US Presidential Election: Tuesday November 6th, 2012

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Dr/Prof Wang is my new favourite. I've also come to appreciate the electoral college a lot more during this run, mainly due to bias.

radd said:
rino! Rino!
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I had to google this, but not before I'd instinctively checked behind me. Crafty, those rhinos.
 
I think the national polls are starting to catch up with the state polls. Even RCP average has Obama leading by 0.3% of the national vote now.
 
Even RASMUSSEN are showing a tie. They've certainly been moving in Obama's direction.

Should also add on your earlier edit that Prof Wang's numbers aren't biased, he literally just puts the median of recent polls up, precisely to avoid any bias (either his own or a pollster's). Obama up by 1 there seems fair.
 
Ramshock said:
I honestly don't think people realize how bad things will get if Romney wins and essentially the same policies from most of the last decade are re-implemented again.
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As Truman put it, 'If you want to live like a Republican - vote for a Democrat.'
 
Ubik said:
Even RASMUSSEN are showing a tie. They've certainly been moving in Obama's direction.

Should also add on your earlier edit that Prof Wang's numbers aren't biased, he literally just puts the median of recent polls up, precisely to avoid any bias (either his own or a pollster's). Obama up by 1 there seems fair.
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Heh. By election day, it will look they called it right. And four years from now, right-wing trolls (er, sorry.. pundits) will point to the final poll as proof that Rasmussen is the most accurate pollster around.

Agreed about Wang, using the median instead of the mean is such an elegant solution.
 
Ubik said:
Even RASMUSSEN are showing a tie. They've certainly been moving in Obama's direction.

Should also add on your earlier edit that Prof Wang's numbers aren't biased, he literally just puts the median of recent polls up, precisely to avoid any bias (either his own or a pollster's). Obama up by 1 there seems fair.
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The best indicator is watching the faces of Chuck Todd and David Gregory.
 
For a while, I considered American elections the most important elections to my life apart from the ones in my country. At this moment though, I think whoever wins in Germany in 2013 might have a much bigger impact on our life here in this impoverished corner of Europe.
 
Plechazunga said:
The Congressional Research Service just published an economic report showing there was no correlation between cutting taxes on the rich and economic growth.

The GOP went mental, and made them retract it.

The Republican War on Reality Continues
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On a related subject, an interesting correlation:

Reagan's first term with Cap Gain preference - 6.5 million jobs

Reagan's 2nd term eliminated Cap Gain Preference - 10.3 million

Clinton's first term without cap gain preference - 12 million

Clinton's 2nd term after reinstating cap gain preference - 8.1 million

Bush's 1st term increasing cap gain preference and adding in dividends - 2.7 million

Bush's 2nd term - minus 4.5 million.
 
Plechazunga said:
The Congressional Research Service just published an economic report showing there was no correlation between cutting taxes on the rich and economic growth.

The GOP went mental, and made them retract it.

The Republican War on Reality Continues
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There are some incredible people out there.

Clicking on your link took me to Motherjones from where I clicked on to this fun infographic - Obama Conspiracy Theories

There's a couple of rumours I had to see to believe so I went to did Obama kill his Grandmother?

One of the comments
Anonymous said:
The first thing that I thought of in November 2008 was that he had his grandmother killed. It happened right before the election — she was cremated – no autopsy. The gay men from his church in Chicago — executed. The social security number from Connecticut does not make sense. As someone said on Twitter, why didn’t he pay $10 to get his birth certificate instead of paying over a million to hide it? The story from the post man who delivered to the Ayers home in Glen Ellyn, IL. He met a young black man “from Africa”, who was staying with the Ayers, who said he was going to become the president of the United States. He is a psycopath. Abandoned by his father and mother. Raised by communists. Mentored by communists. His mind was poisoned when he was a child. Truth is stranger than fiction.
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If that's not a WUM, I worry for the future of humanity.
 
HuffPo says Sandy might not affect EV, although PA is a concern:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/01/hurricane-sandy-voting_n_2060704.html

NEW YORK -- It sounds like a Halloween nightmare: after a major storm, wide swaths of the country are without power going into Election Day. Electronic voting machines cannot operate, denying Americans the right to vote and throwing the result of a presidential election into question.

But due to a spectacular combination of bad timing and Hurricane Sandy's massive girth, some elements of that scenario are coming into play. States all up and down the East Coast, including battlegrounds like Virginia and North Carolina, canceled early voting hours this week. Cleaning up damage from Sandy will make it harder for supporters to volunteer and could depress turnout in some areas.

“We’ll be ready for Election Day one way or the other, and people will have the opportunity to vote in the election, but we’re just going to have to see where we are,” New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) said Wednesday evening.

But even Christie acknowledged that there could be some polling places without power as of Election Day Tuesday. That could lead to problems for voters who will also be struggling with washed out roads and wrecked homes.

In some small fortune, while the "Frankenstorm" did move inland toward the battleground states like Pennsylvania and Ohio that will likely decide the election because of the electoral college, its damage was not as extensive in those states as on the coast.

