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by James Robertson.
Original Post: The Election came, The Election went
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The election has come and gone without major controversy, and without any real question as to who won. The various news outlets are being cautious about calling the race - that stands to reason after they all got burned in 2000. I'm not terribly surprised by the outcome (and I don't mean the winner specifically)
The 2000 election was a rarity - the last time anything like it occurred was 1876 (and before that, the 1820's). Disputed, close elections that are decided by the House (as happened a few times in the early 19th century) or by special procedure (an extra-judicial panel in 1876, the Supreme Court in 2000) are just rare. What they generally mean is:
* The race was between candidates that the electorate has a hard time separating - there's a real or perceived non-difference. That's what happened in 1876 and 2000
* There's more than two candidates who make a major showing - this is what happened when Jefferson was selected by the House, for instance - and when Quincy Adams beat Jackson
Neither situation was the case this year. Most people saw real differences between the 2 major candidates and voted accordingly. The third party candidates - Nader, the Libertarians, et. al. - none of them captured the kind of interest that Perot did in 1992, or that Teddy Roosevelt did in 1912. It all came down to a relatively clear choice between competing philosophies - and one of them won.
If you look at this as a marketing/sales exercise, one side - the Republicans - made the sale. They gained seats in the House, they gained seats in the Senate, and they won the Presidency (both in electoral vote and popular vote terms). The other side - the Democrats - failed to make the sale. The electorate broke towards the Republican argument at the closing bell, and that made all the difference.
It's time for the losers to be gracious, and get back to the blackboard - so that they know how to do better in the next election cycle (not unlike a sales team meeting at the end of the fiscal year reviewing a bad year, actually). The winning side can't really gloat - again, like a winning sales organization, there's no guarantee that the buyers will renew the contracts next time around unless they deliver on their promises. In politics and IT sales, no win is permanent - there's always a chance of "buyers remorse" - which is why sales and marketing teams, no less than political analysts, need to keep their eye on the ball.
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