2,990) in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. We’re just north of Pittsfield (population 45,793), the county seat, 5 miles from the state of New York, 15 miles from Vermont… and about 140 miles from Boston, the state capital.

We are quite literally in the heart of “blue country”. Looking at a county-by-county election map produced by USA Today, thoughtfully hosted by Dave at Scripting News, it appears that Massachusetts is one of only three states in the nation where every single county voted for Kerry. (The others are Hawaii and Rhode Island – thanks for the correction, Ron.) Even ultra-liberal Vermont had a Bush county – Essex, in the far Northeast, sometimes referred to as “The Northeast Kingdom” in a nod to locals libertarian leanings and periodic threats to secede from the state.

Many Blogger-Americans are taking some consolation today from a lovely map designed by Jeff Culver, posted on BoingBoing under the title “Purple Haze”. It shows almost every state in America as a shade of purple, reminding us that most states are split 55-45 and that the “two nations” rhetoric disguises just how mixed political leanings are throughout our diverse nation.

That may be, but where I’m sitting, I’m just not feeling it. The night before election day, my wife and I caught a Richard Thompson concert in nearby (okay, 50 miles, but that qualifies as nearby in our part of the country) Northhampton, MA. Richard, who’d done an excellent job of being apolitical all night, took a straw poll near the end of his set. He asked “Who here will be voting for Bush tomorrow?” There was ten seconds of dead silence, followed by a minute of self-congratulatory laughter. As I took the “T” into Cambridge the next morning, I grabbed the local free paper and read the “Person in the Street” section. Of the 12 people surveyed, 11 were planning on voting for Kerry, and one was not planning to vote.

You can understand how I might have believed Kerry might win this election. It’s not that I wasn’t watching the polling – it’s just that there are very few people in my daily life who were planning to support Bush. (Just to make it very clear – I think that’s a bad thing, not a good thing, which I’ll try to make clear in a moment.)

There’s an excellent discussion taking place on Joi Ito’s weblog. Joi made an inflamatory, but hugely useful, post titled “The People of America Have Failed Us Today”. In my response to his post, I referred to myself as living in “the navy blue corner of a dark blue state”. I was guessing at the nature of local politics based on my experiences living here, but the AP has released a town-by-town voting list for Massachusetts, allowing me to test my theory.

In the average (mean) town in Massachusetts, 62% of voters supported Kerry, 37% supported Bush and 1% supported Cobb or Badnarik. (Bourne is weird – 16% supported Cobb or Badnarik…); in the median (sorted by percentage voting for Kerry), the breakdown is 59%/40%/1%. But the towns I regularly encounter are even bluer. Lanesboro voted 70% for Kerry; Williamstown, where I pick up my mail, was 79.5% Kerry. Nearby cities Pittsfield and North Adams both were 75.4% Kerry. Of the 32 towns in my county, 24 were in the top quartile of Massachusetts towns in terms of percentage of Kerry voters. All but one were in the top half; the lone rebel – Otis, MA – had 720 voters, 320 of whom supported Bush, giving the town a 56% showing for Kerry.

(Incidently, none of the Berkshire towns are in the top 10 of pro-Kerry towns. But Cambridge, where I work, and Northhampton, where I hang out, are.)

So here’s the thing: I’m a big believer that Americans don’t know enough about Africa, and therefore aren’t very interested in Africans. Increasingly, I’m becoming convinced that this is because most Americans don’t know many Africans and don’t have personal connections that cause them to pay attention to Africa. I’m admitting, here and now, that I don’t know enough conservatives, especially Berkshire County conservatives. And I’d like to know more of you.

So, my offer: if you voted for George W. Bush in 2004, and you’re willing to come to deep blue Lanesboro, MA, let me buy you a beer. (And if you don’t drink or are underage, let me buy you some other beverage.) November 11th, 7pm, the Old Forge (Rt. 7, just north of the center of town) – email me ethanz AT gmail.com to let me know you’re coming. I promise not to whine, cry or pout – just to talk and drink. See you there.

Ghanaian Kwesi Addae came to the US as an election observer, sponsored by the group Global Exchange. The reception he received wasn’t a warm one:

The US has been involved in foreign elections – there ought to be reciprocity, a sharing of expertise.

Friend Thomas Crampton has a great piece in the International Herald Tribune, an overview of the perspectives offered by international observers of the US election. His piece concludes with yet another enthusiastic welcome for international observers, this one from Republican congressman Jeff Miller:

“Get on the next plane out of the United States to go monitor an election someplace else, like Afghanistan.”

(Miller was re-elected last night, with 74% of the vote in his Florida panhandle district.)

Rebecca Mackinnon’s beautiful new RConversation pointed me to the Onion’s predictably wonderful commentary on this matter: US Inspires World With Attempt At Democratic Election”.

Personally, not feeling real inspired right about now.

I am a little bit apprehensive because the first term of Bush, he had come in as a lame duck.

We are going to see even more isolationism where America will not bother about the United Nations. To me that is a very sad affair.

- Moody Awori, vice president of Kenya, from BBC’s World Reacts to US Poll.

GhanaHomePage polls conducted over the last two weeks, among Ghanaians in USA, shows Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry running a 46-point lead, 71-25, over President George Bush.

Kerry’s lead is bigger – 50 points – among all Ghanaians living in USA, i.e. includes Ghanaians living in USA, but not eligible to vote.

from GhanaWeb article Ghanaians in US Want Kerry.

“The man will be chosen exclusively by American voters who tend to be rather illiterate on global affairs. That’s not fair.