"Thank God we're not New Jersey and New York right now," said Stuart Garson, chairman of the Cuyahoga County Democrats in Ohio. "We have sporadic outages, but it's not like we have a half a million people [without power]."

As of Thursday, 77,000 customers were without power in Cuyahoga, which includes the critical Democratic stronghold of Cleveland, according to figures from utility company FirstEnergy.

But Garson said that Cleveland's in-person early voting center had not been affected by outages. The numbers of in-person voters thus far this year, 30,241, was down only slightly from the similar figure at this point in 2008, 34,527. Garson chalked that up more to bad weather than power problems, and said he was confident that an increase in absentee ballots made up for the shortfall.

"I do think we are going to give President Obama and Sen. Sherrod Brown a big big bump here," he said.

In Pennsylvania, meanwhile, there were 509,839 customers without power as of Thursday afternoon. The percentage of people affected, 8 percent, was relatively light compared to New Jersey, where 43 percent were waiting for the lights to come back on. But the number was still significant in a state where a swing of just 310,000 voters would have put Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), then the Republican presidential nominee, over the top in 2008.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, has pledged that he will work with utilities to ensure that every polling place in the state has power by Election Day. Backup plans include emergency paper ballots and running electronic voting machines on battery power.

Neither Pennsylvania nor New Jersey and New York make extensive use of early voting, which could minimize the impact of storm-related disruptions on voting. But cleanup from Sandy looks like it will take more than a week.

"The photos I've seen in New Jersey -- I don't understand how you hold an election there," said Thad Hall, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Utah. "Like literally, I don't understand you hold an election somewhere that's flooded."

If elections officials cannot find backup polling places in time, or voters are too busy managing their own troubles to vote, that could create legitimacy problems, Hall argued.

"What is likely to happen is that Obama's still going to win New Jersey and win New York, but what it may do is ... lower his vote totals nationally enough where he's going to win the electoral college but not win the national vote," Hall said.

If that happens, he continued, the outcome will be a repeat of "all those kind of arguments that Democrats made after 2000 but Republicans are a lot better making over and over again" about a president's mandate. "They haven't given up on birther conspiraces and things like that, so think about what they're going to do if he doesn't win the popular vote," he said.

In close races downballot from senator to dogcatcher, Hall also worries about the storm disruptions' ability to tip elections.

Hall and others have also expressed the belief that Hurricane Sandy should serve as a wake-up call to Congress, which has not put in place provisions for emergencies that disrupt the election on a massive scale.

Things are bad enough as they are, Hall said, but "if this had happened next week, we would be in a world of disaster."
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Plechazunga said:
What I don't get about Sandy's effects is that surely it's going to make it harder to vote in rural areas than cities? And that screws Romney, not O.
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True, but if it affect turnout in NJ and NY state in particular, the popular vote total could be affected and well, Repub Delegitimzation Heaven!
 
there will definitely be less turnout because of this. but it affects everyone.

No one will want to be seen to be taking advantage of such a tragedy to steal an election.

And the Obama camp seem very confident. I'm sure they would be on top of this situation.
 
Plechazunga said:
What I don't get about Sandy's effects is that surely it's going to make it harder to vote in rural areas than cities? And that screws Romney, not O.
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Depends, not all rural areas are Republican and they may have fewer roads, etc to clean up. Plus a lot 4WD Vehicles that may be able to get around better.
 
No not all rural areas are Republican, but pretty much all rural areas are more Republican than their local towns and cities.

radd said:
True, but if it affect turnout in NJ and NY state in particular, the popular vote total could be affected and well, Repub Delegitimzation Heaven!
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feck 'em. I mean, in 2000 Bush not only lost the popular vote, but only won the electoral vote because of dubious recounts in a state run by his brother. Liberals were and are bitter, but conservatives took it as a mandate to launch one of the most radical Republican administrations ever.

Righties will moan and some daft libertarian in Oklahoma will try to blow something up, but it's not as if they consider Obama legitimate now - see Red Indian's post above.
 
Plechazunga said:
feck 'em. I mean, in 2000 Bush not only lost the popular vote, but only won the electoral vote because of dubious recounts in a state run by his brother. Liberals were and are bitter, but conservatives took it as a mandate to launch one of the most radical Republican administrations ever.
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Even more so, the Supreme Court in the biggest banana republic decision ever, shut down the recount - which a few months down the line was tallied to a Gore win. What little bro's Secy of State can't, Daddy's judges sho' can!


Righties will moan and some daft libertarian in Oklahoma will try to blow something up, but it's not as if they consider Obama legitimate now - see Red Indian's post above.
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:lol:
 
radd said:
Even more so, the Supreme Court in the biggest banana republic decision ever, shut down the recount - which a few months down the line was tallied to a Gore win. What little bro's Secy of State can't, Daddy's judges sho' can!
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Quite, I forgot the most important bit.

The thing is, if Romney wins, what's going to be even worse than the jubilation of the nutjobs is the shit-eating grin on Mitt's face. Has this guy ever not got what he wanted? It would be unbearable.
 
I have a strange mix of crippling fear and huge overconfidence at the moment.
 
Ubik said:
I have a strange mix of crippling fear and huge overconfidence at the moment.
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