Learning to Accept a Favorable Reality
Fascinating post from Sam Wang at Princeton Election Consortium. Anything can happen of course. Obama could turn out to have buried a series of rodeo clowns in his backyard. McCain could reveal his secret cure for skin cancer. That being said...
I’ve noticed a lot of continued speculation about the Presidential race.
You ask about the Bradley effect, voter purges, and other detailed topics. It’s
all over the comments section, both here and on other sites.As immersed as I am in the analysis, I am only now noticing that many of you are taking a little
time to adapt to current conditions. This post is directed at those of you who
are rooting for one side - Democrats and Republicans alike. It is time for you
to take a good, hard look at what is going on. Whatever your personal preference
may be, a Democratic sweep is coming. The storm is about to make landfall, and
we know where. The question is what you should do about it.Where the Presidential race stands. By the standards of Presidential elections since 1992,
Barack Obama is far ahead. For most of this season he has been running about 50
EV ahead of where John Kerry ran at the same point in 2004, which ended in a near-tie. Currently the gap is even larger - it’s nearing Clinton v.
Dole proportions. In the face of a down economy and abysmal approval ratings
for the Bush Administration, a lead of this size by a Democrat is essentially
insurmountable.
He notes on most of his analysis that it is simply a snapshot, not predictive, but Wang's argument for activists of all parties is that mathematically speaking, your most efficient efforts would be spending money and time in the close Senate races.
posted by JAB at 11:48 AM
6 Comments:
A Republican spokesman talked today of getting voters to "turn the page" on the financial crisis.
Now let's look at the team that brought you that crisis. George W. Bush, a former governor, and Dick Cheney, a man with significant executive experience in private enterprise and government.
We know now what those clowns were able to accomplish - but now think of who the Republicans nominate to replace them. A Senator who has never held an executive role and has only tepid support from his party. And backing him up: a stupid, mean-spirited, unethical, religious nut.
Neither of these people has the remotest chance of understanding the financial and economic problems currently faced by this country and the world.
I support this argument with this randomly-chosen graphic.
What will Caribou- or perhaps Klaus- Barbie think when she reads this in the Economist?
From the NYT via TPM:
The difficulties of the McCain campaign have led some Republican leaders to express concern that he could end up dragging other of the party's candidates down to defeat. "If Obama is able to run up big numbers around the country," said Mr. Anuzis, the Michigan party chairman, "the potential for hurting down-ballot Republicans is very big."
One sign of that has emerged in Nebraska, where Representative Lee Terry, a Republican, ran a newspaper advertisement featuring words of support for him from a woman identified as an "Obama-Terry voter."
Obama has the 106 year old nun vote sewn up.
Just to put that nun thing in perspective, when she voted for Eisenhower in 1952 she was four years older than I am now...
That nun thing is really impressive. He not only got her vote, but got her TO vote.
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