nm
As soon as someone pings 270 electoral votes.
Though I’ll be drinking until I either get a headache or until my headache goes away, depending on who’s winning. So ya’ll have to wait for my concession until (and if) I wake up in the morning.
Oh please. This isn’t a damn coin toss where a 20% chance of it landing on heads actually means it could land on heads, and you know that. The odds of Romney winning Ohio are infinitesimally small, and he absolutely must win it to win the election. He won’t win Ohio … without cheating.
OK, I’m damned if I can think of an epithet for a San Josean. Shark appeaser? Chuck Reed boot-licker? Help me out here.
Could you elaborate on how that relates to cheating?
I don’t understand the question. Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 and the majority of votes cast in Florida in 2000, according to the ballot counts subsequently executed in 2001. The only reason George Bush became President is because 5 justices lack proper judicial temperament, as established when they claimed that their decision was intended to establish no precedent. You can’t obtain more transparent hackery than that.
I’ll accept a Romney win when the evidence justifies it. I’ll note that the polls currently give him a reasonable shot and that the alleged irregularities within the electronic voting machines currently clock in under the margin of polling error, AFAICT. Claims of vote flipping in Republican primaries. - Politics & Elections - Straight Dope Message Board Furthermore, I’ll look at the evidence of voting suppression with interest.
Now I could just accept the results without detailed examination. But that would be immoral. The Republican Party has an explicit policy of voter suppression. Patriotic Americans who value democracy should not accept their legitimacy without examination. Remember, ID cards only curb in-person voter fraud: they do nothing about absentee ballot fraud which is a far greater risk in proportional terms. If Republicans don’t want such scrutiny, they should strive to improve their moral character.
And on what do base this statement? On average, the polls suggest that Romney faces a 2-3 point deficit in Ohio. A 2-3 point lead in the polls does not mean a 99.9% chance of winning. It’s a lead that is small enough to be overcome if there’s an intervening, opinion-shifting event before the vote, and occasionally the polls will simply be “off” by a wide enough margin to cover the spread. If you examine the actual history of candidates with a lead of about this size (in a given state), at about this stage in the race, a meaningful percentage of them – apparently about 20% – have gone on to lose on election day.
Unless you think that every instance of a candidate overcoming an apparent 2-point deficit on election day is *actually *an instance of election fraud, your position doesn’t make sense.
Or, let me put it another way: the polls suggest that Obama should win Ohio by about 2.5 points. You and BobLibDem are saying that if the actual results differ from that number by 3 points in Romney’s favor, so that he wins Ohio by 0.5 points, it can not possibly be legitimate. Shouldn’t the same be true if the polls are off in the other direction? In order to be consistent, if Obama wins Ohio by 5.5 instead of 2.5, wouldn’t you need to proclaim that result to be illegitimate as well?
So you’re saying Romney doesn’t have a 20% chance of winning. Okay, fine. I’ll ask again; why are you right and Silver is wrong? Please explain. What’s wrong with his reasoning?
It won’t take me long to accept a Romney win. In fact, I have some stock I’ve been holding for a long time and it would be awesome to sell it and pay absolutely zero tax on the earnings. That right there will be thousands of dollars out of the Uncle Sam’s pockets and into mine. My children are going to need that money when the Republicans tank the economy, again, in order to slip a few more billion into the pockets of their rich friends.
So, I’m well off enough, financially, to easily accept a Romney win. I don’t know how my wife is going to take the news that the women’s rights have been set back 40 years but I’m sure she will be relieved of having to make decisions about her own body. That should be a load off her mind.
Heck, just peel off some of that money and tell her to go buy shoes. They love shoes. They love us, too, but shoes…
“…However, ask Tommy why he took a job as a lobbyist after his time in government was over and he’ll give you an honest answer – it’s all his wife’s doing. As Tommy explains in the video below, he cashed in his government connections to become a Washington, D.C. lobbyist because his wife Sue Ann wanted to do more shopping…”
There are plenty of reasons given in this thread to believe that there might be pro-Republican manipulation. There have, as far as I know, been no such information for pro-Democratic manipulation. It would be irrational to treat the two different situations as the same.
It’s not always about the math only. In fact, it almost never is.
Exit polling is down to enough of a science for me to accept network call
on that basis.
I disgree with the premise that Romney is going to win, though-- Obama
looks to to me in better shape although not comfortably.
The polls in Ohio in 2008 had Obama up by only 2.5 and he took the state with a 4.6% margin.
Then there’s this:
Nov. 1: The Simple Case for Saying Obama Is the Favorite
[T]he argument we’re making is exceedingly simple. Here it is:
[indent]Obama’s ahead in Ohio.
A somewhat-more-complicated version:
Mr. Obama is leading in the polls of Ohio and other states that would suffice for him to win 270 electoral votes, and by a margin that has historically translated into victory a fairly high percentage of the time.
… “[T]he simplest analysis of the polls would argue that Mr. Obama is winning. He’s been ahead in the vast majority of polls in Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and all the other states where the Democrat normally wins. These states add up to more than 270 electoral votes. It isn’t complicated. To argue that Mr. Romney is ahead, or that the election is a “tossup,” requires that you disbelieve the polls, or that you engage in some complicated interpretation of them. The FiveThirtyEight model represents a complicated analysis of the polls, but simplicity is on its side, in this case.”[/INDENT]
It really is just that simple.
Right, Obama’s the favorite. No one in this thread is disputing that, AFAICT. But you said that Romney did not have a 20% chance to win Ohio; that his odds were, in fact, “infinitesimally small”; that he could not possibly win a legitimate election.
Again: on what do you base these statements? So far you’ve only cited Nate Silver, who explicitly holds that these positions are false – it’s right there on the page you linked to, in fact.
Accept that it’s happened, and they managed to cheat their way in again? When it happens, maybe even before the Democrats drop the inevitable legal challenges. I don’t bother living in denial.
Accept that Romney will actually be inaugurated, and we’re stuck with President 1%? I refuse to answer on the grounds that I might incriminate myself.
No, seriously, the two good things about a Romney win are as follows: One, that it puts paid to Santorum 2016. Two, that it will make it abundantly clear to the rest of the world that 2008 was a fluke and the USA is really dominated by silly imperialist elitists. That’s good, they need to prepare for future conflicts with the USA.
That said, I’m voting for Obama.
footnote: version of last post with stronger language in the Pit:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=15655920&postcount=44
But yeah, it depends on how much of a difference the original results get.
It’s interesting how in the linked chart, the FoxNews/Rasumussen poll taken November 2 had the result as a tie, with a margin of error at 3.0. That would tell me that they thought (with 95 % certainty) that the result would range from McCain +3 to Obama +3. The final result was Obama +4.6.
I wonder how they managed to screw up that badly.