It simply makes sense that if the American president is unofficially the leader of the whole world, then I, as a loyal member of the international community, should not be disenfranchised. “

- M. Gaitho, acting managing editor, Sunday Nation of Kenya, from his commentary, “Why Should It Matter Who Wins?”. (It’s available to registered members only, but it’s free to register, and the whole piece is excellent.)

Rory Carroll, writing for the Guardian, has an excellent piece discussing Bush’s unpopularity in Africa, titled “Why Africa Roots for Kerry”. He points out, validly, I think, that many Africans don’t know much about Kerry, except that he’s not George W. Bush, and that’s sufficient to win their sympathies.

At first glance, this is hardly surprising – we’ve all seen various global polling sites demonstrating deep support for Kerry. Globalvote 2004 has closed their polling, with 77% supporting Kerry and only 9% supporting Bush, who finished just ahead of Nader, with 7% of votes. Globalvote got only 1559 African votes, as compared to 80,350 Europeans, and only 71% of Africans supported Kerry, with many (almost 17%) supporting third party candidates. (There’s so much wrong with the methodology of sites like Globalvote that it’s hardly worth a post, but suffice it to say that there’s no guarantee that any of those 1559 “African” votes were actually African.)

Given the easy story about the world being anti-Bush, the most interesting article I’ve seen on overseas voter preferences in the run-up to the election was CSM’s Abraham McLaughlin-authored survey of global Bush supporters, featuring pro-Bush sentiment in Israel, Germany, Japan and other nations. While McLaughlin has been based in South Africa for the past year, and has done an extraordinary job finding great Africa stories, he’s able to find only two paragraphs of grudging support for Bush’s pro-Africa policies.

Carroll finds this quite paradoxical – on paper, Bush has been surprisingly pro-Africa. He’s continued AGOA, which has been a boon for a few African textile manufacturers, though less helpful to agricultural exporters than some had hoped. He’s promised a great deal of new funding to combat AIDS, though it’s unclear whether much of this funding will be approved by Congress. And his administration’s commitment to “reforming” international aid through the Millenium Challenge Account is a great step towards rewarding nations that have made strides in development… though it does nothing to address the needs of people in “problem nations” where the government is wholly dysfunctional.

Let me offer three possible reasons why Bush would have a tough time winning an election in Africa.

He’s not Clinton. Neither is Kerry, but Bush is clearly identified as being anti- and post-Clinton. It’s hard to overstate Clinton’s popularity, at least in West Africa. When I lived in Accra in 1993-4, I got to watch a local sculptor complete a 10-foot tall concrete statue of the American president. (After he coated the statue with gold spraypaint, some of my American friends and I took a photo with us embraced by Clinton’s outstretched arms…) Over the past few years, I’ve seen dozens of tro-tros (minibuses) with Clinton-supporting names or stickers, including the one pictured below, named “Still Clinton”.

While the Clinton administration has a lot to answer for in terms of African policies, the President was perceived as having a personal interest in the continent, and many people felt a strong connection to him as a result. When Clinton visited Ghana, over 100,000 people crowded Black Star Square for a glimpse of him. Needless to say, Bush’s visit last year didn’t generate crowds of this size.

The UN. Knocking the UN is an easy way to score political points in the US. Even pinko commie liberals like myself will admit that UN is often dysfunctional, painfully slow, self-contradictory and frequently toothless. (After admitting this, I’ll go on to point to the dozens of places UN peacekeepers are helping prevent people from killing one another and asking whether anyone really thinks the US would have sent troops to eastern Congo…)

Knocking the UN in Africa is entirely another matter. It’s one of the institutions in which Africans have the best chance of having a voice. Knocking the UN as “irrelavent” basically translates as “Africa, and Africans, are irrelevant”. Add to that the pride many Africans feel at seeing Kofi Annan leading the global body, and Bush’s anti-UN stance doesn’t go over real well.

Iraq See a lot of African nations in the coalition of the willing? There are only five: Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda and Angola. Before you respond with: “That’s because they couldn’t do anything useful”, allow me to point out that Rwandan peacekeepers are currently policing Darfur, and that Palau, Micronesia and the Solomon Islands (all coalition members) are hardly contributing a lot of ground troops to the effort in Iraq.

The US’s near-unilateral invasion of Iraq looks a lot like colonialism to many Africans. Given how many economic and political ills in Africa are blamed – rightly or wrongly – on colonialism, it’s hard for any African governments to stand with Bush on this issue. Add to that the large, and growing, Muslim populations in many countries, and it’s surprising that the war had as much African support as it did.

Will Kerry be great for Africa? I doubt it. The enormous problems he would inherit from the current administration mean that Africa will likely not be a major priority. Also, Kerry’s protectionist anti-outsourcing stance will make it hard for him to make the changes in trade policy necessary to really balance the playing field for African exporters. But his stated support for multilateralism is a critical differentiator from Bush, and would be a critical issue for African voters… if they had a chance to vote in our elections.

—

I’ve largely tried to avoid talking about US politics on this blog, figuring that there are countless thousands of blogs already covering the subject. But we’ve had a couple of interesting conversations at Harvard lately about “transparent subjectivity”, and the possibility of blogs being fair by being honest about their biases. So, in that light, I’ll mention that I voted last Tuesday for Kerry. (Yes, that’s an emblogment.) I would be lying if I said that I did so without reservation – I had far more sympathy for Dean, or for the John Kerry who’s been my senator for my entire voting life, a far more coherent, progressive and intelligent politician than the guy I’ve seen in this bloody, nasty campaign. My fingers are crossed for a decisive victory, a short battle over recounts, and the rapid re-establishment of the US as a country that cares about the concerns, sentiments and opinions of the rest of the world. But I’m sure as hell not counting on it.