Matthew Gagnon has put together some cool maps showing the difference between the last gay-rights victory in Maine (when an anti-discrimination law was upheld in 2005) and last week's defeat for gay marriage. The dark-brown communities on this map are places that switched from "pro" to "anti" gay. (I know it's not that simple, but I agree with Gagnon that these cities and towns made the difference in the outcome.) The red line represents Interstate 95.

As Gagnon notes, "The people who were receptive to voting for gay rights in 2005, and thus open to a good argument, but voted against gay marriage in 2009 were middle class suburbanites in the small to medium sized satellite towns that were within striking distance of larger cities and transportation corridors." It's great analysis; go read the whole thing.

According to State House News Service (subscription required), Gov. Deval Patrick was on the radio this morning saying there is "no comparison" between yesterday's New Jersey/Virginia gubernatorial elections (both won by Republicans) and his own re-election effort next year. "A year is a long time in politics," he added.

He's right, but the New Jersey result can't be comforting, especially if Patrick and advisers are nursing hopes of winning with less than a majority in a three-candidate race. In the closing weeks of the campaign, many analysts suggested that unpopular Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine could win with far less than 50 percent of the vote, thanks to independent candidate Chris Daggett pulling anti-Corzine votes away from Republican nominee Chris Christie.

In the end Daggett, who had polled as high as 20 percent, got only 5.8 percent of the vote, and Christie unseated Corzine, 48.8 percent to 44.5 percent. My hunch is that anti-Corzine independents and Republicans broke for Christie in the final days of the campaign, leaving Daggett with Democrats who couldn't bring themselves to vote for Corzine but would never vote for a Republican.

So I'm updating my prediction from July: Patrick needs to get very close to 50 percent next fall in order to be re-elected. Gambling that the Republican nominee (presumably Charlie Baker) and independent Tim Cahill will split the anti-incumbent vote and allow Patrick to glide in with, say, 44.5 percent, would be a poor strategy for the governor's campaign.  

Cross-posted at CW Unbound.

Politico's Patrick Ottenhoff is a little premature in analyzing a Republican victory in the Virginia governor's race (Election Day isn't over yet), but his cautionary note about geographic trends is a good one:

[Republican Bob] McDonnell’s victory in Loudoun and in neighboring Prince William County will come as a surprise to many armchair pundits, who thought that all of Northern Virginia had became solidly blue. Many die-hard Democrats will blame Creigh Deeds’s lifeless campaign and the political environment.

But the truth is that Northern Virginia is often taken for granted as a powerful Democratic bloc. To be sure, Fairfax County has become solidly blue, but Loudoun and Prince William counties are more accurately full of independents who just happen to be supporting Democrats recently.

I'm fascinated by the process by which a solid Republican county becomes solidly Democratic (and vice versa), and I suspect that Northern Virginia may yet become as reliably blue as Massachusetts. But these trends almost never play out as a purely linear plotline.

The Boston Globe's Andrew Ryan reports on a "phantom precinct" in Boston's Harbor Islands where turnout expectations are always low:

“It’s the lonely machine,’’ said Loretta Paulding, the election warden in charge of Ward 1, Precinct 15, for the last 15 years. “But I do have to keep an eye on it. And at the end of the night, I still have to tally up zero, zero, zero.’’

Massachusetts was shut out of the American Planning Association's annual "Great Places" list, released earlier this month. But city and town planners don't have to go far to find inspiration, as three New England spots were honored: Front Street, in Bath, Maine; New Haven Green; and Central Square in Keene, New Hampshire. 

Lest the above examples suggest that the APA has quaint, small-town taste, I should point out that other winners this year include Chicago's Lincoln Park and New Orleans's Faubourg Marigny neighborhood.

Last year, two Massachusetts sites were on the list. Downtown Salem was named a Great Neighborhood (its "eccentric street grid, and profusion of archetypal old houses belie a humming, mixed-use district"), and Boston's Washington Street grabbed a Great Street designation (for its South End section, not for embarrassingly empty Downtown Crossing).

In 2007, the first year of the awards, Northampton's Main Street was the only Bay State recipient.

Cross-posted at CW Unbound.

Aspen, Colorado, has had a bit of trouble adopting an instant runoff (IRV) election system -- the same system that will be used to determine Oscar winners next year. According to the Aspen Daily News, election officials erroneously used the vote-counting formula favored in a fellow leftist enclave:

The Electoral Map has a good rundown of the fastest-growing and fastest-shrinking congressional districts in the US. The upshot is that the Republicans are likely to make short-term gains after redistricting in 2012, thanks to new seats in red states like Texas, but the long-term picture may be different:

Democrats moving to states like Texas and Arizona might make those states more competitive and give [the Democratic Party] more seats at the state level. 

Of note to Massachusetts is that none of the 25 "big shrinkage" districts are here, though most of our industrial-state rivals in the North have at least one district that's lost tens of thousands of people so far this decade. Illinois has five, and Michigan and Pennsylvania have four each.

Maybe we'll catch a break and not lose another seat in 2020?

Next year's Oscar winners will be decided, for the first time, through an IRV (or instant runoff voting) system, replacing the winner-take-all system that predominates in American politics.

The idea is to prevent award winners that are championed by a small sliver of voters but disliked by a majority of Academy members. (With the number of Best Picture nominees going from five to 10 next year, it would have been theoretically possible for a movie to take the prize -- and to become an answer in trivia contests and crossword puzzles for decades to come -- with only 11 percent of the vote.)

This could be an opportunity for the IRV system to gain some traction with the public and perhaps be implemented by some more local governments -- except for the fact that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has always been secretive about its election results. I would love to know which Best Picture winners actually won a majority of the vote, and which ones took a plurality while two better films split the vote, but I've never seen this data anywhere. I presume that the Academy is protecting the reputation of the "accidental" winners, like the one from 1976.

Ed Kilgore has a timely reminder that no president has been able to get major legislation passed without being a "sellout" to his base. Not even the famously bossy Lyndon Johnson:

...the myth of LBJ as the driven president demanding and securing progressive legislation against the grain of party, congressional prerogatives, and even public opinion, is an exaggeration, to put it mildly. LBJ showed great courage and resolution on civil rights, but he was riding almost a century of momentum, and he certainly didn't reject bipartisanship in his effort to get the job done. The landmark health care initiatives of Medicare and Medicaid were "betrayals" of the long-established progressive goal of national health insurance--certainly far more so than, say, the substitution of a health care cooperatives for a "public option" in a system of universal health coverage.