Heh. I think making this an issue would just turn people off McCain. I do agree with others who say it’s kind of weird to do this now when Obama’s numbers are up. Seems like it’s more of a risk than to just ride things out with campaign rallies.
You freaked me out for a minute! I thought the Obama thing was tonight, so I checked and Pushing Daisies wasn’t on! But then I figured out it was tomorrow, and yes PD is scheduled. I like Obama, but I hope this helps PD’s ratings go up.
I just want this to be fucking over! I’m tired of it. We’ve had two years of this shit. Let’s get it over and done with. Then, at least, the bitching about politics will stop being a 24/7 thing.
I’m encouraged to find out – and we can always trust anonymous internet emails and talk show hosts – that Obama is a full-fledged Marxist. Once the revolution is proclaimed, me and a bunch of friends are going to sieze the local right-wing radio station and change the calls to WMRX. (Stands for Marx).
Then, when the gulags are set up, I plan to use two recent innovations – email and Google Earth – to point out where the Enemies of the People (aka Republicans) are located, so they can be rounded up and sent to re-education camps. (This may have to wait, because for some reason I can’t find the location of the gulags on the Democratic websites, and they haven’t posted the email address yet.)
After all this is completed, me and a bunch of hippies are going to move into a big mansion previously used by one of the gulag residents.
Moving thread from IMHO to MPSIMS.
Obama’s going to win. As a conservative, I’m in two minds about this. If you pushed me, I’d say it might be a good thing in the current climate. But I digress.
He’s going to win, but it’ll be a much closer thing than y’all think, IMHO. Not 2000 close, but close enough.
We’ll see Election Day if the Bradley Effect is real. Consider this: electoral-vote.com is predicting Obama will win by 364 electoral votes to McCain’s 157 (with 17 EV’s too close to call). But if you take the close states and switch only four percent of the votes from Obama to McCain - McCain wins 274 to Obama’s 264.
That would require McCain running the table of every close state. Do you honestly believe that will happen? Does anyone?
Yeah, unfortunately I don’t think we’ll be out of it either way. If McCain wins there will be MUCH lamentation from the liberals, even worse than Bush winning over Kerry in 2004. So Obama almost needs to win for that reason. Unless McCain winning means the liberals will move to Canada. 
I think the election will be close to 50/50, so if Obama wins, that’s still almost half of Americans that didn’t want Obama to be president. It remains to be seen how long it will take Hollywood and the majority of the media to start being realistic about him. Let’s just hope Obama’s “test” that Biden seems so sure of isn’t too serious. Let’s face it, Kennedy’s test could have gone very badly and he didn’t know it wouldn’t, neither will Obama if it happens.
I’m not sure what you mean by your Hollywood comment, but as to your comment on the test that Obama may or may not get - I’m not a voracious, frothing Obamacon, but I am an Obama supporter. As a level headed supporter I find the notion of a test perfectly fine for Obama. Why? Because I trust the mans judgement. Plain and simple. I used to think this election is going to be a squeaker, however, as time passes and I watch the Republican elite turning their heads from McCain I think that this election is going to be close, but not a squeaker. I’ll venture to say it’s Obama by 52%.
To “swith only four percent” actually means an 8% switch in direction. This is simply not going to happen in any of the battlegrounds.
Might McCain pull out a squeaker in OH or FL or NV? Sure. But in every single toss-up? Uh-uh.
We CAN and WILL win this, but only if you. . .
GO VOTE!
VERIFY YOUR REGISTRATION INFORMATION - FIND OUT WHERE TO VOTE (it may have changed this year)!
WORK THE POLLS! Sign up HERE - especially if you’re an attorney
MAKE SURE EVERYONE YOU KNOW VOTES!
I might have been okay with McCain winning before he chose his running mate but the idea of Sarah Palin becoming POTUS scares the ever-lovin’ crap out of me. I get physically ill with the thought of McCain winning and then dying in office. I also lost any respect I might have had for the man when I saw the direction his campaign has taken.
I don’t want to think that it’s “in the bag” because I’ve been burned before. One day the polls have Obama with a significant lead and the next day they are almost tied. I keep hearing that they guy who wins Florida will win the election and McCain has either been ahead here or tied with Obama. I think I am more anxious about this one than I was in 2004.
You can’t treat the individual state elections as independent events in a situation like this. If the Bradley Effect is real, then it has presumedly affected the polls in every state.
I think your math is a little suspect. My premise was that four percent of the people who said they were voting for Obama actually vote for McCain instead. I’ll grant that the effect is Obama goes down four percent while McCain goes up four percent, but it’s the same four percent.
But not equally. We saw in the primaries how Obama overperformed his polling in several states with similar demographics, and underperformed them in several states with a different set of demographics, and had statistical noise in most states. If the Bradley Effect is still alive (and there’s a good deal of evidence to suggest that it’s long dead), it’s not going to have the same effect in every state, and I suspect that many states will have no change at all.
But again, is there anyone in the world that seriously believes the Bradley Effect has any power anymore?
I put much more stock in the Cooper Effect, young cell-phone sporting young adults and professionals that never felt the need to vote or just turned 18 and are ready to support a president they believe in.
It’s virtually impossible to guess how much a hypothetical concealed bias exists. So I picked an arbitrary figure of four percent and applied it nationwide (actually to ten close states where such a shift would affect the outcome). But four percent is not an unreasonable estimate: Harold Washington had a 14% lead in the polls in his 1983 Chicago mayorial race and won by 4%; Wilson Goode had a 10% lead in the polls in his 1987 Philadelphia mayorial race and won by 2%; David Dinkins had a 14% lead in the polls in his 1988 New York City mayorial race and won by 2%; Douglas Wilder had a 9% lead in the polls in his 1989 Virginia gubernatorial race and won by less than 1%; and of course Tom Bradley himself lost his 1982 California gubernatorial race despite exit polls that showed him ahead - which means people didn’t want to admit how they had voted even afterwards.
That said, I’ll grant that these elections were all back in the eighties and even then there were alternative explanations for the discrepancies between the polls and the vote counts. So consider this as a reasonable hypothetical not a prediction.
Most of the “experts” are pointing out that Obama has had a reverse “Bradley effect” meaning that his numbers coming out are higher than what polling would have you believe. Also, in most cases, Obama’s numbers are higher than any Bradley effect.
We must be smoking the same stuff. I had to read it twice. I am still sitting here, flabbergasted. I’m so paranoid at this point, I think that Tucker is setting us up for a huge practical joke of some kind.
It’s not pretty in my head this week.
Not only are the younger, cell-carrying voters not getting polled, first-time voters and the young are underrepresented in the polls as being not “likely voters”, and I am thinking this will skew the actualy results Obama-wards as well.
I voted last Friday in early voting and there was a 1+ hour wait. There was a much greater percentage of people who were first time voters than ever before (well, actually, I’ve never been next to anyone who said they were a first time voter before and this happened to me several times that day.)
never mnd